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Stephen Miller Claimed Elon Musk Was the One Elected in November

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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.

Who Needs Intelligence Sharing?

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On January 27th, an AP story appeared on the news website Military.com with the headline “Intelligence Sharing by the US and Its Allies Has Saved Lives. Trump Could Test Those Ties.” On the surface, it reads like one of those analysis pieces that come out when the White House changes from one party to the next, with the added twist of knowing what the first Trump administration was like.

The Associated Press spoke with 18 current and former senior European and U.S. officials who worked in NATO, defense, diplomacy or intelligence. Many raised questions and concerns about Trump’s past relationship with America’s spies and their ability to share information at a time of heightened terror threats and signs of greater cooperation between U.S. adversaries.

The importance of trust

The U.S. and its allies routinely share top-secret information, be it about potential terror threats, Chinese cyberattacks or Russian troop movements. America’s closest intelligence partners are New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain, and it often shares with other nations or sometimes even adversaries when lives are at stake.

[snip]

Cooperation particularly between the U.S. and the U.K. is “strong and robust enough to withstand some turbulence at the political level,” said Lord Peter Ricketts, former U.K. national security adviser and current chair of the European Affairs Committee of the upper chamber of the British Parliament.

However, any strong intelligence relationship is underpinned by trust, and what if “trust isn’t there?” Ricketts said.

Ricketts’ question is no longer a hypothetical. This is the reality faced by intelligence services who in the past have been friendly with the US intelligence community. The AP put out their story on January 27th, and that seems like years ago. Today this reads like a warning.

The takeover of USAID that has played out this past week is *not* just a battle over who runs offices in DC. The bulk of USAID’s staff work overseas, alongside their local partners. When phone calls from these overseas missions back to DC go unanswered, and when US staffers abroad are told to stand down, all those local partners are going to get very, very nervous, and not just because their paychecks stop. They’re going to talk to others in their government, trying to find out what it going on. At the same time, they will be providing input (either directly or indirectly) to their own country’s intelligence service, as their spooks add it to whatever they are learning from elsewhere. In the US, folks worry about those who are losing their jobs; overseas, these fights will result in people dying, like those who don’t get the clean water, medical care, or disease prevention measures like malaria nets. Those other countries are watching with horror the stories of Musk’s minions breaking into sensitive databases, over the objections of trusted career people, and wonder what of their own information is now in the hands of a privateer, and if the same this is (or will be) going on at the CIA, DIA, and other US intelligence agencies.

I guarantee you that all these other countries are watching the battle over USAID much more carefully than folks in the US.

Or look at the targeting of General Mark Milley, widely respected by his counterparts among our allies and within their intelligence services. OK, Biden pardoned him to protect him, but Trump withdrew his security clearance, and also his personal security detail. On January 29th, newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth launched a process to investigate Milley, seeking to strip him of at least one star, cut his retirement pay, and punish him further. Given what the US attorney for DC is doing by going after DOJ attorneys for investigating the rather noticeable break-in of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, it’s not hard to imagine that Hegseth’s henchmen will be rather thorough in their work and ruthlessly push aside anyone who gets in their way.

Now imagine you are a member of a foreign intelligence service — perhaps the head, or perhaps a mid-level staffer whose specialty is the US. You see the USAID invasion. You see the public decapitation of the FBI. You see the targeting of career DOJ officials. You see Hegseth paint a target on the back of Milley (and others, like John Bolton and John Brennan). You see all this, much of it in the bright light of public reporting. You hear more from your contacts, who paint more detailed pictures of these purges and fights. You see all this, and you ask yourself two questions, over and over again.

1) Are the things we shared with the US intelligence community in the past safe from being revealed in public, and thus causing us harm?
2) Can we trust the US intelligence community with information we might share with them in the future?

Given what we’ve seen over the last week, the answers to these questions are becoming more and more clear: 1) no and 2) no.

I haven’t talked to those “18 current and former senior European and U.S. officials who worked in NATO, defense, diplomacy or intelligence” to whom the AP spoke. The AP headline was hypothetical – “Trump could test those ties” – but now on February 3rd, it’s real. Trump has been f’ing around with those intelligence service ties, and he’s about to find out what happens.

The short answer is becoming clear, as Trump’s vision of America First becomes America Alone.

 

 

Some of the Ways Trump’s Immigrant Invader Damaged America in Just Two Weeks

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I think one effect of Trump’s attempt to wow journalists with the appearance of action is to hide how many major fuck-ups and failed promises Trump has had in his first two weeks (like the serial confession that Trump and Stephen Miller lied to voters about how many criminal aliens there are and Trump’s equivocations about multiple of the tariffs he will set).

But one locus of many of the worst failures comes from this unelected immigrant.

Among the things that African immigrant Elon Musk has done in the last few weeks was:

Forced FAA’s head, Michael Whitaker, out days before a fatal crash. As the Verge explained, Elon took Whitaker out because he deigned to regulate Musk’s companies.

But Musk’s efforts to get Whitaker were well known even before Trump’s victory in November. He has complained many times about the FAA, lashing out in September after the agency levied a $633,000 fine for launching missions with unapproved changes. (Musk is worth over $400 billion, making him the richest man in the world.)

The FAA has also fined Starlink, after the SpaceX subsidiary failed to submit safety data before launching satellites in 2022. In a House hearing, Whitaker explained that the FAA’s civil penalties were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.”

On X, Musk complained that the FAA was “harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.” He also claimed that humans would never land on Mars without “radical reform at the FAA.” In September, he wrote “he needs to resign” about Whitaker.

Elon also pushed out the guy who manages America’s checkbook, David Lebryk, in whom a lot of the confidence of investors and businessmen is invested.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.

[snip]

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

Musk’s flunkies, including one 18-year old with only a high school diploma, have also been installed in the Office of Personnel Management [corrected] — the government’s HR department.

Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.

Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the powerful investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, stands as Trump’s nominee to run the OPM. But already in place, according to sources, are a variety of people who seem ready to carry out Musk’s mission of cutting staff and disrupting the government.

Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, according to her LinkedIn. Before that, she was part of the talent and operations team at Human Capital, a venture firm with investments in the defense tech startup Anduril and the political betting platform Kalshi; before that, she worked for years at Uber. Her placement in this key role, experts believe, seems part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool.

Sources say that Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. (Steve Davis, the CEO of the Boring Company, is rumored to be advising Musk on cuts to be made via DOGE and was integral in Musk’s gutting of Twitter, now X, after his takeover of the company in 2022.)

According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages.

One thing they’ve done is set up a government-wide email function.

Last week, many federal workers received test emails from the email address [email protected]. In a lawsuit filed last night, plaintiffs allege that a new email list started by the Trump administration may be compromising the data of federal employees.

In their attempts to set up agency- and government-wide emails, Elon’s unelected bureaucrats seem to have taken security filters off at least NOAA’s email system, resulting in noxious spam being sent.

After setting up the government-wide email, someone sent out an email similar to the one Elon sent out when he gutted Xitter, attempting to fool government workers into accepting something misleadingly labeled a buy-out, one not authorized by statute or appropriation.

In a separate email sent on Tuesday entitled “Fork in the Road,” most federal workers were effectively offered an eight-month severance package to leave their jobs, simply by sending [email protected] a message with the word “Resign” in the subject line between now and February 6. Military personnel, postal workers, and national-security and immigration officials are not eligible.

The executive branch has no authority from Congress to offer a mass buyout to federal workers. In fact, the OPM website clearly states that the limit for incentive packages for voluntary resignations is $25,000, far less than eight months’ pay for the average federal worker. Some employees can’t even be offered that.

The way OPM purports to get around this is by defining this as “deferred resignation.” The resignation of the federal worker would be set at September 30, and they will retain full pay and benefits until then and be exempt from return-to-office requirements that are part of one of the Trump executive orders. (This is also a way to not unlawfully reduce salary outlays in federal appropriations for the current fiscal year.) “I understand my employing agency will likely make adjustments in response to my resignation including moving, eliminating, consolidating, reassigning my position and tasks, reducing my official duties, and/or placing me on paid administrative leave until my resignation date,” reads the sample resignation letter. In this sense it is just a future setting of an end date of employment, though the strong implication is that those employees will have nothing to do for the next eight months.

[snip]

This was an Elon Musk operation, through and through. In fact, the “Fork in the Road” email had the same title as one that Elon Musk sent to Twitter when he took over there, informing workers to be “extremely hardcore” or take the resignation offer. The Twitter emails even included the same ask of workers to reply with their decision.

All this access — and almost certainly, some shitty AI — is where the big lie Karoline Leavitt told in her first presser came from.

MS. LEAVITT: There was notice. It was the executive order that the president signed.

There’s also a freeze on hiring, as you know; a regulatory freeze; and there’s also a freeze on foreign aid. And this is a — again, incredibly important to ensure that this administration is taking into consideration how hard the American people are working. And their tax dollars actually matter to this administration.

You know, just during this pause, DOGE and OMB have actually found that there was $37 million that was about to go out the door to the World Health Organization, which is an organization, as you all know, that President Trump, with the swipe of his pen in that executive order, is — no longer wants the United States to be a part of. So, that wouldn’t be in line with the president’s agenda.

DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.

Jesse Watters picked up Leavitt’s lie, which in turn led Trump to parrott Watters’ expanded version of it.

It’s possible flunkies installed by African immigrant Elon Musk mistook Africa for the Middle East (of which only Jordan gets contraceptives), because Africa receives condoms from the US (as part of the important PEPFAR anti-AIDS program that even Republican Senators were demanding be resumed when it got shut down).

And this is just what we already know! While it hasn’t been confirmed, I’d bet a good deal of money that Elon’s flunkies were behind shutting down the Medicaid portals early in the week, something that affected health care for people throughout the country.

It has been spectacular failure after failure.

And many of them were directly caused by the immigrant demanding that we get rid of unelected bureaucrats taking democracy away.

The Complications of Elon Musk

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You might be forgiven for forgetting that, just over a week ago, Trump’s spox, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement affirming that Trump — and not Elon Musk — leads the Republican party.

As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.

She was trying to sustain the illusion that Trump really did only learn about the contents of the Continuing Resolution that Elon Musk tanked after Elon did, rather than that Elon vetoed a bill Trump had already acquiesced to.

Read Robert Kuttner on the ways that Elon outplayed Trump in the CR negotiations (though I think Elon had several goals, not just to continue doing business in China unimpeded, but also defeating a measure that would have limited his ability to post Deep Fakes of AOC on Xitter).

You might be forgiven for forgetting Leavitt’s thin denial because Trump’s own comments, at Turning Point USA’s latest shindig, were even more striking.

Elon is going to have his DOGE [sic], Trump recommitted. But he’s not going to be President, Trump continued, because he is Constitutionally prohibited.

But I will order federal workers to get back to the office in person or be terminated from the job immediately. And we will create the new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk.

And no, he’s not taking the presidency. I like having smart people. You know, the — they’re on a new kick — Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, all the different hoaxes. And the new one is, President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk. No, no, that’s not happening. But Elon’s done an amazing job. Isn’t it nice to have smart people that we can rely on, okay? Don’t we want that?

[snip]

But no, he’s not going to be president, that I can tell you. And I’m safe. You know why? He can’t be. He wasn’t born in this country. But the fake news knows that. No, he’s a great guy, and we want to have him, everybody.

Pretty rich [cough] for a guy like Trump to seek refuge in the Constitution.

The next day, Trump put Stephen Miller’s spouse, Katie on DOGE [sic], right alongside naming another billionaire, Stephen Feinberg, to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense.

We learned during the campaign that the relationship between Stephen Miller and Musk is chummier than we knew, though we still can’t say whether Miller was the one who counseled Musk on bringing “the boss himself, if you’re up for that!” back onto Xitter.

But by picking even the spokesperson for DOGE [sic] — presumably a spox who would like to get paid — Trump provides NGOs like CREW a lever to demand transparency into DOGE [sic] that it is otherwise designed to evade.

It also puts a trusted insider inside.

All that was before the hilarious fight between Laura Loomer and Elon Musk (and Vivek Ramaswamy, who suggested American children don’t have the same work ethic that children of South Asian immigrants do) over H1Bs yesterday. After Loomer called Musk out for pushing immigration, Elon started shutting down her Xitter privileges.

Which led to Elon “censoring” Loomer’s account, after which she herself adopted the “President Musk” moniker.

Then someone with a manic South African accent using the name Adrian Dittman went into an Owen Shroyer chatroom and further antagonized Loomer.

Perhaps this is all some light-hearted amusement — something to do between the Beyoncé hafltime show and the New Years Eve ball drop.

But I do think it’s a testament to the complexity of the relationship between Trump and Elon. And that’s true for more reasons than the fundamental incompatibility of Trump’s populist nativism and Elon’s supranational aspirations. As it happened, the CR disappointed almost three dozen Republicans, who took Trump’s promise of backing Elon’s plans to cut government seriously. But it also disappointed Trump, who didn’t get Republicans to eliminate the debt ceiling. And those two incompatible stances — cutting government spending versus eliminating all limits to it — are simply two unpopular ways of giving the richest man in the world more tax cuts.

Many people predict, with good reason, that the two Malignant Narcissist problem will soon lead to a break between the men — that Trump will tire of questions about his own authority and lash out, cut off Elon, maybe even retaliate. The more people call Elon the President, the more likely that will happen.

But I’m not convinced that fully accounts for the complexity of this relationship. I don’t know whether that’s because Trump is awed by Elon’s shiny rockets and endless money. Or if there’s further complexity to the way Trump won the election.

It should be the case that Trump, through no more than inaction, a failure to order subordinates to shut down the various investigations and regulatory reviews that threaten Musk, could eliminate the problem Elon poses to his authority.

But Trump has already allowed Elon to chip away at the viability of his coalition.

Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE

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Zeynep Tufekci has a column at NYT scolding thousands of people on social media for taking glee in the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

I don’t care one way or another for the scold. I care about how she makes a remarkable claim and then uses it to engage in political nihilism.

Tufekci claims that she can’t remember any murder being so openly celebrated in the US.

I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.

From there, Tufekci likens this moment to the Gilded Age, where social upheaval led to exploitation and political violence.

The Gilded Age, the tumultuous period between roughly 1870 and 1900, was also a time of rapid technological change, of mass immigration, of spectacular wealth and enormous inequality. The era got its name from a Mark Twain novel: gilded, rather than golden, to signify a thin, shiny surface layer. Below it lay the corruption and greed that engulfed the country after the Civil War.

The era survives in the public imagination through still-resonant names, including J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt; through their mansions, which now greet awe-struck tourists; and through TV shows with extravagant interiors and lavish gowns. Less well remembered is the brutality that underlay that wealth — the tens of thousands of workers, by some calculations, who lost their lives to industrial accidents, or the bloody repercussions they met when they tried to organize for better working conditions.

Also less well remembered is the intensity of political violence that erupted. The vast inequities of the era fueled political movements that targeted corporate titans, politicians, judges and others for violence.

But she suggests that rather than the reform that arose out of the Gilded Age, this moment will stumble because “the will among politicians to push for broad public solutions appears to have all but vanished.”

The turbulence and violence of the Gilded Age eventually gave way to comprehensive social reform. The nation built a social safety net, expanded public education and erected regulations and infrastructure that greatly improved the health and well-being of all Americans.

Those reforms weren’t perfect, and they weren’t the only reason the violence eventually receded (though never entirely disappeared), but they moved us forward.

The concentration of extreme wealth in the United States has recently surpassed that of the Gilded Age. And the will among politicians to push for broad public solutions appears to have all but vanished. I fear that instead of an era of reform, the response to this act of violence and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest.

So, unprecedented glee at a murder. And Tufekci’s judgment that there’s simply not the political will there was in the early 20th Century.

As a threshold matter, I find her claim that this is a unique moment of glee to be … forgetful. Just two years ago, after all, Donald Trump and Elon Musk — whose platform has encouraged such mob celebrations — both led their mob in vicious jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder.

Indeed, Trump used attacks on Paul Pelosi at least twice in his campaign — most recently, campaigning with some cops in September.

How do you forget that the richest man in the world and the President-elect have engaged in just such celebration of political violence (and that’s before he pardons seditionists)? Donald Trump got elected by celebrating political violence.

And then he proceeded to install at least 11 billionaires, ready to start looting government.

Which is where Tufekci’s failure to find any will to push for systematic solutions gets curious. After all, Lina Khan’s efforts to rein in monopolies played a role in last year’s election. WaPo’s coverage of all the billionaires Trump installed quotes Josh Hawley along with Elizabeth Warren and Noah Bookbinder.

Trump’s team of rivals stands in stark contrast with President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $118 million in the first year of his presidency, according to Forbes. Trump’s picks have not yet released their financial disclosures, but his 2025 Cabinet is likely to be even richer than the first Trump Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $6.2 billion.

[snip]

Trump’s selections may be more inclined to look out for the interests of their own businesses and their fellow billionaires than for working-class voters, said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“It is hard to see how a Cabinet made up largely of the very, very wealthiest of Americans is going to have an understanding of what the needs of regular Americans are,” he said.

[snip]

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) expressed concern about the business backgrounds of some of Trump’s picks in an interview with Politico on Tuesday.

“All these Treasury secretaries, my point is, always end up being sort of Wall Street guys. Do I think that’s a great trend? Not really,” Hawley said.

[snip]

Democrats have roundly criticized Trump’s choices. The Democratic Party on Tuesday put out a news release that said Trump was “stacking his Cabinet with out of touch billionaires.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) told The Washington Post that the choices suggest Trump’s presidency will “be one giveaway after another for the wealthy and well-connected.”

“He’s nominating his ‘rich-as-hell’ buddies to run every facet of our economy, corrupting our government at the expense of ordinary Americans,” she said.

(NYT’s version of the same story credulously repeats the Tech Bros’ transparently bullshit claim that “A core goal of Mr. Musk and the Silicon Valley set has been to improve the efficiency of government services.”)

And even beyond Khan’s work, the Biden Administration took efforts to reverse the kind of concentration that made Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg rich. They’ve even taken action against … United Healthcare.

The richest man in the world is about to come for VA Health Care and once that fails to make way for new tax cuts, Medicare.

No one knows where this moment of rage will go. The oligarchs have the means to exercise the power of the state against those complaining that Trump’s billionaires plan to use bullshit claims about efficiency to make things far worse.

But the people who brought us to this moment where mobs take glee at political violence are about to loot the government.

And I’m pretty sure Senator Warren will be ready at hand to explain what is going down.

Pam Bondi Offers a Platform to Expose the Consequences of Trump’s Past Corruption

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Greg Sargent had a column proposing ways for Democrats to really challenge Pam Bondi at her confirmation hearing. He describes it as an opportunity to expose how badly she’ll be willing to politicize rule of law.

Democrats should start thinking right now about the opportunity presented by Bondi’s Senate confirmation hearings next year. This will be a major occasion to unmask just how far she’ll gladly go in corrupting the rule of law and unleashing the state on all the “vermin” he has threatened to persecute.

“The attorney general will be the weaponizer-in-chief of the legal system for Trump,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, told me.

While I agree with Sargent’s premise — Democrats should treat Bondi’s confirmation hearing as an opportunity — I disagree with his proposed approach (and that espoused by Jamie Raskin, whom he quotes at length).

Sargent’s focus is on how Bondi would act under predictable eventualities.

Trump has threatened to prosecute enemies without cause. How will Bondi respond when he demands such prosecutions? He has vowed to yank broadcasting rights to punish media companies that displease him and send the military into blue areas for indeterminate pacification missions. His advisers are reportedly exploring whether military officers involved in the Afghanistan mission can be court-martialed. Raskin says Bondi should be confronted on all of this: “Ask whether she thinks the First Amendment and due process are any impediment to what Trump has called for.”

But this is precisely the approach that failed with Bill Barr, who months after a contentious confirmation hearing, kicked off the process of politicizing DOJ.

Most tellingly, Barr was asked questions about the kind of foreseeable eventualities that Sargent describes (such as, pardons for January 6ers), and it did no good. Patrick Leahy, Amy Klobuchar, and Lindsey Graham all asked Barr whether pardoning someone for false testimony would amount to obstruction. Every time, Barr at least conceded the potential applicability of obstruction in that case. And then, just months after that hearing, when Barr wrote a declination memo for Robert Mueller’s obstruction charge, he simply ignored the pardons. He didn’t mention them at all. While it took years for us to learn how he had reneged on his own stated views (by simply ignoring them), those setting these expectations never found a way to hold him accountable for the dodge.

That said, January 6 Committee staffer Thomas Joscelyn, whom Sargent also quotes, gets a bit closer to the approach I’d recommend. Don’t ask Bondi whether she would do something; make sure you lay out her responsibility for inevitable consequences when things she’s likely to do have untoward effects.

“What happens if Trump pardons the Proud Boys leaders who were convicted for seditious conspiracy and instigating the violence?” said Tom Joscelyn, a lead author of the Jan. 6 Committee report, in suggesting lines of questioning for Bondi. “What about the dozens of defendants convicted of assaulting cops?”

Joscelyn adds that pardons for them would provide a major boost to violent far right extremist groups in this country and would “legitimize their cause.” Dems should confront Bondi with all of that. Make her own every last bit of it.

Where I’d add to what Joscelyn suggests is with Trump’s past history.

Rather than asking Bondi about something we know will happen going forward (political violence from freed militia members), ask her how she’ll avoid the negative consequences Trump’s past actions already had. Rather than asking Bondi whether she’ll be responsible for Proud Boy violence when Trump pardons them, instead note that Bill Barr treated threats  the Proud Boys and Roger Stone made against Amy Berman Jackson as a technicality, only to have them plan an insurrection 18 months later. “Bill Barr’s coddling of Trump’s far right extremists led to a predictable increased threat, an attack on the Capitol. How will you avoid the same mistake?” It uses the confirmation hearing to lay out the consequences of past corruption.

You can use this approach with pardons more generally. “Because Trump didn’t properly vet his pardons the first time around, at least seven of them quickly returned to crime, with many of them beating their spouses. How will you ensure that Trump’s bypassing of normal pardon protocol don’t put violent men back on the streets?” You can pick some of the January 6ers — like hardened criminal Shane Jenkins, who almost had a fundraiser at Bedminster, or NeoNazi Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who did — to ask Bondi how coddling such criminals is consistent with the law-and-order promises she makes.

The difference, so far, is subtle: Using the hearing to show past consequences for Barr or Trump’s own failures, rather than generically predicting future woes.

But that difference becomes more important when adopting a more important focus for the hearing.

Like the legitimization of far right extremists that Joscelyn predicts, we can predict a number of other inevitable outcomes from Trump’s second term. The most important is that as billionaires like Elon Musk loot the government, government service will decline precipitously, only exacerbating the alienation of many of the people who voted for Trump. And when those same billionaires get impunity from Trump’s DOJ, consumers will have their lives ruined. But Trump will work hard to blame scapegoats: liberals, trans people, and unions, rather than the billionaires Trump chose to given direct control over the looting process.

Democrats need to build in accountability for the corruption from the beginning. They need to explain that a crash in life quality is the inevitable consequence of Trump’s corruption and — just as important because committed MAGAts are more likely to turn on others before they turn on Trump — his billionaire appointees and protected buddies.

And Pam Bondi offers a spectacular way to lay that out, because she has been involved in protecting the villains who harmed Trump supporters in the past.

“Ms. Bondi, these ardent Trump supporters who signed up for Trump University racked up debt but got nothing from their degrees. How will you avoid such abuse of consumers going forward?”

“Ms. Bondi, after you fired the attorneys who were investigating banks foreclosing based on dodgy paperwork, millions of Floridians lost their homes. How will you protect Americans from similar business fraud going forward?”

“Ms. Bondi, after you and Rudy Giuliani made false claims about the vote in Pennsylvania, many of them threw their lives away by attacking the Capitol. How will you ensure that such lies don’t harm Trump supporters going forward?”

There are similar questions she can be asked that will anticipate other actions she’s likely to take — like shutting down investigations into Elon Musk’s various stock manipulations and false claims. “Ms. Bondi, how will you protect consumers who purchased cars falsely sold as self-driving?”

There are other questions that might get at Bondi’s past complicity. “Ms. Bondi, why did you and Trump’s other impeachment defense attorneys claim Trump’s demand for an investigation into Burisma was a pursuit of corruption, when Trump’s own DOJ had just shut down a 3-year investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky’s corruption?”

But the most important questions can and should be framed in terms of the Trump supporters whom her past corruption has harmed.

Democrats are not going to prevent Bondi’s confirmation. They’re also not going to get reassurances that Bondi will protect the integrity of the Department; Bill Barr’s prevarications prove that’s futile.

But they can use the high profile confirmation process as a way to lay out what should be a relentless message going forward: corruption hurts the little guy. Trump’s past corruption has hurt his supporters. Bondi’s past corruption has hurt his supporters.

That’s what the Republicans who will confirm her should have to own: the inevitable consequences of her protection of Trump’s corruption and that of the other billionaires who will be swarming his administration.

Yes, Trump Plans to Flush NATO, But It’s Part of a Larger Whole

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Note, 1:40 ET: Folks, I know this is bad timing, but in about 20 minutes, I’m going to temporarily shut down comments here, as we’re going to do some planned maintenance. Hopefully it won’t take too long. 

When Donald Trump announced he had selected Matt Whitaker as his Ambassador to NATO, a bunch of people rushed over here to hear me say Big Dick Toilet Salesman* again.

Like most of Trump’s other nominees, Whitaker is wildly unqualified for the role. Actual diplomats may be able to exploit his inexperience. Likely, he’ll wander around Europe like Gordon Sondland did, doing personal errands for Trump, often involving grift. Unlike most of Trump’s nominees, Whitaker has at least been able to get and sustain security clearance in the past.

But I really think BDTS is not where our attention should focus.

Yes, there are reasons to focus on Trump’s five most outrageous nominees, but not always for the main reasons they’re wildly unqualified.

It matters that Russia keeps calling Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump wants to lead the entire Intelligence Community, their girlfriend. But just as important, Nikki Haley has made an issue of Tulsi’s nomination — focusing on Iran, not Russia.

It matters that RFK Jr would pursue policies that would kill more children, just like he did in Samoa. But it’s worth recalling that RFK made more pointed attacks on red states than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris ever did.

Pete Hegseth is unqualified both because of his Christian nationalism and the NDA he got with a woman who told police he had raped her (his attorney, Tim Parlatore, says the sex was consensual). But it matters just as much that Hegseth hid the alleged assault from Trump’s flimsy vetting process, raising questions among Trump’s team about his candor.

She said Hegseth took her phone and blocked the door with his body when she tried to leave. She told police she said “no” repeatedly. She said she was next on a bed or a couch and Hegseth was on top of her, with his dog tags hovering over her face. Hegseth, she said, ejaculated on her stomach.

Even the focus on evidence of Matt Gaetz’ alleged sex trafficking — something likely to be aired anyway in two month’s time, not least because JD Vance’s disclosure that Trump plans to replace Chris Wray means Wray will have no incentive to refuse Democratic Senators’ requests for more information on the investigation — distracts from the larger effort, focusing on sordid Venmo payments rather than Gaetz’ willingness to sustain conspiracy theories that have been debunked.

Donald Trump’s wildly inappropriate nominations taken one by one, like Nancy Mace’s grotesque attack on Sarah McBride (and Fox News’ lies that McBride, not Mace, started the fight), serve to distract from the larger issue: Trump’s wholesale effort to dismantle the Federal government’s commitment to serve Americans not named Donald Trump or African immigrants named Elon Musk — or Russians named Vladimir Putin.

That’s why Musk is an exception to my claim of distraction. Thus far, I am far less intrigued by claimed tensions around Musk than others like Gaetz — I think it is too early to tell whether Musk has enough leverage over Trump to withstand complaints that he is stealing the thunder from the boss. It doesn’t hurt to play them up, but I have a hunch they won’t work like they normally would. But Musk’s conflicts most readily convey the looting that is at the core of this effort. It should be easy to show how the selection of Brendon Carr as FCC head will not only pose a risk to the First Amendment in the US, but would also provide specific, personalized benefits to Musk’s Starlink. It should be easy to use Musk as an exemplar of the point of all this, which has nothing to do with “woke” or bathrooms or “free speech,” but is, instead, about looting.

Taken individually and as a whole, Republicans — at least the Senators — are in an awkward spot. They are being asked whether they support America, or whether they will irretrievably stop serving their constituents as their President dismantles decades of government benefits. Each instance of discomfort created by Trump’s picks, whether it is Trump’s own team’s belief that Hegseth hid something or Haley’s attack on Tulsi from the right or generalized loathing of Matt Gaetz, provides a discomfort that may lead Republicans to stand up. Each instance of an incompetent crony (and I include Whitaker in that list) being placed in a position where he’s more likely to seek personal benefit he’ll have motive to protect by dutifully implementing whatever Trump orders should be a way to show that Senators have sold out their constituents.

But thus far, Trump has brilliantly done what he always does: used a series of distractions to drown out any coherent discussion of the whole.

It is usually a good bet to assume Republicans will fail to exhibit the integrity or self-preservation when it most matters. But the stakes are too high not to do everything we can to try to change that.

And that starts by maintaining focus on the whole rather than the endless series of new outrageous distractions.

*Note, I did not make up this nickname, though it’s a good one. I merely helped popularize it.

Things the Legacy Media Found Less Important than Joe Biden’s Apostrophe

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If Kamala Harris loses today, America’s media ecosystem will bear a great deal of the blame.

As I’ve said before, part of that is the hermetically sealed Trump propaganda industry, starting with Fox News. About 35% to 40% of American voters live in that world and believe Trump’s false claims of grievance. With Pete Buttigieg leading the way and a bunch of ad buys, Harris cracked that world just enough to elicit squeals about betrayal from Trump.

Part of that is the disinformation industry, led by Elon Musk. As more of America becomes a news desert, voters’ window on the world is often mediated by the algorithms of people, like Musk, who have a stake in debasing reason.

But a big part of it is the legacy media, which has gotten so addicted to horse race that it has lost interest in the reality of politics’ effects on ordinary people’s lives.

In an interview with Margaret Sullivan, Jay Rosen describes how reporters chose to chase Joe Biden’s alleged attack on Trump supporters rather than things that mattered to voters.

“But the horse race is too easy, too available — it has all these advantages,” he said.

How does this play out? This is my example, not Jay’s, but consider how the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with others in national media, gave such huge emphasis last week to the story about Biden’s verbal gaffe in which he used the word “garbage.” (He says he was describing the demonization of Puerto Rican people that was depicted at Trump’s appalling Madison Square Garden rally; others — especially on the right — heard Biden’s words as a description of Trump’s followers.)

If coverage is based around the horse race, this is a big story because it remind people of how Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was damaged after she described some Trump fans as a “basket of deplorables.” And indeed, that’s how they played it — both major newspapers led their home pages with that story, framing it as how Kamala Harris was being forced to distance herself from Biden and how it was giving “grist” to her opponents. Both papers also put the story above the fold on their Thursday front pages.

Huge, in other words. As Greg Sargent of the New Republic put it in a smart X thread: “The news hook is literally that it provided ‘grist’ to Republicans,” and this in effect “outsources the judgment about the newsworthiness of the event to bad-faith actors.” He’s right. It’s also classic false equivalence — as Trump devolves into simulating oral sex with a microphone, there must be something bad to say about Harris’s campaign, right?

If media coverage had been centered around the potential loss of American democracy, or really, anything other than horse race coverage, this Biden screwup wouldn’t have mattered much. Biden’s not the candidate, after all. There’s no actual consequence to this story.

But if your organizing principle is the horse race — neck and neck going into the home stretch! — Harris’s response is a much bigger deal. So the emphasis tells us a lot.

In a piece reminding that Rick Perlstein this childish practice of chasing bogus scandals has a long history — did you know that the press shamed John McCain for fighting back against Karl Rove’s black baby smear? — he also notes that sometimes voters just won’t play along.

Breaking en masse for Kamala Harris, Puerto Ricans just might be the ones who end up confounding that elite media’s desperation to end this race in a photo finish. If they do, they will have proved once and for all that the most malodorous garbage during this campaign was the stuff those elite journalists kept trying to shovel in our face.

Indeed, as Daniel Marans described, some Puerto Rican voters took renewed offense from Trump’s stunt of renting a garbage truck.

Nilsa Vega and Neidel Pacheco of Hellertown, a borough south of Bethlehem, both said they had never voted before, but Hinchcliffe’s remarks were the reason they planned to vote for Harris on Tuesday.

“That hit the spot right there,” Vega said. “They keep saying, ‘Oh, he’s only a comedian.’ It still hurts.”

Pacheco saw Trump’s decision to pose in a garbage truck at a campaign stop in Wisconsin the following day as an additional insult. “If he didn’t have nothing to do with it, what’s he doing in the garbage truck?” Pacheco asked.

Meanwhile, here’s a story about the Syracuse student who got one of the most impactful stories in a key swing district: whether Republicans will cut off job-creating funding from the CHIPS Act.

Back on July 17 — four days before Biden dropped out — I made a list of stories that the press was ignoring by instead focusing on Joe Biden Old. They were:

  • Is Trump a Saudi Foreign Agent?
  • What deals has Trump made with Putin and/or Orbán?
  • What happened to the missing classified documents?

I’d add a few more:

  • What is the state of Trump’s health and is he suffering ongoing symptoms from the shooting attempt?
  • Who are the other business partners and backers behind the various means Trump has established, like Truth Social, to launder payments?

We are hours away from polls closing, and Eric Lipton is one of the few journalists (along with Forbes, which reported on a new loan Trump got in 2016 today) who has shown much curiosity about who actually owns Trump.

We literally don’t know the precise nature of the business relationship between the Saudis and Emiratis — to say nothing of Russia or Egypt — and the Republican candidate for President.

Instead, we know that Republicans were able to bait the press into chasing an apostrophe for several of the last days of this campaign.