Trump and Musk
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Showing posts with label MUSK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MUSK. Show all posts
June 7, 2025
On Trump, Musk and Putin
June 6, 2025
The Break-Up: Trump vs. Musk
Elon Musk and President Trump in the Oval Office last week. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Today the U.S. political world was consumed today by a public fight between President Donald J. Trump and his former sidekick, billionaire Elon Musk. Musk invested about $290 million into the 2024 election, vowing to elect Trump in order to get rid of government investigations into his businesses he worried would “take [him] down.”
When Trump took office, Musk became a fixture in the White House, attending Cabinet meetings and heading the “Department of Government Efficiency.” That group set out to kill government programs by withholding congressionally approved funds at the same time that its staff sucked up information on Americans that could feed the training of artificial intelligence and killed the investigations into his businesses Musk had worried about.
In February, Musk posted on social media: “I love [Donald Trump] as much as a straight man can love another man.”
But Musk overstepped boundaries and overstayed his welcome even as his antics hurt sales of his signature car, the Tesla, inspiring Trump to do a car commercial for him on the White House grounds. Just a week ago, Musk officially left the White House on the same day that an article in the New York Times documented his heavy drug use on the campaign.
Then, on Tuesday, June 3, he took a public stand against the omnibus bill Trump desperately wants Congress to pass, posting on X: “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
And with that, the falling out began.
This morning, Trump told reporters he was “disappointed” in Musk. Ron Filipkowski of Meidas followed the saga from there.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House, and the Republicans would be 51–49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote. “Such ingratitude.”
Trump then suggested that “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Musk promptly said he would begin decommissioning SpaceX’s spacecraft, which supply the International Space Station.
The two men continued to go back and forth, with Musk saying that “Donald Trump is in the Epstein files,” a reference to the records compiled by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Trump was friendly. Musk also said Trump's tariffs will cause a recession, and agreed with another poster who suggested that Trump should be impeached and replaced with Vice President J.D. Vance.
Trump responded to that attack far more weakly than one would have expected, simply turning back to the omnibus bill and insisting it “is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”
Musk’s behavior is erratic in its own right, but if there is anything but pique behind it, it appears he is threatening Trump by making a play to control the Republican Party. In response to a post by conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer suggesting that Republican lawmakers are unsure if they should side with Trump or Musk, Musk wrote: “Oh and some food for thought as they ponder that question: Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.”
It’s quite a gamble, since Trump controls the government contracts on which Musk’s fortune was built and on which he still relies. Some MAGA loyalists appear to see the fight as a victory for Trump and are thrilled to see Musk’s star fall. MAGA influencer Steve Bannon told Tyler Pager of the New York Times that he has advised Trump to cancel all of Musk’s federal contracts and launch a formal investigation of his drug use and his immigration status.
Kylie Robison and Aarian Marshall of Wired noted that TrumpCoin lost more than $100 million in value during the fight. Tesla stock lost $152 billion of value from its market capitalization,
May 31, 2025
OnTrump Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Ketamine and Other Drugs and Family Drama
Elon Musk boarding Air Force One in March.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
As Musk entered Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous and his drug use was more intense than previously known.
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May 30, 2025
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May 30, 2025
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As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
On Wednesday evening, Mr. Musk announced that he was ending his stint with the government, after lamenting how much time he had spent on politics instead of his businesses.
Mr. Musk and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment this week about his drug use and personal life. He has previously said he was prescribed ketamine for depression, taking it about every two weeks. And he told his biographer, “I really don’t like doing illegal drugs.”
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President Trump spoke about government spending alongside Mr. Musk and his son, known as X, in the Oval Office in February.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York TimesThe White House declined to comment on Mr. Musk’s drug use. At a news conference with Mr. Trump on Friday afternoon, Mr. Musk was asked about The New York Times’s coverage. He questioned the newspaper’s credibility and told the reporter to “move on.”
As a large government contractor, Mr. Musk’s aerospace firm, SpaceX, must maintain a drug-free work force and administers random drug tests to its employees. But Mr. Musk has received advance warning of the tests, according to people close to the process. SpaceX did not respond to questions about those warnings.
Mr. Musk, who joined the president’s inner circle after making a vast fortune on cars, satellites and rocket ships, has long been known for grandiose statements and a mercurial personality. Supporters see him as an eccentric genius whose slash-and-burn management style is key to his success.
But last year, as he jumped into the political arena, some people who knew him worried about his frequent drug use, mood swings and fixation on having more children. This account of his behavior is based on private messages obtained by The Times as well as interviews with more than a dozen people who have known or worked with him.
This year, some of his longtime friends have renounced him, pointing to some of his public conduct.
“Elon has pushed the boundaries of his bad behavior more and more,” said Philip Low, a neuroscientist and onetime friend of Mr. Musk’s who criticized him for his Nazi-like gesture at a rally.
And some women are challenging Mr. Musk for control of their children.
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Mr. Musk and Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes and the mother of three of his children, at the Met Gala in 2018. Credit...Damon Winter/The New York TimesOne of his former partners, Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, has been fighting with Mr. Musk over their 5-year-old son, known as X. Mr. Musk is extremely attached to the boy, taking him to the Oval Office and high-profile gatherings that are broadcast around the world.
Ms. Boucher has privately complained that the appearances violate a custody settlement in which she and Mr. Musk agreed to try to keep their children out of the public eye, according to people familiar with her concerns and the provision, which has not been previously reported. She has told people that she worries about the boy’s safety, and that frequent travel and sleep deprivation are harming his health.
Another mother, the right-leaning writer Ashley St. Clair, revealed in February that she had a secret relationship with Mr. Musk and had given birth to his 14th known child. Mr. Musk offered her a large settlement to keep his paternity concealed, but she refused. He sought a gag order in New York to force Ms. St. Clair to stop speaking publicly, she said in an interview.
A Ketamine Habit
Mr. Musk has described some of his mental health issues in interviews and on social media, saying in one post that he has felt “great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.” He has denounced traditional therapy and antidepressants.
He plays video games for hours on end. He struggles with binge eating, according to people familiar with his habits, and takes weight-loss medication. And he posts day and night on his social media platform, X.
Mr. Musk has a history of recreational drug use, The Wall Street Journal reported last year. Some board members at Tesla, his electric vehicle company, have worried about his use of drugs, including Ambien, a sleep medication.
In an interview in March 2024, the journalist Don Lemon pressed him on his drug use. Mr. Musk said he took only “a small amount” of ketamine, about once every two weeks, as a prescribed treatment for negative moods.
“If you’ve used too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done, and I have a lot of work,” he said.
He had actually developed a far more serious habit, The Times found.
Mr. Musk had been using ketamine often, sometimes daily, and mixing it with other drugs, according to people familiar with his consumption. The line between medical use and recreation was blurry, troubling some people close to him.
He also took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms at private gatherings across the United States and in at least one other country, according to those who attended the events.
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Elon Musk at a Trump rally last year in Butler, Pa.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Food and Drug Administration has formally approved the use of ketamine only as an anesthetic in medical procedures. Doctors with a special license may prescribe it for psychiatric disorders like depression. But the agency has warned about its risks, which came into sharp relief after the death of the actor Matthew Perry. The drug has psychedelic properties and can cause dissociation from reality. Chronic use can lead to addiction and problems with bladder pain and control.
By the spring of last year, Mr. Musk was ramping up criticism of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., particularly his policies on illegal immigration and diversity initiatives.
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Mr. Musk was also facing federal investigations into his businesses. Regulators were looking into crashes of Tesla’s self-driving cars and allegations of racism at its factories, among other complaints.
“There are at least half a dozen initiatives of significance to take me down,” he wrote in a text message to someone close to him last May. “The Biden administration views me as the #2 threat after Trump.”
“I can’t be president, but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will,” he added.
He publicly endorsed Mr. Trump in July.
Around that time, Mr. Musk told people that his ketamine use was causing bladder issues, according to people familiar with the conversations.
On Oct. 5, he appeared with Mr. Trump at a rally for the first time, bouncing up and down around the candidate. That evening, Mr. Musk shared his excitement with a person close to him. “I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight,” he wrote in a text message. “Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.”
“This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised,” Mr. Musk added about an hour later. “‘Lasers’ from space.”
After Mr. Trump won, Mr. Musk rented a cottage at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s Florida resort, to assist with the transition. Mr. Musk attended personnel meetings and sat in on phone calls with foreign leaders. And he crafted plans to overhaul the federal government under the new Department of Government Efficiency.
Family Secrets
Mr. Musk has also been juggling the messy consequences of his efforts to produce more babies.
By 2022, Mr. Musk, who has married and divorced three times, had fathered six children in his first marriage (including one who died in infancy), as well as two with Ms. Boucher. She told people she believed they were in a monogamous relationship and building a family together
But while a surrogate was pregnant with their third child, Ms. Boucher was furious to discover that Mr. Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink, according to people familiar with the situation.
Mr. Musk was by then sounding an alarm that the world’s declining birthrates would lead to the end of civilization, publicly encouraging people to have children and donating $10 million to a research initiative on population growth.
Privately, he was spending time with Simone and Malcolm Collins, prominent figures in the emerging pronatalist movement, and urging his wealthy friends to have as many children as possible. He believed the world needed more intelligent people, according to people aware of the conversations.
Mr. Collins declined to comment on his relationship with Mr. Musk, but said, “Elon is one of the people taking this cause seriously.”
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The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, met in Washington this February with Mr. Musk and Shivon Zilis, the mother of some of Mr. Musk’s children.Credit...Press Information Bureau / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images
Even as Mr. Musk fathered more children, he favored his son X. By the fall of 2022, during a period when he and Ms. Boucher were broken up, he began traveling with the boy for days at a time, often without providing advance notice, according to people familiar with his actions.
Ms. Boucher reconciled with Mr. Musk, only to get another unpleasant surprise. In August 2023, she learned that Ms. Zilis was expecting a third child with Mr. Musk via surrogacy and was pregnant with their fourth.
Ms. Boucher and Mr. Musk began a contentious custody battle, during which Mr. Musk kept X for months. They eventually signed the joint custody agreement that specified keeping their children out of the spotlight.
By mid-2023, unknown to either Ms. Boucher or Ms. Zilis, Mr. Musk had started a romantic relationship with Ms. St. Clair, the writer, who lives in New York City.
Ms. St. Clair said in an interview that at first, Mr. Musk told her he wasn’t dating anyone else. But when she was about six months pregnant, he acknowledged that he was romantically involved with Ms. Zilis, who went on to become a more visible fixture in Mr. Musk’s life.
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Ashley St. Clair, center, was asked to keep her child’s paternity a secret.Credit...Jason Alpert-Wisnia/Sipa USA, via Reuters
Ms. St. Clair said that Mr. Musk told her he had fathered children around the world, including one with a Japanese pop star. He said he would be willing to give his sperm to anyone who wanted to have a child.
“He made it seem like it was just his altruism and he generally believed these people should just have children,” Ms. St. Clair said.
Ms. St. Clair said that when she was in a delivery room giving birth in September, Mr. Musk told her over disappearing Signal messages that he wanted to keep his paternity and their relationship quiet.
On election night, Ms. St. Clair and Mr. Musk both went to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Mr. Trump’s victory. But she had to pretend that she hardly knew him, she said.
He offered her $15 million and $100,000 a month until their son turned 21, in exchange for her silence, according to documents reviewed by The Times and first reported by The Journal. But she did not want her son’s paternity to be hidden.
After she went public in February, ahead of a tabloid story, she sued Mr. Musk to acknowledge paternity and, later, to get emergency child support.
Mr. Musk sought a gag order, claiming that any publicity involving the child, or comments by Ms. St. Clair on her experience, would be a security risk for the boy.
‘No Sympathy for This Behavior’
Some of Mr. Musk’s onetime friends have aired concerns about what they considered toxic public behavior.
In a January newsletter explaining why their friendship had ended, Sam Harris, a public intellectual, wrote that Mr. Musk had used his social media platform to defame people and promote lies.
“There is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,” Dr. Harris wrote.
Later that month, at a Trump inauguration event, Mr. Musk thumped his chest and thrust his hand diagonally upward, resembling a fascist salute. “My heart goes out to you,” he told the crowd. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.”
Mr. Musk dismissed the resulting public outcry, saying he had made a “positive gesture.”
Dr. Low, who is chief executive of NeuroVigil, a neurotechnology company, was outraged by the performance. He wrote Mr. Musk a sharp email, shared with The Times, cursing him “for giving the Nazi salute.”
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Mr. Musk was given a chain saw by the Argentine president, Javier Milei, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Time
When Mr. Musk didn’t respond to the message, Dr. Low posted his concerns on social media. “I have no sympathy for this behavior,” he wrote on Facebook, referring to the gesture as well as other behaviors. “At some point, after having repeatedly confronted it in private, I believe the ethical thing to do is to speak out, forcefully and unapologetically.”
The next month, Mr. Musk once again found himself under scrutiny, this time for an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington.
As he walked onto the stage, he was handed a chain saw from one of his political allies, Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy!” Mr. Musk shouted to the cheering crowd.
Some conference organizers told The Times that they did not notice anything out of the ordinary about his behavior behind the scenes. But during an onstage interview, he spoke in disjointed bouts of stuttering and laughing, with sunglasses on. Clips of it went viral as many viewers speculated about possible drug use.
Mr. Musk has also been juggling the messy consequences of his efforts to produce more babies.
By 2022, Mr. Musk, who has married and divorced three times, had fathered six children in his first marriage (including one who died in infancy), as well as two with Ms. Boucher. She told people she believed they were in a monogamous relationship and building a family together
But while a surrogate was pregnant with their third child, Ms. Boucher was furious to discover that Mr. Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink, according to people familiar with the situation.
Mr. Musk was by then sounding an alarm that the world’s declining birthrates would lead to the end of civilization, publicly encouraging people to have children and donating $10 million to a research initiative on population growth.
Privately, he was spending time with Simone and Malcolm Collins, prominent figures in the emerging pronatalist movement, and urging his wealthy friends to have as many children as possible. He believed the world needed more intelligent people, according to people aware of the conversations.
Mr. Collins declined to comment on his relationship with Mr. Musk, but said, “Elon is one of the people taking this cause seriously.”
Image
The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, met in Washington this February with Mr. Musk and Shivon Zilis, the mother of some of Mr. Musk’s children.Credit...Press Information Bureau / Handout/Anadolu via Getty ImagesEven as Mr. Musk fathered more children, he favored his son X. By the fall of 2022, during a period when he and Ms. Boucher were broken up, he began traveling with the boy for days at a time, often without providing advance notice, according to people familiar with his actions.
Ms. Boucher reconciled with Mr. Musk, only to get another unpleasant surprise. In August 2023, she learned that Ms. Zilis was expecting a third child with Mr. Musk via surrogacy and was pregnant with their fourth.
Ms. Boucher and Mr. Musk began a contentious custody battle, during which Mr. Musk kept X for months. They eventually signed the joint custody agreement that specified keeping their children out of the spotlight.
By mid-2023, unknown to either Ms. Boucher or Ms. Zilis, Mr. Musk had started a romantic relationship with Ms. St. Clair, the writer, who lives in New York City.
Ms. St. Clair said in an interview that at first, Mr. Musk told her he wasn’t dating anyone else. But when she was about six months pregnant, he acknowledged that he was romantically involved with Ms. Zilis, who went on to become a more visible fixture in Mr. Musk’s life.
Image
Ashley St. Clair, center, was asked to keep her child’s paternity a secret.Credit...Jason Alpert-Wisnia/Sipa USA, via ReutersMs. St. Clair said that Mr. Musk told her he had fathered children around the world, including one with a Japanese pop star. He said he would be willing to give his sperm to anyone who wanted to have a child.
“He made it seem like it was just his altruism and he generally believed these people should just have children,” Ms. St. Clair said.
Ms. St. Clair said that when she was in a delivery room giving birth in September, Mr. Musk told her over disappearing Signal messages that he wanted to keep his paternity and their relationship quiet.
On election night, Ms. St. Clair and Mr. Musk both went to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Mr. Trump’s victory. But she had to pretend that she hardly knew him, she said.
He offered her $15 million and $100,000 a month until their son turned 21, in exchange for her silence, according to documents reviewed by The Times and first reported by The Journal. But she did not want her son’s paternity to be hidden.
After she went public in February, ahead of a tabloid story, she sued Mr. Musk to acknowledge paternity and, later, to get emergency child support.
Mr. Musk sought a gag order, claiming that any publicity involving the child, or comments by Ms. St. Clair on her experience, would be a security risk for the boy.
‘No Sympathy for This Behavior’
Some of Mr. Musk’s onetime friends have aired concerns about what they considered toxic public behavior.
In a January newsletter explaining why their friendship had ended, Sam Harris, a public intellectual, wrote that Mr. Musk had used his social media platform to defame people and promote lies.
“There is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,” Dr. Harris wrote.
Later that month, at a Trump inauguration event, Mr. Musk thumped his chest and thrust his hand diagonally upward, resembling a fascist salute. “My heart goes out to you,” he told the crowd. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.”
Mr. Musk dismissed the resulting public outcry, saying he had made a “positive gesture.”
Dr. Low, who is chief executive of NeuroVigil, a neurotechnology company, was outraged by the performance. He wrote Mr. Musk a sharp email, shared with The Times, cursing him “for giving the Nazi salute.”
Image
Mr. Musk was given a chain saw by the Argentine president, Javier Milei, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York TimeWhen Mr. Musk didn’t respond to the message, Dr. Low posted his concerns on social media. “I have no sympathy for this behavior,” he wrote on Facebook, referring to the gesture as well as other behaviors. “At some point, after having repeatedly confronted it in private, I believe the ethical thing to do is to speak out, forcefully and unapologetically.”
The next month, Mr. Musk once again found himself under scrutiny, this time for an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington.
As he walked onto the stage, he was handed a chain saw from one of his political allies, Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy!” Mr. Musk shouted to the cheering crowd.
Some conference organizers told The Times that they did not notice anything out of the ordinary about his behavior behind the scenes. But during an onstage interview, he spoke in disjointed bouts of stuttering and laughing, with sunglasses on. Clips of it went viral as many viewers speculated about possible drug use.
May 4, 2025
Musk Gets Out of DOGE to Oversee Tesla losses.
The “Department of Government Efficiency” and its leader, billionaire Elon Musk, are also running into trouble. Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion from government spending, but that number kept dropping until he said DOGE will save about $150 billion. As David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine noted in the New York Times, that number is largely unsubstantiated. The DOGE team’s list of cuts is riddled with errors. In addition, the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that DOGE cuts have actually cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year, not including lawsuits.
Yesterday Musk told reporters that Congress will have to get to work to make the cuts he began permanent as he pulls back from government work to oversee Tesla. His foray into politics so badly hurt the company’s performance that it saw a 71% drop in profits in the first quarter of 2025. According to Emily Glazer, Becky Peterson, and Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal, Tesla’s board has begun looking for a new chief executive. While both Musk and Tesla’s board deny the report, Musk will move back toward company business. When asked if he needed a successor in the White House, Musk answered: “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism? Was it not stronger after he passed away?”
It’s not clear that Congress will, in fact, embrace the cuts DOGE has made willy-nilly throughout the government. Three days ago, a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll found that only 35% of Americans approve “of the way Elon Musk is handling his job in the Trump administration,” while 57% disapprove. “The amazing thing is that they haven’t actually done anything constructive whatsoever. Literally all they’ve done is destroy things,” a current federal employee told Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian. “People are going to miss the federal government that they had.”
As the damage it has caused becomes clearer, DOGE seems unlikely ever to become more popular. Yesterday David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that the DOGE operative installed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Christopher Sweet, is an undergraduate with no government experience. He is using artificial intelligence to comb through the agency’s rules and regulations, compare them with the laws authorizing them, identify rules that can be relaxed or removed, and rewrite them.
A source from HUD told Gilbert and Elliott that such work is redundant: officials created the rules only after “a multi-year multi-stakeholder meatgrinder.” Another source told the Wired reporters they were informed that Sweet is refining a model “to be used across the government.”
Yesterday Musk told reporters that Congress will have to get to work to make the cuts he began permanent as he pulls back from government work to oversee Tesla. His foray into politics so badly hurt the company’s performance that it saw a 71% drop in profits in the first quarter of 2025. According to Emily Glazer, Becky Peterson, and Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal, Tesla’s board has begun looking for a new chief executive. While both Musk and Tesla’s board deny the report, Musk will move back toward company business. When asked if he needed a successor in the White House, Musk answered: “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism? Was it not stronger after he passed away?”
It’s not clear that Congress will, in fact, embrace the cuts DOGE has made willy-nilly throughout the government. Three days ago, a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll found that only 35% of Americans approve “of the way Elon Musk is handling his job in the Trump administration,” while 57% disapprove. “The amazing thing is that they haven’t actually done anything constructive whatsoever. Literally all they’ve done is destroy things,” a current federal employee told Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian. “People are going to miss the federal government that they had.”
As the damage it has caused becomes clearer, DOGE seems unlikely ever to become more popular. Yesterday David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that the DOGE operative installed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Christopher Sweet, is an undergraduate with no government experience. He is using artificial intelligence to comb through the agency’s rules and regulations, compare them with the laws authorizing them, identify rules that can be relaxed or removed, and rewrite them.
A source from HUD told Gilbert and Elliott that such work is redundant: officials created the rules only after “a multi-year multi-stakeholder meatgrinder.” Another source told the Wired reporters they were informed that Sweet is refining a model “to be used across the government.”
April 9, 2025
Markets Fall Again. Trump Imposes 104% Tariff on China. Even Billionaire Republicans incl Musk are Getting Restive
Stocks were up early today as traders put their hopes in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s suggestion that the Trump administration was open to negotiations for lowering Trump’s proposed tariffs. But then U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said there would not be exemptions from the tariffs for individual products or companies, and President Donald J. Trump said he was going forward with 104% tariffs on China, effective at 12:01 am on Wednesday.
Markets fell again. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by another 320 points, or 0.8%, a 52-week low. The S&P 500 fell 1.6% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.2%.
Rob Copeland, Maureen Farrell, and Lauren Hirsch of the New York Times reported today that over the weekend, Wall Street billionaires tried desperately and unsuccessfully to change Trump’s mind on tariffs. This week they have begun to go public, calling out what they call the “stupidity” of the new measures. These industry leaders, the reporters write, did not expect Trump to place such high tariffs on so many products and are shocked to find themselves outside the corridors of power where the tariff decisions have been made.
Elon Musk is one of the people Trump is ignoring to side with Peter Navarro, his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Navarro went to prison for refusing to answer a congressional subpoena for information regarding Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Since Musk poured $290 million into getting Trump elected in 2024 and then burst into the news with his “Department of Government Efficiency,” he has seemed to be in control of the administration. But he has stolen the limelight from Trump, and it appears Trump’s patience with him might be wearing thin.
Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui, Pranshu Verma, and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported today that Musk was among those who worked over the weekend to get Trump to end his new tariffs. When Musk failed to change the president’s mind, he took to social media to attack Navarro personally, saying the trade advisor is “truly a moron,” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”
Asked about the public fight between two of Trump’s advisors—two of the most powerful men in the world—White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Boys will be boys.”
Business interests hard hit by the proposed tariffs are less inclined to dismiss the men in the administration as madcap kids. They are certainly not letting Musk shift the blame for the economic crisis off Trump and onto Navarro. The right-wing New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is backed by billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch, has filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump’s tariffs against China are not permitted under the law. It argues that the president’s claim that he can impose sweeping tariffs by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is misguided. It notes that the Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to levy tariffs.
With Trump’s extraordinary tariffs now threatening the global economy, some of those who once cheered on his dictatorial impulses are now recalling the checks and balances they were previously willing to undermine.
Today the editors of the right-wing National Review urged Congress to take back the power it has ceded to Trump, calling it “preposterous that a single person could enjoy this much power over…the global economy.” They decried the ”raw chaos” of the last week that has made it impossible for any business to plan for the future.
“What has happened since last Thursday is hard to fathom,” they write. “Based on an ever-shifting series of rationales, characterized by an embarrassing methodology, and punctuated with an extraordinary arrogance toward the country’s constitutional order, the Trump administration has alienated our global allies, discombobulated our domestic businesses, decimated our capital markets, and increased the likelihood of serious recession.” While this should worry all Americans, they write, Republicans in particular should remember that in less than two years, they “will be judged in large part on whether the president who shares their brand has done a good job.”
“No free man wants to be at the mercy of a king,” they write.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) told the Senate yesterday: “I don’t care if the president is a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t want to live under emergency rule. I don’t want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me and have a check and balance on power.”
Adam Cancryn and Myah Ward reported in Politico today that Republican leaders are worried about Trump’s voters abandoning him as prices go up and their savings and jobs disappear. After all, voters elected Trump at least in part because he promised to lower inflation and spur the economy. “It’s a question of what the pain threshold is for the American people and the Republican voters,” one of Trump’s economic advisors told the reporters. “We’ve all lost a lot of money.”
MAGA influencers have begun to talk of the tariffs as a way to make the United States “manly” again, by bringing old-time manufacturing and mining back to the U.S. Writer Rotimi Adeoye today noted MAGA’s glorification of physical labor as a sort of moral purification. Adeoye points out how MAGA performs an identity that fetishizes “rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake rugged masculinity.” That image—and the tradwife image that complements it—recalls an imagined American past. In reality, the 1960s manufacturing economy MAGA influencers appear to be celebrating depended on high rates of unionization and taxation, and on government investing heavily in infrastructure, including healthcare and education.
Adeoye notes that Trump is marketing the image of a world in which ordinary workers had a shot at prosperity, but his tariffs will not bring that world back.
Now Trump is demonstrating his power over the global economy, rejecting the conviction of past American leaders that true power and prosperity rest in cooperation. Trump has always seen power as a zero-sum game in which for one party to win, others must lose, so he appears incapable of understanding that global trade does not mean the U.S. is getting “ripped off.” Now he appears unconcerned that other countries could work together against the U.S. and seems to assume they will have to do what he says.
We’ll see.
For his part, Trump appears to be enjoying that he is now undoubtedly the center of attention. Asked to make “dinner remarks” at the National Republican Congressional Committee tonight, he spoke for close to two hours. Discussing the tariffs, he delivered a story with the “sir” marker that indicates the story is false: “These countries are calling us up. Kissing my ass,” he told the audience. “They are dying to make a deal. “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir. And then I’ll see some rebel Republican, you know, some guy that wants to grandstand, saying: ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.’ Let me tell you: you don’t negotiate like I negotiate.”
Markets fell again. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by another 320 points, or 0.8%, a 52-week low. The S&P 500 fell 1.6% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.2%.
Rob Copeland, Maureen Farrell, and Lauren Hirsch of the New York Times reported today that over the weekend, Wall Street billionaires tried desperately and unsuccessfully to change Trump’s mind on tariffs. This week they have begun to go public, calling out what they call the “stupidity” of the new measures. These industry leaders, the reporters write, did not expect Trump to place such high tariffs on so many products and are shocked to find themselves outside the corridors of power where the tariff decisions have been made.
Elon Musk is one of the people Trump is ignoring to side with Peter Navarro, his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Navarro went to prison for refusing to answer a congressional subpoena for information regarding Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Since Musk poured $290 million into getting Trump elected in 2024 and then burst into the news with his “Department of Government Efficiency,” he has seemed to be in control of the administration. But he has stolen the limelight from Trump, and it appears Trump’s patience with him might be wearing thin.
Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui, Pranshu Verma, and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported today that Musk was among those who worked over the weekend to get Trump to end his new tariffs. When Musk failed to change the president’s mind, he took to social media to attack Navarro personally, saying the trade advisor is “truly a moron,” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”
Asked about the public fight between two of Trump’s advisors—two of the most powerful men in the world—White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Boys will be boys.”
Business interests hard hit by the proposed tariffs are less inclined to dismiss the men in the administration as madcap kids. They are certainly not letting Musk shift the blame for the economic crisis off Trump and onto Navarro. The right-wing New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is backed by billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch, has filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump’s tariffs against China are not permitted under the law. It argues that the president’s claim that he can impose sweeping tariffs by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is misguided. It notes that the Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to levy tariffs.
With Trump’s extraordinary tariffs now threatening the global economy, some of those who once cheered on his dictatorial impulses are now recalling the checks and balances they were previously willing to undermine.
Today the editors of the right-wing National Review urged Congress to take back the power it has ceded to Trump, calling it “preposterous that a single person could enjoy this much power over…the global economy.” They decried the ”raw chaos” of the last week that has made it impossible for any business to plan for the future.
“What has happened since last Thursday is hard to fathom,” they write. “Based on an ever-shifting series of rationales, characterized by an embarrassing methodology, and punctuated with an extraordinary arrogance toward the country’s constitutional order, the Trump administration has alienated our global allies, discombobulated our domestic businesses, decimated our capital markets, and increased the likelihood of serious recession.” While this should worry all Americans, they write, Republicans in particular should remember that in less than two years, they “will be judged in large part on whether the president who shares their brand has done a good job.”
“No free man wants to be at the mercy of a king,” they write.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) told the Senate yesterday: “I don’t care if the president is a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t want to live under emergency rule. I don’t want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me and have a check and balance on power.”
Adam Cancryn and Myah Ward reported in Politico today that Republican leaders are worried about Trump’s voters abandoning him as prices go up and their savings and jobs disappear. After all, voters elected Trump at least in part because he promised to lower inflation and spur the economy. “It’s a question of what the pain threshold is for the American people and the Republican voters,” one of Trump’s economic advisors told the reporters. “We’ve all lost a lot of money.”
MAGA influencers have begun to talk of the tariffs as a way to make the United States “manly” again, by bringing old-time manufacturing and mining back to the U.S. Writer Rotimi Adeoye today noted MAGA’s glorification of physical labor as a sort of moral purification. Adeoye points out how MAGA performs an identity that fetishizes “rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake rugged masculinity.” That image—and the tradwife image that complements it—recalls an imagined American past. In reality, the 1960s manufacturing economy MAGA influencers appear to be celebrating depended on high rates of unionization and taxation, and on government investing heavily in infrastructure, including healthcare and education.
Adeoye notes that Trump is marketing the image of a world in which ordinary workers had a shot at prosperity, but his tariffs will not bring that world back.
Now Trump is demonstrating his power over the global economy, rejecting the conviction of past American leaders that true power and prosperity rest in cooperation. Trump has always seen power as a zero-sum game in which for one party to win, others must lose, so he appears incapable of understanding that global trade does not mean the U.S. is getting “ripped off.” Now he appears unconcerned that other countries could work together against the U.S. and seems to assume they will have to do what he says.
We’ll see.
For his part, Trump appears to be enjoying that he is now undoubtedly the center of attention. Asked to make “dinner remarks” at the National Republican Congressional Committee tonight, he spoke for close to two hours. Discussing the tariffs, he delivered a story with the “sir” marker that indicates the story is false: “These countries are calling us up. Kissing my ass,” he told the audience. “They are dying to make a deal. “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir. And then I’ll see some rebel Republican, you know, some guy that wants to grandstand, saying: ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.’ Let me tell you: you don’t negotiate like I negotiate.”
March 29, 2025
Trump gives power to a CEO, to run Gov't without any interference from Cong or courts, shutting most public institutions.
The craziness going on around us in the first two months of the second Trump administration makes a lot more sense if you remember that the goal of those currently in power was never simply to change the policies or the personnel of the U.S. government. Their goal is to dismantle the central pillars of the United States of America—government, law, business, education, culture, and so on—because they believe the very shape of those institutions serves what they call “the Left.”
Their definition of “the Left” includes all Americans, Republicans and Independents as well as Democrats, who believe the government has a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights and who support the institutional structures Americans have built since World War II.
In place of those structures, today’s MAGA leaders intend to create their own new institutions, shaped by their own people, whose ideological purity trumps their abilities. As Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, he and his ilk believe that American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
This plan is central to Project 2025, the plan President Donald Trump insisted before the election he knew nothing about but which, now that he’s in office, has provided the blueprint for a large majority of the administration’s actions. Project 2025 author Russell Vought, who is now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, called for a “conservative President” to “use…the vast powers of the executive branch” aggressively “to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”
Last month, journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that Curtis Yarvin, a thinker popular with the technological elite currently aligned with the religious extremists at Project 2025, laid out a plan in 2022 to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.
Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts…. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”
Earlier this month, Yarvin cheered on the idea of hacking existing infrastructure “to operate in an unusual way that its designers, its previous operators, or both, did not expect,” and complimented DOGE for the way it has hacked into existing bureaucracies. The key performance indicator of DOGE, he wrote, “is its ability to take power from the libs, then keep it.”
Far from saving money for the United States, as Jacob Bogage at the Washington Post reported on March 22, billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” has cost the government $500 billion, 10% of what the Internal Revenue Service took in last year. Bogage reports that the administration has demolished the IRS, firing nearly 20,000 employees, especially in the divisions that focus on enforcement, and dropping investigations of corporations and the richest taxpayers. Officials project that these changes will result in more tax evasion, and they are expecting a sharp drop in tax revenue this spring.
If the administration is working not to save money but rather to destroy the government, the cuts that threaten the well-being of American citizens make more sense. Today, Emily Davies and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported that Trump officials are looking for cuts of between 8% and 50% of the employees in federal agencies. They obtained an internal White House document that calls for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be cut in half, the Interior Department to lose nearly 25% of its workforce, and the Internal Revenue Service to lose about one third of its people. The Justice Department is set to lose 8% of its workforce, the National Science Foundation 28%, the Commerce Department 30%, and the Small Business Administration 43%.
Cuts to the government have led to the Social Security Administration’s website crashing four times in ten days this month, and there are not enough workers to answer phones. Yesterday, Sahil Kapur and Julie Tsirkin of NBC News reported that lawmakers, including Senate Finance subcommittee on Social Security chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA), have been kept in the dark as the men working for DOGE have cut SSA phone services and instituted new rules requiring that beneficiaries without access to the internet prove their identity with an in-person visit to an SSA office.
Washington Post reporters Lisa Rein and Hannah Natanson warn that “Social Security is breaking down.” Senator Angus King (I-ME) told them: “What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating…. What they’re doing now is unconscionable.”
In a televised Cabinet meeting on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she planned to “eliminate FEMA,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency that responds to national emergencies like hurricanes. This news comes on top of Trump’s executive order last week calling for the Department of Education to be shuttered, along with cuts of about half of its workforce.
Yesterday, Apoorva Mandavilli, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Jan Hoffman reported in the New York Times that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has suddenly cancelled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states. That money supported mental health services, addiction treatment, and programs to track infectious diseases. Today HHS announced it will be cutting 10,000 employees on top of the 10,000 who have already left and the more than 5,000 probationary workers who were fired last month. These cuts will include 3,500 full-time employees from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and 2,400 employees from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In addition to slashing and burning through government agencies, the administration is trying to undermine the rule of law. Trump has signed executive orders suspending security clearances for law firms that represent Democratic clients and barring the government from hiring employees from those firms.
Trump and his team have challenged the judges who have ruled against Trump, working to destroy faith in the courts. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has suggested that Republicans in Congress could eliminate some federal courts, telling reporters: “We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things.”
Trump’s administration is also working to take over colleges and universities, beginning with a high-profile fight against Columbia University in which the administration withheld $400 million in grants, allegedly over antisemitism at the school, until the university bent to the administration's will. Columbia’s leaders did so, only to have the administration say the changes are only “early steps” and that Columbia “must continue to show they are serious in their resolve to end anti-Semitism…through permanent and structural reform. Other universities…should expect the same level of scrutiny and swiftness of action if they don’t act to protect their students and stop anti-Semitic behavior on campus,” a member of the administration said.
Chillingly, on Tuesday federal authorities in plain clothes took Tufts University international student Rumeysa Ozturk into custody on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, saying she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” apparently a reference to a pro-Palestinian op-ed she had written for the Tufts newspaper. On Wednesday the Department of Homeland Security said she was being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Louisiana.
The administration is also working to reshape American culture according to their vision. The project of stripping words like “climate crisis,” “diversity,” “health disparity,” “peanut allergies,” “science-based,” “segregation,” “stereotypes,” and “understudied” from government communications are an explicit attempt to reshape the way Americans think. Today, in an executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” Trump tried to change the ways in which Americans understand our history, too. He called for Vance, who as vice president serves on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, “to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.”
The problem for those who embrace this vision of America is that it is not popular. Before the election, only 4% of voters liked Project 2025, and it has not gained in popularity as the dramatic cuts to the government have hurt farmers by killing grain purchases for foreign aid, cut funding for cancer research, and thrown people out of work. Because Republican-dominated counties rely more heavily on government programs than Democratic-dominated counties do, cuts to government services are hitting Republican voters particularly hard.
Today, Wired reported that it had found four more Venmo accounts associated with the Trump administration officials who participated in the now-infamous Signal chat about a planned military attack on the Houthis in Yemen. A payment on one of them was identified only with an eggplant emoji, which is commonly used to suggest sexual activity.
On Tuesday, Democrat James Andrew Malone won a special election for a state senate seat in a Pennsylvania district that Trump won in November with 57% of the vote. Today, Trump was forced to withdraw New York Republican representative Elise Stefanik’s name from consideration for ambassador to the United Nations out of concern that a Democrat might win her vacant seat, although Trump won her district in 2024 by 21 points.
Their definition of “the Left” includes all Americans, Republicans and Independents as well as Democrats, who believe the government has a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights and who support the institutional structures Americans have built since World War II.
In place of those structures, today’s MAGA leaders intend to create their own new institutions, shaped by their own people, whose ideological purity trumps their abilities. As Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, he and his ilk believe that American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
This plan is central to Project 2025, the plan President Donald Trump insisted before the election he knew nothing about but which, now that he’s in office, has provided the blueprint for a large majority of the administration’s actions. Project 2025 author Russell Vought, who is now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, called for a “conservative President” to “use…the vast powers of the executive branch” aggressively “to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”
Last month, journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that Curtis Yarvin, a thinker popular with the technological elite currently aligned with the religious extremists at Project 2025, laid out a plan in 2022 to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.
Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts…. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”
Earlier this month, Yarvin cheered on the idea of hacking existing infrastructure “to operate in an unusual way that its designers, its previous operators, or both, did not expect,” and complimented DOGE for the way it has hacked into existing bureaucracies. The key performance indicator of DOGE, he wrote, “is its ability to take power from the libs, then keep it.”
Far from saving money for the United States, as Jacob Bogage at the Washington Post reported on March 22, billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” has cost the government $500 billion, 10% of what the Internal Revenue Service took in last year. Bogage reports that the administration has demolished the IRS, firing nearly 20,000 employees, especially in the divisions that focus on enforcement, and dropping investigations of corporations and the richest taxpayers. Officials project that these changes will result in more tax evasion, and they are expecting a sharp drop in tax revenue this spring.
If the administration is working not to save money but rather to destroy the government, the cuts that threaten the well-being of American citizens make more sense. Today, Emily Davies and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported that Trump officials are looking for cuts of between 8% and 50% of the employees in federal agencies. They obtained an internal White House document that calls for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be cut in half, the Interior Department to lose nearly 25% of its workforce, and the Internal Revenue Service to lose about one third of its people. The Justice Department is set to lose 8% of its workforce, the National Science Foundation 28%, the Commerce Department 30%, and the Small Business Administration 43%.
Cuts to the government have led to the Social Security Administration’s website crashing four times in ten days this month, and there are not enough workers to answer phones. Yesterday, Sahil Kapur and Julie Tsirkin of NBC News reported that lawmakers, including Senate Finance subcommittee on Social Security chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA), have been kept in the dark as the men working for DOGE have cut SSA phone services and instituted new rules requiring that beneficiaries without access to the internet prove their identity with an in-person visit to an SSA office.
Washington Post reporters Lisa Rein and Hannah Natanson warn that “Social Security is breaking down.” Senator Angus King (I-ME) told them: “What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating…. What they’re doing now is unconscionable.”
In a televised Cabinet meeting on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she planned to “eliminate FEMA,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency that responds to national emergencies like hurricanes. This news comes on top of Trump’s executive order last week calling for the Department of Education to be shuttered, along with cuts of about half of its workforce.
Yesterday, Apoorva Mandavilli, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Jan Hoffman reported in the New York Times that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has suddenly cancelled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states. That money supported mental health services, addiction treatment, and programs to track infectious diseases. Today HHS announced it will be cutting 10,000 employees on top of the 10,000 who have already left and the more than 5,000 probationary workers who were fired last month. These cuts will include 3,500 full-time employees from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and 2,400 employees from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In addition to slashing and burning through government agencies, the administration is trying to undermine the rule of law. Trump has signed executive orders suspending security clearances for law firms that represent Democratic clients and barring the government from hiring employees from those firms.
Trump and his team have challenged the judges who have ruled against Trump, working to destroy faith in the courts. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has suggested that Republicans in Congress could eliminate some federal courts, telling reporters: “We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things.”
Trump’s administration is also working to take over colleges and universities, beginning with a high-profile fight against Columbia University in which the administration withheld $400 million in grants, allegedly over antisemitism at the school, until the university bent to the administration's will. Columbia’s leaders did so, only to have the administration say the changes are only “early steps” and that Columbia “must continue to show they are serious in their resolve to end anti-Semitism…through permanent and structural reform. Other universities…should expect the same level of scrutiny and swiftness of action if they don’t act to protect their students and stop anti-Semitic behavior on campus,” a member of the administration said.
Chillingly, on Tuesday federal authorities in plain clothes took Tufts University international student Rumeysa Ozturk into custody on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, saying she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” apparently a reference to a pro-Palestinian op-ed she had written for the Tufts newspaper. On Wednesday the Department of Homeland Security said she was being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Louisiana.
The administration is also working to reshape American culture according to their vision. The project of stripping words like “climate crisis,” “diversity,” “health disparity,” “peanut allergies,” “science-based,” “segregation,” “stereotypes,” and “understudied” from government communications are an explicit attempt to reshape the way Americans think. Today, in an executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” Trump tried to change the ways in which Americans understand our history, too. He called for Vance, who as vice president serves on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, “to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.”
The problem for those who embrace this vision of America is that it is not popular. Before the election, only 4% of voters liked Project 2025, and it has not gained in popularity as the dramatic cuts to the government have hurt farmers by killing grain purchases for foreign aid, cut funding for cancer research, and thrown people out of work. Because Republican-dominated counties rely more heavily on government programs than Democratic-dominated counties do, cuts to government services are hitting Republican voters particularly hard.
Today, Wired reported that it had found four more Venmo accounts associated with the Trump administration officials who participated in the now-infamous Signal chat about a planned military attack on the Houthis in Yemen. A payment on one of them was identified only with an eggplant emoji, which is commonly used to suggest sexual activity.
On Tuesday, Democrat James Andrew Malone won a special election for a state senate seat in a Pennsylvania district that Trump won in November with 57% of the vote. Today, Trump was forced to withdraw New York Republican representative Elise Stefanik’s name from consideration for ambassador to the United Nations out of concern that a Democrat might win her vacant seat, although Trump won her district in 2024 by 21 points.
March 23, 2025
Pentagon ditched a top-secret presentation for Musk on plans for fighting a potential war with China, Also Tesla Takedowns Contimue.
After news broke last night that the Pentagon was preparing a top-secret presentation for billionaire Elon Musk on plans for fighting a potential war with China, members of the administration denied that Musk’s visit to the Pentagon would include such a meeting. This morning, Musk posted on social media that the “leakers” “will be found.” “I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,” he posted.
Aside from appearing to confirm the story—one can’t “leak” a false story—Sophia Cai, Danny Nguyen, Daniel Payne, Amy MacKinnon, and Eli Stokols of Politico suggest that Musk’s threat has backfired. “We are public servants, not Elon’s servants,” one Food and Drug Administration employee told the reporters, adding, “[t]he public deserves to know how dysfunctional, destructive, and deceptive all of this has been and continues to be.”
A senior Federal Aviation Administration official said, referring to Musk, “He IS A LEAKER. When you put hard drives on data systems at government agencies you are creating the biggest security breaches we have seen in years and years. Possibly ever.” A Department of Agriculture staffer said: “If the Biden administration or Obama had acted like this, no one would have tolerated it. The Trump administration doesn’t get a pass.”
Those angry at Musk and the cuts his Department of Government Efficiency team has made to the government have demonstrated their anger by launching a grassroots movement called “TeslaTakedown” that protests peacefully at Tesla dealerships. Law enforcement officers and experts in domestic extremism say they have found no evidence that acts of vandalism against cars, charging stations, and dealerships—there have been at least ten such instances—are coordinated.
Trump tried to shore up the brand with a sales pitch for Teslas at the White House on March 11, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday urged the Fox News Channel audience to buy Tesla stock, an endorsement that violated federal ethics rules but did nothing to prop up the stock price.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi called vandalism of Teslas “domestic terrorism,” and today President Donald Trump insisted that the vandalism of Tesla products is far more serious than the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when rioters tried to stop the counting of electoral votes and thus overturn the will of American voters. Trump issued a blanket pardon for those rioters, including those convicted of violence against law enforcement officers, but today he posted about Tesla vandals on social media: “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
Aside from appearing to confirm the story—one can’t “leak” a false story—Sophia Cai, Danny Nguyen, Daniel Payne, Amy MacKinnon, and Eli Stokols of Politico suggest that Musk’s threat has backfired. “We are public servants, not Elon’s servants,” one Food and Drug Administration employee told the reporters, adding, “[t]he public deserves to know how dysfunctional, destructive, and deceptive all of this has been and continues to be.”
A senior Federal Aviation Administration official said, referring to Musk, “He IS A LEAKER. When you put hard drives on data systems at government agencies you are creating the biggest security breaches we have seen in years and years. Possibly ever.” A Department of Agriculture staffer said: “If the Biden administration or Obama had acted like this, no one would have tolerated it. The Trump administration doesn’t get a pass.”
Those angry at Musk and the cuts his Department of Government Efficiency team has made to the government have demonstrated their anger by launching a grassroots movement called “TeslaTakedown” that protests peacefully at Tesla dealerships. Law enforcement officers and experts in domestic extremism say they have found no evidence that acts of vandalism against cars, charging stations, and dealerships—there have been at least ten such instances—are coordinated.
Trump tried to shore up the brand with a sales pitch for Teslas at the White House on March 11, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday urged the Fox News Channel audience to buy Tesla stock, an endorsement that violated federal ethics rules but did nothing to prop up the stock price.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi called vandalism of Teslas “domestic terrorism,” and today President Donald Trump insisted that the vandalism of Tesla products is far more serious than the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when rioters tried to stop the counting of electoral votes and thus overturn the will of American voters. Trump issued a blanket pardon for those rioters, including those convicted of violence against law enforcement officers, but today he posted about Tesla vandals on social media: “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
March 21, 2025
Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contract
Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the globe.
In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut out during the Biden era.
At NASA, after repeated nudges by Mr. Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet.
And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself, Starlink satellite dishes have recently been installed, to expand federal government internet access.
Mr. Musk, as the architect of a group he called the Department of Government Efficiency, has taken a chain saw to the apparatus of governing, spurring chaos and dread by pushing out some 100,000 federal workers and shutting down various agencies, though the government has not been consistent in explaining the expanse of his power.
But in selected spots across the government, SpaceX is positioning itself to see billions of dollars in new federal contracts or other support, a dozen current and former federal officials said in interviews with The New York Times.
The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Mr. Musk’s allies and employees who now hold government positions. The company will also benefit from policies under the current Trump administration that prioritize hiring commercial space vendors for everything from communications systems to satellite fabrication, areas in which SpaceX now dominates.
In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut out during the Biden era.
At NASA, after repeated nudges by Mr. Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet.
And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself, Starlink satellite dishes have recently been installed, to expand federal government internet access.
Mr. Musk, as the architect of a group he called the Department of Government Efficiency, has taken a chain saw to the apparatus of governing, spurring chaos and dread by pushing out some 100,000 federal workers and shutting down various agencies, though the government has not been consistent in explaining the expanse of his power.
But in selected spots across the government, SpaceX is positioning itself to see billions of dollars in new federal contracts or other support, a dozen current and former federal officials said in interviews with The New York Times.
The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Mr. Musk’s allies and employees who now hold government positions. The company will also benefit from policies under the current Trump administration that prioritize hiring commercial space vendors for everything from communications systems to satellite fabrication, areas in which SpaceX now dominates.
Pentagon's scheduled a briefing for Musk on the U.S. military’s top-secret plans for any potential war with China. is canceled.
Eric Schmitt, Eric Lipton, Julian E. Barnes, Ryan Mac, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that the Pentagon has scheduled a briefing tomorrow for billionaire Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s top-secret plans for any potential war with China. As the reporters noted, this information includes “some of the nation's most closely guarded military secrets.” Musk’s largest Tesla factory is located in China—Chinese lenders contributed $2.8 billion to it—and as Joshua Keating of Vox explained two days ago, China is the only EV market where Tesla sales are continuing to increase. Keating also pointed to a Financial Times report that Chinese investors have been funneling money into Musk’s other businesses.
After the New York Times story broke, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.” About an hour later, the reporters note, he posted on X: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth chimed in: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”
Then Trump added: “The Fake News is at it again, this time the Failing New York Times. They said, incorrectly, that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow to be briefed on any potential ‘war with China.’ How ridiculous?’ China will not be even mentioned or discussed. How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can make up such lies. Anyway, the story is completely untrue.”
Shortly after Trump posted, Alexander Ward and Nancy A. Youssef of the Wall Street Journal confirmed the story, adding that their sources told them that Musk had asked for the briefing. They also reminded readers that Musk “has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a close partner of China, the country that has supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.”
After the New York Times story broke, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.” About an hour later, the reporters note, he posted on X: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth chimed in: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”
Then Trump added: “The Fake News is at it again, this time the Failing New York Times. They said, incorrectly, that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow to be briefed on any potential ‘war with China.’ How ridiculous?’ China will not be even mentioned or discussed. How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can make up such lies. Anyway, the story is completely untrue.”
Shortly after Trump posted, Alexander Ward and Nancy A. Youssef of the Wall Street Journal confirmed the story, adding that their sources told them that Musk had asked for the briefing. They also reminded readers that Musk “has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a close partner of China, the country that has supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.”
March 14, 2025
Musk has overstated the savings he claims by at least 92%,
The administration promises that it is eliminating “waste, fraud, and corruption,” but Judd Legum of Popular Information today launched the “Musk Watch DOGE Tracker,” which shows that Musk has overstated the savings he claims by at least 92%, with the warning that since these identified cuts are illegal and unconstitutional—Congress appropriates money and writes the laws for how it’s spent, and courts have agreed that the executive branch has to execute the laws as they are written—the contracts might not be canceled at all.
That the administration knows it is not operating on the up-and-up seems clear from its attempts to hide what it is doing. It has taken weeks for courts to get the administration to say who is running the “Department of Government Efficiency” and what the body actually is. The White House has tried to characterize Musk as a senior advisor to the president to shield him from questioning.
But today, in response to a lawsuit by 14 attorneys general from Democratic-dominated states arguing that Musk is acting unconstitutionally, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered Musk and DOGE to turn over their records and answer questions, giving them three weeks to comply.
On Tuesday, remaining staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) received an email under the name of acting executive secretary Erica Carr at USAID telling them to shred or burn agency records, despite strict laws about the preservation of federal documents. “Haphazardly shredding and burning USAID documents and personnel files seems like a great way to get rid of evidence of wrongdoing when you’re illegally dismantling the agency,” said Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Two lawsuits are already challenging the order.
January 22, 2021
- Elon Musk surpassed Jeff Bezos on Thursday to become the richest person in the world, with a net worth of more than $185 billion. [CNBC / Robert Frank]
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