President Donald Trump with reporters, Elon Musk and X Æ A-Xii in the White House Oval Office on February 11, 2025. Photo: The White House (Wikimedia Commons)

Musk and Trump: A morbid spectacle

The spectacle of two billionaires – let’s call them M’ump — wanting more and more money and power is mortifying. No matter how much they have, it’s not enough. Their press conference in the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago — an old man slumped at the Resolute Desk, and a younger one posing, strutting and spouting inanities — could have been filmed in a crack house. Their addiction was showing. How many viewers averted their eyes in embarrassment?

M’ump has a disease, many psychologists argue, called “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (NPD). The narcissist, according to well recognized symptomology, strives to demonstrate his superiority. He insists he is smarter, stronger, funnier, and better at sex than anyone else. He wants to be richer and more powerful too, and sometimes – as in the case of M’ump – he is. But that superiority produces no lasting satisfaction. To get his narcissistic fix, he must diminish, even destroy others, the better to affirm himself. At war with the world, he is a stranger to love, except self-love. But without a regular dose of adoration or fear, even that emotion is cribbed. When a person with NPD is furnished weapons or powerful institutions, he becomes dangerous, even deadly. Driven by motives both apparent and obscure, M’ump has forced hundreds of thousands into hiding or onto unemployment lines. His narcissistic impulses may soon kill thousand and endanger millions.

M’ump seems like an alien from Mars, but in fact, he is familiar, or at least his characteristic mentality is — greed. Everybody knows someone greedy; we’re greedy ourselves sometimes. The difference between us and M’ump is the duration and scale of avarice: M’ump is always and colossally greedy — morbidly greedy. But recognition of his greed – and its political foundation — may offer us a way to challenge it. Precisely because we instinctively revile greed, we can organize to stop it. Our slogan is simple: “Greed kills.”

Cultural and religious aversion to greed

Abhorrence of greed is as universal as the incest taboo. Among foragers (“hunter-gatherers) – whose mode of living prevailed for 90% of human history — sharing was the norm and hoarding punished by ostracism or other sanctions. (There are only a few surviving foraging communities.) But even in intensely hierarchical, pre-capitalist societies, reciprocity or “guest-friendship” – what the ancient Greeks called xenia (ξενία) – was the rule. Strangers must be greeted with gifts of food, drink, lodging, and even entertainment such as story-telling or song. They in turn must be courteous and reciprocate as hosts whenever they can.

Violation of the principle of xenia can lead to violence, even war. The Homeric epic begins with just such a breach: Paris, Menelaus’s guest at Sparta, kidnaps Helen to begin the Trojan war. In the end, Paris is killed, Troy is destroyed, and Helen is returned. There are multiple instances of xenia in the Odyssey and Iliad, including theoxenia, when a host welcomes a stranger who turns out to be a god. There’s a well-known example of theoxenia in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 C.E.). Disguised as peasants, Zeus and Hermes travel to Phrygia where they are repeatedly denied hospice. At the home of Philemon and Baucis however, they are greeted warmly and invited to share a meal. After revealing their divinity, they instruct the elderly couple to leave their home so they can destroy the

city with a flood while not harming them. After the water receded, a temple appears where the couple’s home had been, and Philemon and Baucis are granted their wish to become its caretakers.

The sin of the biblical inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah is usually understood to be lust. But according to early Rabbinic or Talmudic scholars (> 6th century C.E.), their chief offense against God was greed — failure to extend hospitality to strangers. The Babylonian Talmud lists seven sins that if committed, bring on the plague of leprosy. One of them was “envy,” which encompassed greed and covetousness, prohibited by the tenth commandment of the Decalogue of Moses. Still today, the idea of welcoming strangers into one’s home survives among Jews in the ritual of Passover. It’s considered a mitzvah to welcome anyone who’s hungry to the feast, gentiles as well as Jews. At the conclusion of the seder, a door is opened and a glass of wine poured to accommodate the prophet Elijah, harbinger of the Messiah. The ritual is a re-enactment of theoxenia: a god disguised as a mortal stranger is welcomed into the home and given succor. Any Jew today who begins the Passover seder with the benediction “this is the bread of our affliction, let all who are hungry come and eat,” but reject immigrants, is a hypocrite and a shanda (שָׁנדע).

Xenia is also central to Christian teaching. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples (including Judas), fed a multitude, and offered shelter to the poor, sick, lost and homeless. The Apostle Paul admonished Christ’s followers to “pursue hospitality” (Romans 12:13). The 4th century Julian the Hospitaller, patron saint of hospitality, renounced wealth and vain pursuits (especially hunting) to create a hospice for sick or weary pilgrims.........

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