Yeah, actually, I think he was. People in early 2017 joked that Steve Bannon was really the President. And then Trump fired him. In his first term, Trump didn’t like people upstaging him, and he really didn’t like people talking like someone else was really in charge. This time? I mean…Musk is still there. Musk’s own toddler told Trump to get out of his daddy’s chair…and Trump said nothing. This time around is noticeably different. I think Trump has significantly degraded, cognitively, and I think they all know it. It’s why they left him out of the loop. I also think there’s probably at least 3 or 4 people who think they’re really in charge (Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Musk, and I don’t know who else, but there’s probably someone else in the mix. Putin?)
This is it.
They are also, as we all learned, all using little private channels on 3rd party apps and probably playing games with who gets in on what. It’s likely rando friends of pig butcherers in China know more than various security heads.
Fucking unqualified goons incapable of doing anything but masturbating their egos and stealing from the regular ass US citizens.
And basically just pillaging the coffers until he kicks over, leaving him as the scapegoat.
Hmm. That’s a tempting view, but I think he’s more of a player in this shitstorm, and more to blame for it, than that term implies.
I immediately thought of this. Showing my age. 
Emphasis mine. Makes me wonder what the Signal developers think about that, considering that the app is anything but unsecure. I agree though that they’re a bunch of idiots using compromised commercial phones where their attack surfaces are as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.
There are different levels of secure. Is Signal secure compared to regular text messaging? Of course. Is it secure compared to Facebook Messenger? Absolutely. Is it secure compared to the normal channel of communications for our government to plan military operations? Fuck no!
Any app is ultimately only as secure as its dipshit users.
I believe it. There’s so much more diabolically evil stuff the Trump admin is doing this time around, and I can pretty much guarantee it’s nothing to do with Trump’s “genius”.
And then there is incompetence.
March 27, 2025 (Thursday)
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.
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.
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 28, 2025 (Friday)
“Another wipeout walloped Wall Street Friday,” Stan Choe of the Associated Press wrote today. The S&P 500 had one of its worst days in two years, dropping 2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 715 points, losing 1.7% of its value. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.7%. On Tuesday, news dropped that the administration’s blanket firings and wildly shifting tariff policies have dropped consumer confidence to a low it has not hit since January 2021. Today’s stock market tumble started after the Commerce Department released data showing that consumer prices are rising faster than economists expected.
AIG chief international economist James Knightley said: “We are moving in the wrong direction and the concern is that tariffs threaten higher prices, which means the inflation prints are going to remain hot.” Business leaders like lower interest rates, which reduce borrowing costs and make it cheaper to finance business initiatives, but with rising inflation, the Federal Reserve will be less likely to cut interest rates.
Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is planning to move the computer system of the Social Security Administration (SSA) off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system. In 2017, the SSA estimated that such a migration would take about five years. DOGE is planning for the migration to take just a few months, using artificial intelligence to complete the change.
Experts have expressed concern. Dan Hon, who runs a technology strategy company that helps the government modernize its services, told Kelly: “If you weren’t worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead.” More than 65 million Americans currently receive Social Security benefits. Today Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) recorded himself calling the SSA and being told by a recording that the wait times were more than two hours and that he should call back. And then the system hung up on him.
Musk told the Fox News Channel today that he plans to step down from DOGE in May, apparently at the end of the 130-day cap for the “special government employee” designation that enables him to avoid financial disclosures. In February, White House staffers suggested Musk would stay despite the limit.
Today the State Department told Congress it is shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) altogether by July 1. Whatever agency functions the administration approves will move into the State Department. Founded by President John F. Kennedy and enjoying bipartisan support, USAID administers programs for global health, disaster relief, long-term economic development, education, environmental protection, and democracy. It is widely perceived to be a key element of U.S. “soft power.”
USAID was created by Congress, and its funds are appropriated by Congress. Congress and the courts have established that the executive branch—the branch of government overseen by the president—cannot kill an agency Congress has created and cannot withhold appropriations Congress has made. The authors of Project 2025 want to challenge that principle and consolidate government power in the hands of the president. It appears they have chosen USAID as the test case.
As Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shatters science and health agencies, the nation’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, submitted his resignation today after being given the choice to resign or be fired. Dan Diamond of the Washington Post noted that Marks has been at the Food and Drug Administration since 2012 and has been at the head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research since 2016.
In his resignation letter, Diamond says, Marks expressed his deep concern over the ongoing measles outbreak in the Southwest—now more than 450 cases—and warned that the outbreak “reminds us of what happens when confidence in well-established science underlying public health and well-being is undermined.” Marks said that although he was willing to work with Kennedy on his plan to review vaccine safety, “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
On Tuesday, news broke that Kennedy has tapped anti-vaccine activist David Geier to lead a study looking to link autism to vaccines, although that alleged link has been heavily studied and thoroughly debunked. Infectious disease journalist Helen Branswell notes that Geier does not have a medical degree and was disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license.
British investigative journalist Brian Deer, who has written about the hoax that vaccines cause autism, told Branswell: “If you want an independent source,… [you] wouldn’t go to somebody with no qualifications and a long track record of impropriety and incompetence.” But, he said, “[i]f you wanted to get in anybody off the street who would come up with the result that Kennedy would like to see, this would be your man.”
Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported today that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has done some targeted staffing, too. His younger brother Phil Hegseth is traveling to the Indo-Pacific with the secretary in his role at the Pentagon as a liaison and senior advisor to the Department of Homeland Security. Hegseth also employed his brother when he ran the nonprofit Concerned Veterans for America, where the younger Hegseth’s salary was $108,000 for his media work. Copp notes that a 1967 law “prohibits government officials from hiring, promoting or recommending relatives to any civilian position over which they exercise control.”
Hegseth and his colleagues are still in the hot seat for uploading the military’s attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen to Signal, an unsecure commercially available messaging app. Yesterday, Nancy A. Youssef, Alexander Ward, and Michael R. Gordon of the Wall Street Journal reported that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz identified a Houthi missile expert whose identity Israel had provided from a human source in Yemen, angering Israeli officials.
Americans, especially those with ties to the military, aren’t happy either. Military, the leading news website for service members, veterans, and their families, titled a story about the scandal “‘Different spanks for different ranks’: Hegseth’s Signal scandal would put regular troops in the brig.” Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the story had “angered and bewildered” fighter pilots, who say “they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they strap into cockpits.”
At a raucous town hall held today by Republican representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN), the crowd booed Spartz loudly when she said she would not call for the resignations of Waltz, Hegseth, and the rest of the people on the group chat.
All the mayhem created by the administration has created enough backlash that the White House appears concerned about upcoming special elections on April 1. One is for the seat in Florida’s District 6 that Waltz vacated when he became national security advisor. In 2024, Trump won that district by 30 points, and Republicans considered their candidate, state senator Randy Fine, whom Trump has strongly endorsed, to be such a shoo-in that he barely campaigned. His website features pictures of him with Trump but has only bullet points to explain his stand on issues.
Democrat Josh Weil, a middle-school math teacher who has outraised Fine by almost 10 to one, is polling within the margin of error for a victory in a contest where even a 10- to 15-point loss would show a dramatic collapse in Republican support. Weil has tied Fine to Musk’s unpopular DOGE and to the president, as well as to cuts to Social Security and Medicaid.
Trump is now personally campaigning for Fine and for the Republican candidate to fill the seat vacated by former representative Matt Gaetz in Florida District 1. There, Democratic candidate Gay Valimont is running against Republican Jimmy Patronis in a district that elected Trump with about 68% of the vote. Like Fine, Patronis is strongly backed by Trump and wants more cuts to the federal government; Gay is a former state leader for Moms Demand Action and focuses on healthcare and veterans’ services. She has criticized DOGE’s cuts to VA hospitals. Like Weil, she has significantly outraised her opponent.
Republicans are concerned enough about holding the seats that billionaire Elon Musk, who poured more than $291 million into the 2024 election to help Republicans, has begun to contribute to Republicans in Florida. On Tuesday he spent more than $10,000 apiece for texting services for the Florida candidates.
Musk has contributed far more than that—more than $20 million—to the April 1 election for a ten-year seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Trump loyalist Brad Schimel is running against circuit court judge Susan Crawford in a contest that has national significance. Wisconsin is evenly split between the parties, but when Republicans control the legislature and the supreme court, they suppress voting and heavily gerrymander the state in their favor. When liberals hold the majority on the court, they ease election rules and uphold fair maps. Currently, the state gerrymander gives Republicans 75% of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives although voting in 2024 was virtually dead even. The makeup of the court could well determine the congressional districts of Wisconsin through 2041, through the redistricting that will take place after the 2030 census.
Musk has told voters that if Crawford wins, “then the Democrats will attempt to redraw the districts and cause Wisconsin to lose two Republican seats.” Not only has Musk said he is going to Wisconsin to speak before the election, but also he is handing out checks to voters who sign a petition against “activist judges,” a suggestion that it would not be fair to unskew the Republican gerrymander. Last night, Musk advertised a contest that would award two voters a million dollars each, with the condition that the winners had to have already voted.
This morning, Wisconsin Democrats issued a press release noting that Musk had “committed a blatant felony,” directly violating the Wisconsin law that prohibits offering anyone anything worth more than $1 to get them to “vote or refrain from voting.” Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler said that if Schimel “does not immediately call on Musk to end this criminal activity, we can only assume he is complicit.”
Musk deleted the tweet and then, eliminating the language that said people had to have voted, posted that he would give the checks to spokespeople for his petition. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul sued to stop Musk “from any further promotion of the million-dollar gifts” and “from making any payments to Wisconsin electors to vote.” “The Wisconsin Department of Justice is committed to ensuring that elections in Wisconsin are safe, secure, free, and fair,” Kaul said in a statement. “We are aware of the offer recently posted by Elon Musk to award a million dollars to two people at an event in Wisconsin this weekend. Based on our understanding of applicable Wisconsin law, we intend to take legal action today to seek a court order to stop this from happening.”
MeidasTouch reposted Musk’s offer to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote” and noted: “No matter what side of the aisle you are on, you should be appalled that a billionaire thinks he has the right to buy elections like this.” Former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party David Pepper posted: “Have some pride, America. We are so much better than this guy thinks we are.”
Well…we can be, but I don’t think we are right now.
This isn’t just unconstitutional. Impoundment is specifically illegal.
ETA:
Quit dicking around. Just arrest him already! Why have laws at all if they are optional for billionaires!?! Surround him with Wisconsin State Troopers in masks and no identifying information and rendition his ass to a black site in Oshkosh. Or is that only reserved for PhD students?
Sounds good in principle, and maybe you’re just joking, but I doubt any state official would do that. He’s not just a billionaire; he’s also de facto co-preznit. Yes, there’s no technically legal protection there from what you and I both wish for, but such an action would of course bring on the strong likelihood of enormous federal force and resources in bludgeoning response.
Don’t do the right thing because it could cause an even more illegal response? Yeah, we’re totally screwed.
I don’t know the right way to handle this, but someone has got to start standing up to these assholes, consequences be damned. It’s time. I’m so pissed at these Big Law firms that capitulated to Trump’s EO. They literally hire the best and brightest lawyers from the best of the best law schools. Every year. They are chock full of the best legal minds in the country. They know damn well Trump’s EO aimed at them is illegal, but they don’t want to fight it? They should have told him to go fuck himself, and if he tries to enforce it, they’ll see him in court. The governor of Maine has more guts than any of them. And man, if they aren’t going to stand up to Trump/Musk, I don’t know who is.
I hope they do really, really shitty pro bono work for him. How would he be able to tell the difference from his normal lawyers?
