Fridays with Nicole Sandler
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Some of the Ways Trump’s Immigrant Invader Damaged America in Just Two Weeks
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
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.
Fridays with Nicole Sandler
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Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE
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
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
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
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.
Batting Down Election-Day Conspiracy Theories
There is no truth to the rumor that Donald J. Trump wearing an apron while dispensing french fries at a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in Pennsylvania was part of his preparation for a new career move should he lose tonight [Sunday, October 20, 2024. Photo by Doug Mills/AP.]
So let’s get right to it.
There is no truth to the rumor that the staff at Mar-a-Lago has put plastic sheeting over the walls, to make cleaning up any thrown pasta easier. If anyone tells you that the custodial staff is worried about Trump throwing his dinner around once results start coming in, do not believe them.
There is no truth to the rumor that JD Vance has prepared a concession speech filled with remorse for the things he said about Kamala Harris during the campaign, and there is absolutely no truth whatsoever that Peter Thiel is preparing to have JD Vance disappeared for his failure to win.
There is no truth to the rumor that Lara Trump is planning to move to Saudi Arabia should Harris/Walz win.
There is no truth to the rumor that Fox News has a contingency plan to have an intern shut down the power to the FOX studios and take them off the air on election night if the results come in putting Harris over the top.
There is no truth to the rumor that Ivanka and Jared are giving the Saudi’s back the money they were given to “invest” back in 2020.
There is no truth to the rumor that Elon Musk is shorting DJT stock.
There is no truth to the rumor that Mike Pence has a bottle of champagne on ice for he and Mother to share this evening, should Trump/Vance lose.
There is no truth to the rumor that Alito and Thomas are so despondent at the mere thought of Trump losing that their doctors are worried about them succumbing to heart attacks in the next 72 hours.
There is no truth to the rumor that Bill Barr is preparing a memo for Kamala Harris, laying out the rationale for her naming him as her new AG should Trump lose.
There is no truth to the rumor that Liz Cheney has practicing her sincerity in anticipation of making a call later this evening to Donald Trump, offering her solemn condolences at Trump’s loss, and absolutely no truth whatsoever that her practice sessions are not going well because she can’t get through two sentences without laughing.
There is no truth to the rumor that Gavin Newsom is planning a call to Donald Trump Junior and Kimberly Guilfoyle, offering condolences on the occasion of the loss of Trump/Vance.
There is no truth to the rumor that Ted Cruz already has purchased a new home in Cancun, and absolutely no truth whatsoever that in a gesture of bipartisanship, Colin Allred has already generously agreed to bring pizza and empty boxes to help him pack.
There is no truth to the rumor that Mitt Romney has laid in numerous kegs of beer for his watch party tonight at the Romney family home, and absolutely no truth whatsoever that Mitt’s sister niece Ronna McDaniel is planning to resume using “Romney” in her name again.
There is no truth to the rumor that Trump’s staffers are secretly preparing to call in sick this evening, rather than attend any watch parties or “victory” rallies, so that they can prepare to enter witness protection programs.
THERE IS NO TRUTH TO ANY OF THESE THINGS.
There is also a rumor that the members of Putin’s election interference unit are reeling in terror at the mere thought that Harris/Walz may win, resulting in an all-expenses paid one way trip to Ukraine for the entire group. This rumor we have been unable to debunk or verify.
If you have heard other rumors that need to be shut down, please add them in the comments.
Elon Musk’s Machine for Fascism: A One-Stop Shop for Disinformation and Violence
Just over a year ago, I described how Twitter had been used as a way to sow false claims in support of Trump in 2016 and 2020.
I described how, in 2016, trolls professionalized their efforts, with the early contribution of Daily Stormer webmaster Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer. I quoted testimony from Microchip, a key cooperating co-conspirator at Douglass Mackey’s trial, describing how he took unoffensive content stolen from John Podesta and turned it into a controversy that would underming Hillary Clinton’s chances.
Q What was it about Podesta’s emails that you were sharing?
A That’s a good question.
So Podesta ‘s emails didn’t, in my opinion, have anything in particularly weird or strange about them, but my talent is to make things weird and strange so that there is a controversy. So I would take those emails and spin off other stories about the emails for the sole purpose of disparaging Hillary Clinton.
T[y]ing John Podesta to those emails, coming up with stories that had nothing to do with the emails but, you know, maybe had something to do with conspiracies of the day, and then his reputation would bleed over to Hillary Clinton, and then, because he was working for a campaign, Hillary Clinton would be disparaged.
Q So you’re essentially creating the appearance of some controversy or conspiracy associated with his emails and sharing that far and wide.
A That’s right.
Q Did you believe that what you were tweeting was true?
A No, and I didn’t care.
Q Did you fact-check any of it?
A No.
Q And so what was the ultimate purpose of that? What was your goal?
A To cause as much chaos as possible so that that would bleed over to Hillary Clinton and diminish her chance of winning.
After Trump won, the trolls turned immediately to replicating their efforts.
Microchip — a key part of professionalizing this effort — declared, “We are making history,” before he immediately started pitching the idea of flipping a European election (as far right trolls attempted with Emmanuel Macron’s race in 2017) and winning the 2020 election.
They did replicate the effort. That same post described how, in 2020, Trump’s role in the bullshit disinformation was overt.
Trump, his sons, and his top influencers were all among a list of the twenty most efficient disseminators of false claims about the election compiled by the Election Integrity Project after the fact.
While some of the false claims Trump and his supporters were throttled in real time, almost none of them were taken down.
But the effort to throttle generally ended after the election, and Stop the Steal groups on Facebook proliferated in advance of January 6.
To this day, I’m not sure what would have happened had not the social media companies shut down Donald Trump.
And then, shortly thereafter, the idea was born for the richest man in the world to buy Twitter. Even his early discussions focused on eliminating the kind of moderation that served as a break in 2020. During that process, someone suspected of being Stephen Miller started pitching Elon Musk on how to bring back the far right, including “the boss,” understood to be Trump.
Musk started dumping money into Miller’s xeno- and transphobic political efforts.
Once Musk did take over Xitter, NGOs run by far right operatives, Republicans in Congress, and useful idiots coordinated to undercut any kind of systematic moderation.
As I laid out last year, the end result seemed to leave us with the professionalization and reach of 2020 but without the moderation. Allies of Donald Trump made a concerted effort to ensure there was little to hold back a flood of false claims undermining democracy.
Meanwhile, the far right, including Elon, started using the Nazi bar that Elon cultivated to stoke right wing violence here on my side of the pond, first with targeted Irish anti-migrant actions, then with the riots that started in Southport. I’ve been tracing those efforts for some time, but Rolling Stone put a new report on it out, yesterday.
Throughout, the main forum where right-wing pundits and influencers stoked public anger was X. But a key driver of the unrest was the platform’s owner himself, Elon Musk. He would link the riots to mass immigration, at one point posting that “civil war” in the U.K. was inevitable. He trolled the newly elected British prime minister, Keir Starmer — whose Labour Party won power in July after 14 years of Conservative rule — for supposedly being biased against right-wing “protesters.” After Nigel Farage, the leader of radical-right party Reform U.K. and Trump ally, posted on X that, “Keir Starmer poses the biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history,” Musk replied: “True.”
Anything Musk even slightly interacted with during the days of violence received a huge boost, due to the way he has reportedly tinkered with X’s algorithm and thanks to his 200 million followers, the largest following on X. “He’s the curator-in-chief — he’s the man with the Midas touch,” says Marc Owen Jones, an expert on far-right disinformation and associate professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. “He boosted accounts that were contributing to the narratives of disinformation and anti-Muslim hate speech that were fueling these riots.”
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, one of Trump’s most gleeful supporters, someone with troubling links to both China and Russia, has set up a one-stop shop: Joining false claims about the election with networks of fascists who’ll take to the streets.
With that in mind, I want to point to a number of reports on how disinformation has run rampant on Xitter.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (one of the groups that Elon unsuccessfully sued) released a report showing that even where volunteers mark disinformation on Xitter, those Community Notes often never get shown to users.
Despite a dedicated group of X users producing accurate, well-sourced notes, a significant portion never reaches public view. In this report we found that 74% of accurate Community Notes on false or misleading claims about US elections never get shown to users. This allows misleading posts about voter fraud, election integrity, and political candidates to spread and be viewed millions of times. Posts without Community Notes promoting false narratives about US politics have garnered billions of views, outpacing the reach of their fact-checked counterparts by 13 times.
NBC described Elon’s personal role in magnifying false claims.
In three instances in the last month, Musk’s posts highlighting election misinformation have been viewed over 200 times more than fact-checking posts correcting those claims that have been published on X by government officials or accounts.
Musk frequently boosts false claims about voting in the U.S., and rarely, if ever, offers corrections when caught sharing them. False claims he has posted this month routinely receive tens of millions of views, by X’s metrics, while rebuttals from election officials usually receive only tens or hundreds of thousands.
Musk, who declared his full-throated support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in July, is facing at least 11 lawsuits and regulatory battles under the Biden administration related to his various companies.
And CNN described how efforts from election administrators to counter this flood of disinformation have been overwhelmed.
Elon Musk’s misinformation megaphone has created a “huge problem” for election officials in key battleground states who told CNN they’re struggling to combat the wave of falsehoods coming from the tech billionaire and spreading wildly on his X platform.
Election officials in pivotal battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona have all tried – and largely failed – to fact-check Musk in real time. At least one has tried passing along personal notes asking he stop spreading baseless claims likely to mislead voters.
“I’ve had my friends hand-deliver stuff to him,” said Stephen Richer, a top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, a Republican who has faced violent threats for saying the 2020 election was secure.
“We’ve pulled out more stops than most people have available to try to put accurate information in front of (Musk),” Richer added. “It has been unsuccessful.”
Ever since former President Donald Trump and his allies trumpeted bogus claims of election fraud to try to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, debunking election misinformation has become akin to a second full-time job for election officials, alongside administering actual elections. But Musk – with his ownership of the X platform, prominent backing of Trump and penchant for spreading false claims – has presented a unique challenge.
“The bottom line is it’s really disappointing that someone with as many resources and as big of a platform as he clearly has would use those resources and allow that platform to be misused to spread misinformation,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told CNN, “when he could help us restore and ensure people can have rightly placed faith in our election outcomes, whatever they may be.”
Finally, Wired explained how, last week, Elon’s PAC made it worse, by setting up a group of 50,000 people stoking conspiracy theories.
For months, billionaire and X owner Elon Musk has used his platform to share election conspiracy theories that could undermine faith in the outcome of the 2024 election. Last week, the political action committee (PAC) Musk backs took it a step further, launching a group on X called the Election Integrity Community. The group has nearly 50,000 members and says that it is meant to be a place where users can “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.”
In practice, it is a cesspool of election conspiracy theories, alleging everything from unauthorized immigrants voting to misspelled candidate names on ballots. “It’s just an election denier jamboree,” says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, who authored a recent report on how social media facilitates political violence.
[snip]
Inside the group, multiple accounts shared a viral video of a person ripping up ballots, allegedly from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which US intelligence agencies have said is fake. Another account shared a video from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones alleging that unauthorized immigrants were being bussed to polling locations to vote. One video shared multiple times, and also purportedly from Buck County, shows a voter confronting a woman with a “voter protection” tag on a lanyard who tells the woman filming that she is there for “early vote monitoring” and asks not to be recorded. Text in the accompanying post says that there were “long lines and early cut offs” and alleges election interference. That post has been viewed more than 1 million times.
Some accounts merely retweet local news stories, or right-wing influencers like Lara Loomer and Jack Posobiec, rather than sharing their own personal experiences.
One account merely reshared a post from Sidney Powell, the disgraced lawyer who attempted to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, in which she says that voting machines in Wisconsin connect to the internet, and therefore could be tampered with. In actuality, voting machines are difficult to hack. Many of the accounts reference issues in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
This latter network includes all the same elements we saw behind the riots in the UK — Alex Jones, Trump’s fascist trolls, Russian spies (except Tommy Robinson, who just got jailed on contempt charges).
Now, in my piece last year, I suggested that Elon has diminished the effectiveness of this machine for fascism by driving so many people off of it.
The one thing that may save us is that this Machine for Fascism has destroyed Xitter’s core value to aspiring fascists: it has destroyed Xitter’s role as a public square, from which normal people might find valuable news. In the process, Elmo has destroyed Twitter’s key role in bridging from the far right to mainstream readers.
Maybe that’s true? Or maybe by driving off so many journalists Elon has only ensured that journalists have to go look to find this stuff — and to be utterly clear, this kind of journalism is some of the most important work being done right now.
But with successful tests runs stoking far right violence in Ireland and the UK, that may not matter. Effectively, Elon has made Xitter a massive version of Gab, a one-stop shop from which he can both sow disinformation and stoke violence.
On a near daily basis, DOJ issues warnings that some of this — not the false claims about fraud and not much of the violent rhetoric, but definitely those who try to confuse voters about how or when to vote — is illegal.
NBC describes that election officials are keeping records of the corrections they’ve issued, which would be useful in case of legal cases later. What we don’t know is whether DOJ is issuing notices of illegal speech to Xitter (they certainly did in 2020 — it’s one of the things Matt Taibbi wildly misrepresented), and if so, what they’re doing about it.
I am, as I have been for some time, gravely alarmed by all this. The US has far fewer protections against this kind of incitement than the UK or the EU. Much of this is not illegal.
Kamala Harris does have — and is using — one important tool against this. Her campaign has made a record number of contacts directly with voters. She is, effectively, sidestepping this wash of disinformation by using her massive network of volunteers to speak directly to people.
If that works, if Harris can continue to do what she seems to be doing in key swing states (though maybe not Nevada): getting more of her voters to the polls, then all this will come to a head in the aftermath, as I suspect other things may come to a head in the transition period, assuming Harris can win this thing. In a period when DOJ can and might act, the big question is whether American democracy can take action to shut down a machine that has been fine-tuned for years for this moment.
American law and years of effort to privilege Nazi speech have created the opportunity to build a machine for fascism. And I really don’t know how it’ll work out.
Update: Thus far there have been three known Russian disinformation attempts: a false claim of sexual abuse targeted at Tim Walz, a fake video showing votes in Bucks County being destroyed, and now a false claim that a Haitian migrant was voting illegally in Georgia.
This statement from Raffensperger, publicly asking Musk to take it down, may provide some kind of legal basis to take further steps. That’s the kind of thing that is needed to get this under control.
Update: I meant to include the Atlantic’s contribution to the reporting on Musk’s “Election Integrity Community;” it’s a good thing so many people are focused on Elon’s efforts.
Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud. Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times, is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to educate yourself.”