Why Elon Will Be Trump’s Undoing
And a request to the DOGE Bros: Please read a f***ing book.
Yes, yes, “the wheels of justice grind slowly” and all that. But when do the courts get involved?
Happy Wednesday.
Never Musk
by William Kristol
It’s grim out there. Limiting the damage done by Donald Trump and the Trumpists to our government and the rule of law, and reversing the momentum of Trumpism politically and culturally—all of this seems difficult and daunting.
Let’s be honest: It doesn’t just seem difficult and daunting. It is difficult and daunting.
It’s also as important a task as any in my political lifetime. And the good news is that difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Daunting needn’t be frightening.
Even critics must concede that the Trump blitzkrieg has been impressive. Many of our laws, norms, and procedures designed to provide guardrails against arbitrary, reckless, and lawless actions have proven ineffective.
But defensive lines can fall and the forces of freedom can still ultimately prevail. And vulnerabilities in the apparently formidable Trumpist movement have already begun to appear. Here’s one vulnerability: Elon Musk.
No one voted for Musk. Trump, on the other hand, has won the votes of 63 million, 74 million, and 77 million Americans in the last three presidential elections. Trump was sworn in as president just two weeks ago. For better or worse, the half of the country who voted for him is going to be reluctant to rush to judgment—however warranted that judgment might be!—that they made a mistake. It’s going to be hard to dramatically roll back Trump’s support for a little while. The strategy, for now, has to be more like containment.
About half the electorate also voted for Republicans just three months ago, as they have been doing pretty consistently in recent decades. The partisan polarization is both steady and deep. It seems a safe bet that in the short term, basic partisan alignment isn’t going to change suddenly. In dealing with Republicans as well, containment seems for now the best course.
Polling confirms these common-sense judgments. A Quinnipiac poll late last week showed 46 percent of voters approving of the job Trump is doing so far, with 43 percent disapproving. Trump won on Election Day by a point and half. So not much of a honeymoon—but no quick divorce either.
As for the Republican party, 43 percent of registered voters now have a favorable opinion and 45 percent an unfavorable opinion. You might think this isn’t great for the GOP . . . until you take a look at voters’ opinion of the Democratic party: 31 percent favorable, 57 percent unfavorable. Yikes. What this suggests is that it won’t be advantageous, for now, for the democratic resistance to look like merely a Democratic resistance. A counter-attack against Trump that looks merely partisan isn’t promising.
So what’s the vulnerability? How about the richest man in the world, the second-most powerful man in the Trump White House, who is reshaping America despite never having been elected or confirmed to any public office?
There’s a striking finding in that same Quinnipiac poll from last week: 53 percent of voters disapprove of Musk playing a prominent role in the Trump administration, while only 37 percent approve. In an earlier Quinnipiac survey in mid-December, the same number, 53 percent, disapproved of Musk, while 41 percent approved. So as Musk has become ever more prominent, there’s been a slight erosion of support for him, even as Trump’s numbers have improved a bit over that period.
Turning that slight erosion into a cascade of disapproval is the task. But it should be a pretty doable one. Already, there is evidence of it happening, as relayed by Rep. Jared Golden, perhaps the most centrist Democrat in the House:
I’ve been getting a lot of calls over the past few days, and the interesting thing is none of them are about Donald Trump. They’re all about Elon Musk. My constituents, and a majority of this country, put Trump in the White House, not this unelected, weirdo billionaire.
A friend with long experience in the U.S. government who’s also a student of the Soviet Union recently remarked in an email on “the Stalinoid ethos that seems to permeate Trump 2.0.” He continued:
Since we are in the early stages of the process the closest analogy would seem to be the mid-1920s, when Lenin (Trump) was not really exercising oversight of the day to day operations of the party and government. Stalin (Musk) was busy operating the system of personnel management and accruing power that would make him ultimately an unstoppable force.
We are seeing purges and secrecy and firings and, yes, law-breaking by a bunch of arrogant young Muskovites, acting at the direction of their Alternative für Deutschland–supporting unelected and unaccountable “special government employee” boss. Americans already have their doubts about Musk. His presence, looming in the wings and off-putting to most Americans, is a vulnerability to be exploited.
Remedial Civics for Tech Bros
by Hannah Yoest
Every other day tech bros reinvent things they seem to be totally ignorant of already existing. There are whole Tumblrs documenting the phenomenon. It’s what happens when you have “STEM without the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities,” says anthropologist Holly Waters: “More ‘innovative’ tech bros who giddily reinvent rent, roommates, taxes, and now . . . roller skates. With complete, straight-faced, sincerity.”
Now—lucky us—we get to watch this same pattern play out in our nation’s capital, where a team of tech bros handpicked by Elon Musk are suddenly discovering this entity called the government and this concept called democracy. Just as Musk seemed to have never seen a bus before, his crack team in D.C. appears never to have considered any aspect of civic life or duty.
With Trump’s call to address “massive waste and fraud” in the government, Musk had a very original, very bright idea: More fraudulent government. His Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, named for one of Elon’s brain rot fixations: a dog meme cryptocurrency) is, according to the bizarre Trump executive order that duct-taped it together, supposed to “moderniz[e] Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Several executive agencies and offices already existed to do just that sort of work.
Barely two weeks into its existence, DOGE is already facing litigation. It hasn’t discovered new “waste,” just programs that Musk doesn’t like. As for making the government more efficient, what they’re really doing is staging a quasi-coup.
One theme in the reports of the young DOGEbros’ rampage through the federal government—taking over offices, demanding access to hypersensitive computer systems, threatening civil servants who stand in their way—is their combination of blithering ignorance and swaggering self-assurance. It makes sense, of course. Musk, with his arrogance and smug superiority, is the final boss of a culture that has for too long heralded STEM as a new vanguard of the intellectual elite while dismissing and trivializing the humanities as frivolous. And yikes, does it show.
Who needs to read the classics when you know how to code? Why bother to learn American history when you can write America’s future in C++? Unfortunately for everyone, it turns out running a country it’s a little more complicated than building apps or cars or NFTs fake-money schemes. The whole country is at the mercy of conceited twenty-something computer science dipshits as they get a remedial crash course in government, learning the kinds of things that college freshman in political science 101 are expected already to know.
Musk and his lackeys seem to think they are the very first galaxy brains ever to ask where the money in the Treasury goes. Apparently, according to these geniuses, no one else has ever bothered to look into it before. Here’s how one of Musk’s admiring fans imagined what went down:
Musk himself agreed with that absurd description of what his minions have been up to:
As these boys keep finding astonishing new ways to demonstrate their profound ignorance it does seem like some kind of prophetic fulfillment of Idiocracy.
Get it? The Founders were young guys themselves, so what’s wrong with Musk’s young guys coming in to remake the government? Let’s set aside the fact that most of the Founders were squarely middle-aged by 1776 (and for the few on the younger side, like Hamilton and Madison who were in their twenties during the Revolution, their most important contributions came later, when they were in their thirties and older). Here’s where the argument really falls apart: wealthy 20-year-olds today are frying their neural pathways with the dopamine heroin of Roblox and porn, while the wealthy 20-year-olds of the Founding era were studying Greek and Latin while learning history, philosophy, and the classics through reading. Sure, they may have had to contend with syphilis but at least they had to go out and get it rather than just giving themselves carpal tunnel while staring at a screen.
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity,” is often attributed to Albert Einstein. As we witness the federal government’s “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” I’ve been thinking about the ending of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Not to spoil it, but the protagonist kills himself. Unable to bear the excess of the orgies and their incompatibility with truth, he hangs himself. This type of suicide is now commonly referred to as a death of despair.
America is also killing itself, and certainly in many ways the country we once knew is already dead. But it is not a death of despair. It is succumbing to the orgies with relish. It is a death of decadence.
QUICK HITS
MAR-A-GAZA: Yesterday, the president seemed really fixated on the idea that the best permanent solution to the war in Gaza was to force out all of the current inhabitants and transform the strip into an American-owned “Riviera of the Middle East.”
People were rightly agog and aghast at this idea, which combined trademark Trumpian ignorance and inability to see anything but real-estate deals with a casual suggestion of ethnic cleansing. In this case, it was sprinkled with some useless neo-imperialism from the guy who decried nation-building in 2016. He did not seem to consider whether the cost of nation-building in the world's most volatile region would count against DOGE’s efforts to reduce the budget.
The old man has more catastrophic ideas in a day than most politicians have in a year. He doesn’t act on most of them, and this one would be particularly difficult to execute, especially if the invasion of Gaza is simultaneous with his threatened invasions of Panama and Greenland.
Gaza has been through enough. The last thing it needs is Trump taking it over—and the inevitable bankruptcy that would follow.
EVERYTHING XI EVER WANTED: At Politico, Nahal Toosi points out that, once again, Trump’s hawkish rhetoric about China is empty. “Instead,” she writes, “Trump has started his second term looking like the U.S. president Beijing has long wanted.”
While Trump is busy undermining the American government and Constitution but also our alliances and partnerships around the world—all while risking our long-term economic competitiveness by degrading the rule of law—he also gave TikTok a breather (likely illegally) and has cast doubt on whether the United States would help defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression. Yes, he also raised tariffs on China, which arguably hurts us more than them. But even that move was “not as tough as he had threatened before,” Toosi writes.
None of this should be news. It was clear by the end of Trump’s first term that, in his senseless and narrow-minded quest for a massive “deal” with Beijing, the CCP had rolled him. Trump has never understood why China is a threat to the United States and still doesn’t.
Relatedly, if you want to get a sense of just how bad the situation is at USAID—whose gutting by Trump and Musk has also clearly aided China—we recommend this New York Magazine article.
STILL WAITING ON RUSSIA: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced yesterday that he would be willing to negotiate directly with Vladimir Putin “if that is the only setup in which we can bring peace to the citizens of Ukraine.” He added that “Even the conversation with Putin is a compromise” and maintained that any negotiations would have to involve not just Russia and Ukraine but the United States and the European Union as well. And he foreswore any recognition of Russian ownership of Ukrainian territory. Instead, he said, he was ready to end the “hot stage” of the war.
Americans with a more isolationist or realist bent have been calling on Zelensky to negotiate for years. But, as ever, the big question isn’t really about whether Zelensky is ready to negotiate, but whether he has anyone to negotiate with. Putin has not signaled any willingness to come to the table except to accept Ukraine’s surrender.
Putin won’t get that. And it seems unlikely he will negotiate either. Last time Russian and Ukrainian officials met face-to-face, someone tried to poison the Ukrainians. But if there’s any reason Putin might strike a deal, Zelensky pointed it out: While Ukraine has lost more than 45,000 soldiers in three years of war, Russia has lost 350,000. For all the talk of Ukraine’s manpower issues, at some point, Putin will run out of not only Russians, but North Koreans, too.
Cheap Shots
Anyone who has ever taken a sledgehammer to a wall knows the brutal, almost effortless satisfaction of destruction. It’s easy—savage, unthinking, almost primal. Swing. Crash. Dust in the air, a jagged scar where something once stood. Construction, though—that’s a different beast entirely. That takes vision, patience, sweat, planning, precision, and an unshakable commitment to seeing something through when the excitement has long since faded.
That is precisely what terrifies me about the moment we’re in. Because neither Trump nor Musk has ever shown the faintest inclination toward the laborious, unglamorous, and often thankless work of building. Trump is a man whose name has been stamped onto things he didn’t create, a perpetual squatter in the halls of success, surfing from one bankrupt endeavor to the next, his only real skill the ability to wriggle free of consequences. Musk, for all his grandiloquent pronouncements of civilization-saving genius, operates on a similar principle—overpromise, underdeliver, and leave others to clean up the mess when the smoke clears.
With Musk as Trump’s unelected architect of chaos, the demolition phase has begun in earnest. They are not reformers, not revolutionaries, not even ideologues. They are vandals in high office, running a grift so vast it masquerades as governance. There is no blueprint, no roadmap, no plan for the ruins once they’ve been picked clean.
This is the great and terrifying truth: the destruction is not a prelude to something new. There is no vision beyond the wreckage. No scaffolding waiting in the wings. Because construction is hard, slow, and demands actual competence—things that Trump and Musk, for all their bluster, have never possessed.
"A Quinnipiac poll late last week showed 46 percent of voters approving of the job Trump is doing so far, with 43 percent disapproving.... As for the Republican party, 43 percent of registered voters now have a favorable opinion and 45 percent an unfavorable opinion. You might think this isn’t great for the GOP . . . until you take a look at voters’ opinion of the Democratic party: 31 percent favorable, 57 percent unfavorable. Yikes."
I'm sorry, these numbers indicate we are a country of idiots, with warped priorities, and that's a recipe for disaster in a representative democracy. We elected a criminal for president, and now he's running a lawless presidency, with no brushback from congress because we elected his party of enablers to majorities. This is why Canadians are booing the US National Anthem, because America is a moral abyss from top to bottom and there is no telling where the world will be after four weeks of this, never mind four years.
The cheap shot is so on point today; all greed, no charity, coked out and at some point, the coke runs out and we find ourselves in another Great Depression, but this time with no allies, no moral standing, just our guns and our bibles. WWJD? Why, defenestrate USAID of course! Then post pics of himself dancing with drunk young thangs on Insta, baby.