Yesterday, Stephen Miller RTed a propagandist’s attack on Jamie Raskin, in which he reframed Raskin’s legal points — that Congress has the power of the purse, that Elon Musk cannot eliminate agencies created by Congress — by suggesting they were an attack on DOGE’s [sic] efforts to “eliminat[e] waste and fraud.”

Miller suggested Democrats — defending the Constitution — hate democracy, because (Miller said) “voters have the right to elect a president to drain the permanent unelected DC swamp.”

With his RT, the Deputy Chief of Staff of Donald Trump’s White House suggested Elon had been elected.

Elon. Not Trump.

According to Politico, propagandists were posting this argument on Xitter, with Elon RTing them to assert his own legitimacy.

On X, Musk reposted accounts arguing Americans voted for Musk to play a major role in the Trump administration.

But there’s a big difference between Draino and Eric Daugherty suggesting that Elon, not Trump, was elected, and Stephen Miller doing so.

Meanwhile, this NYT article suggests that the White House isn’t in control of what Elon is doing.

Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. One Trump official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.

[snip]

This time, however, he carries the authority of the president, who has bristled at some of Mr. Musk’s ready-fire-aim impulses but has praised him publicly.

“He’s a big cost-cutter,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”

[snip]

Several former and current senior government officials — even those who like what he is doing — expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Mr. Musk’s level of unaccountability. At one point after another, Trump officials have generally relented rather than try to slow him down. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.

Mr. Trump himself sounded a notably cautionary note on Monday, telling reporters: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won’t.”

“If there’s a conflict,” he added, “then we won’t let him get near it.”

It depicts a fight that — last week — was pitched as proof that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had managed to limit Elon’s access to Trump by denying him an office in the West Wing as instead, at least as Elon tells it, a concession about office size.

At one point, Mr. Musk sought to sleep over in the White House residence. He sought and was granted an office in the West Wing but told people that it was too small. Since then, he has told friends he is reveling in the trappings of the opulent Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where he has worked some days.

And amid all that, it notes Elon’s ties to Miller, linking a story that focuses on immigration, not destroying government.

He has a close working relationship with Mr. Trump’s top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who shares Mr. Musk’s contempt for much of the federal work force.

Now, for all its star power, this is not the article you should read to find out what’s going on in the agencies. Wired has, generally, been leading the pack on that front, having IDed the boys Elon has installed, confirmed one of those boys has control over Treasury’s payment systems, recorded the Musk boys’ platitudes about AI, and found that even after PEPFAR was exempted from USAID cuts, it remains unfunded. And if you want to understand where access by these boys to the government’s HR records will lead, read Mike Masnick.

But I want to compare the impotence portrayed by NYT — the refashioning of the office space fight, the anonymous confirmation that few if anyone in the White House know what Elon’s doing, the on the record quotes from a clueless Trump, a lying Karoline Leavitt, and … from Stephen Miller’s spouse, Katie, who has been installed in Elon’s group, that nothing will go wrong here — with the relative success of the two billionaires’ days yesterday.

Trump got his ass handed to him.

After promising big tariffs on our closest trading partners yesterday, he twice announced one month delays on the tariffs, tied to concessions that “Sleepy Joe Biden” actually negotiated, in one case four years ago. Worse still, both Claudia Sheinbaum and Justin Trudeau beat Trump to the microphone, and in Canada’s case, their Ambassador showed up on Fox News to make it clear Canada already agreed to the things Trump was hailing as a big concession, while Biden was still President. Better yet, some journalists have learned the lesson of the Colombia “negotiation,” in which the same thing happened. Leavitt’s lies about concessions may get less and less effective, moving forward, each time she tries to claim that Trump is some great dealmaker.

I suspect that between the time Trump announced tariffs and the time he capitulated, Senators and possibly even Rupert Murdoch told him how insane the tariffs were. I further suspect that these discussions involved a quid pro quo, perhaps tying a Susan Collins vote for Tulsi Gabbard, for example, in exchange for a reversal on tariffs that might affect Maine.

However Trump was talked off that cliff, he got his ass handed to him.

He didn’t even entirely succeed at claiming this was a fight over immigration and fentanyl trafficking, when that excuse was obvious bullshit as it pertains to Canada.

The one bright spot of his day was making a big announcement about a Sovereign Wealth Fund, yet another piece of paper Stephen Miller handed him to sign, probably, but a promise that, like the plan to annex Canada and purchase Greenland, remains unfunded and undiscussed in heated talks in the House and Senate about how to do reconciliation.

As I suggested Friday, so long as Stephen Miller keeps handing Trump papers to sign, he seems content to imagine he’s the President.

Meanwhile, Elon did succeed in getting the Trump-whisperers at NYT to accept that his attack on bureaucracy, which started with an agency with a $40 billion budget, 1% of government expenditures, and has never glanced at the agency with an $800 billion budget that has never passed an audit.

Mr. Musk has told Trump administration officials that to fulfill their mission of radically reducing the size of the federal government, they need to gain access to the computers — the systems that house the data and the details of government personnel, and the pipes that distribute money on behalf of the federal government.

Mr. Musk has been thinking radically about ways to sharply reduce federal spending for the entire presidential transition. After canvassing budget experts, he eventually became fixated on a critical part of the country’s infrastructure: the Treasury Department payment system that disburses trillions of dollars a year on behalf of the federal government.

Mr. Musk has told administration officials that he thinks they could balance the budget if they eliminate the fraudulent payments leaving the system, according to an official who discussed the matter with him. It is unclear what he is basing that statement on. The federal deficit for 2024 was $1.8 trillion. The Government Accountability Office estimated in a report that the government made $236 billion in improper payments — three-quarters of which were overpayments — across 71 federal programs during the 2023 fiscal year.

[snip]

In private conversations, Mr. Musk has told friends that he considers the ultimate metric for his success to be the number of dollars saved per day, and he is sorting ideas based on that ranking.

“The more I have gotten to know President Trump, the more I like him. Frankly, I love the guy,” Mr. Musk said in a live audio conversation on X early Monday morning. “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have.”

This is ridiculous garbage, as are Elon’s daily claims of money he has saved (which NYT accedes elsewhere). You’re not going to eliminate the deficit by shutting down USAID. You will, however, cut off a lot of funding to Ukraine, with Russia laughing gleefully as it watches. As Elon moves onto reviewing individual employees, you’ll cut off employees who’ll have to be replaced by more expensive contractors.

You won’t cut spending appreciably.

Nothing Elon is doing will balance the budget. Nothing Elon is doing will make government more efficient. Hell, his AI boys can’t even tell the difference between a condom and a hospital, and as a direct result, Trump keeps making transparently bogus claims about Gaza funding.

But as we try to get a sense of where the attacks on democracy are coming from, it’s worth noting that the first thing that happened — before the Senate installed one after another of Trumps’ wildly unqualified nominees, and before Congressional Republicans have decided how to defund government themselves — Elon has gone in and started changing code at government agencies, and done so with feeble claims of approval from the White House.

Meanwhile, people who seem to answer to Miller — people like Acting DC US Attorney Ed Martin, one of three January 6 insurrectionists salted through government so far — appear to be working for Elon, not Trump.

Update, February 5: Both NBC and Atlantic are reporting that Susie Wiles claims to be in charge of what Elon is doing.