Trump and Elon Musk are dangerous narcissists tailored to 2022 America | Robert Reich

We're better off when people like them cannot gain such untrammeled wealth and influence. Our politics is the worst for it

We likely won't know all the results of America's midterm election for a while, but consider two people not on any ballot who are setting the tenor for much of what we have heard and seen.

First is Elon Musk, who last Friday fired half of Twitter's 7,500 employees, including teams devoted to combating election misinformation - and did it so haphazardly and arbitrarily that most had no idea they were fired until their email accounts were shut off.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com