I blame Boris's buses. At one point, Boris Johnson, apropos of nothing, claimed that he made models of buses to relax. This very likely _was_ an attempt to distract from/mess up search engines for the embarrassing Brexit bus. This somehow metastasized into "all weird embarrassing things that Boris does are actually a masterplan to distract from something else", and, presumably on the theory that all oafish politicians with weird hair are pretty much the same, transferred to Trump.

In this particular case, the revelations in the deposition aren't all _that_ damaging; they just make Musk look stupid, irresponsible, and confused. So doing other embarrassing stuff to distract from them feels counterproductive.

but Boris' antics did carry over -- Trump used them a lot. during the impeachments anytime something especially damming or annoying would pop up he'd tweet something silly. when the Magninsky Act was discussed he sent a big ole screed about how he was banning transgender folks in the military -- an issue the military didn't care about and had mostly solved.

this may be just that Elon is losing his filter and doesn't have to care -- TSLA still hasn't cratered for some freakin reason...