Elon Musk Is the Biggest Danger to American Democracy and the Economy
I don’t know where to start this morning, which is exactly the point of all of Donald Trump’s chaos. Ezra Klein had a great piece about this flood-the-zone strategy—the idea that the administration unleashes three new policies a day so the media doesn’t have enough time to focus on any single one. This particular passage stood out to me:
I had a conversation a couple of months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.
But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.
Klein added later in the piece:
To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.
And that’s where we are already, after only two weeks. Trump exposed his weakness when he rescinded his OMB executive order last week and essentially let the birthright citizenship executive order die after a judge struck it down. The offer made to 2.3 million employees to resign doesn’t actually seem to be going anywhere, and after a tragic plane crash last week, the offer has already been withdrawn from air traffic controllers and federal employees whose jobs involve safety concerns.
The next test is what Elon Musk is doing right now: taking control of the federal payment system and, along with a group of tech-bro interns, impermissibly stealing the private data of the American people. It appears he’s unilaterally deciding which federal payments—already authorized by Congress—should go out. Musk is also dismantling USAID, which accounts for more than half of all U.S. foreign assistance. You can read about what USAID does here; my wife’s best friend was a senior advisor there until the inauguration (she was a political appointee). People who care about aid to Gaza and Ukraine should be outraged by this. (You can’t read about what they do on their site because it’s been removed, along with thousands and thousands of web pages from other agencies, like the CDC).
Musk isn’t being shy about it, either—he’s basically live-tweeting a coup of the nation’s financial system. His group reportedly has access to classified information they aren’t authorized to see. When someone identified the tech-bro interns assisting Musk, he tweeted that they were committing a crime by naming them, even though these interns ostensibly work for an advisory group with no actual governmental authority. What they’re doing is likely illegal.
The trade war is likely to get the most attention today—and it will have a devastating effect on the stock market. It will ultimately prove unpopular, and the tariffs have been implemented for no reason (even The Wall Street Journal is calling it "The Dumbest Trade War in History"). My guess is that after a few days or weeks, once enough damage has been done, Trump will declare victory and claim that Mexico and Canada caved. It will create a lot of chaos, but don’t let it distract us from what Elon Musk—an unelected billionaire oligarch—is doing.
There’s a reason why other media outlets are reporting that Musk has taken control of the federal payment systems while Fox News is not. Check their website—there’s no mention of it. They don’t want their viewers to know because it’s illegal and hugely unpopular. Nobody elected this weird dude, and nobody wants him poking around in our private information or in the government’s classified documents. And no one wants the richest man on the planet to decide which government employees should be paid.
This is where we should be putting our focus. And oddly enough, we have an ally in at least this one respect: Steve Bannon, the guy who came up with the flood-the-zone strategy, is just as anxious to get rid of Elon Musk as the rest of us. Musk needs to go. Trump may be president, but right now, Elon Musk is the most powerful person on the planet—and no one is happy about it.
(As always, we have replaced a header image of Elon Musk with that of Lee Pace for aesthetic reasons, and with apologies to Lee Pace.)
The most infuriating thing is that there's literally nothing we can do. USAID for example was created by an act of congress and can only be disbanded by an act of congress, but as of this morning at least the republicans in charge of congress don't give a single fuck. That information Musk's interns illegally have access to? Practically hand delivered by the administration via the Treasury secretary. We hit the constitutional road blocks this weekend and they were a veil of smoke. Which brings me back to my first point which is not only can we not do anything, but neither can the Democratic party. The only power they have to stop any of this is to set their hair on fire on the capital steps, and the only thing that would come of that is the trolls running the government roasting marshmallows. I bring that up because the "Do something!!"s on social media were having field days this weekend blaming the only people in the government that literally can't do shit to stop this, instead of themselves for spending the runup to the election bitching about Biden or Harris or Gaza or or or paving the road that the republicans merrily pranced right down to this very moment in time. So don't fall for that bullshit again, please and thank you. There is only one guilty party and they are the ones doing this shit in broad daylight.
You know how when there is a coup or junta in another country and we get news stories that the insurgents have taken over the finance ministry or the TV station, or some other governmental agency that seems mundane but basically gives them total control?
Or in bad action movies when the bad guys are hacking into a government system? In Die Hard, Timmy Olyphant was hacking into social security I believe.
That's where we are. An intern whose user name is Big Balls is sleeping in a government building going through information he has no clearance for, under the guidance of a Nazi loving crazed billionaire. This is just the shittiest Bond movie ever.