Month: May 2025

There is no genocide. Duh.

Trump to Ramaphosa: "You're taking people's land away from them. And those people in many cases are being executed. And they happen to be white." pic.twitter.com/djzq88qeIK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025

this was some weird shit, folks pic.twitter.com/dHhyOQVRkh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025

Reuters did a good fact check:

Among the claims contradicted by the evidence:

1. There is a genocide of white farmers in South Africa.

This conspiracy theory has been propagated by some fringe groups of white South Africans since the end of apartheid in 1994. It has been circulating in global far-right chat rooms for at least a decade, with the vocal support of Trump’s ally, South African-born Elon Musk.

Supporters of the theory point to murders of white farmers in remote rural parts of the country as proof of a politically orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing, rather than ordinary violent crime. They accuse the Black-majority led government of being complicit in the farm murders, either by encouraging them or at least turning a blind eye. The government strongly denies this.

South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates, with an average of 72 a day, in a country of 60 million people. Most victims are Black. South African police recorded 26,232 murders nationwide in 2024, of which 44 were linked to farming communities. Of those, eight of the victims were farmers.

The high court in Western Cape province ruled that claims of white genocide were “clearly imagined and not real” in a case earlier this year, forbidding a donation to a white supremacist group on those grounds.

2. The government is expropriating land from white farmers without compensation, including through violent land seizures, in order to distribute it to Black South Africans.

The government has a policy of attempting to redress inequalities in land ownership that are a legacy of apartheid and colonialism. But no land has been expropriated, and the government has instead tried to encourage white farmers to sell their land willingly. That hasn’t worked. Some three-quarters of privately-owned farmland is still in the hands of whites, who make up less than 8% of the population, while 4% is owned by Black South Africans who make up 80%.

In an effort to address this, Ramaphosa signed a law in January allowing the state to expropriate land “in the public interest,” in rare cases without compensating the owner. The law requires authorities to first try to reach an agreement. It still hasn’t been used.

3. The “Kill the Boer (farmer)” song sung by some Black South Africans is an explicit call to murder Afrikaners, the ethnic group of European descent who make up the majority of whites and who own most of the farmland. The song dates back to the resistance against apartheid, when Afrikaner nationalists controlled the country. In one of the video clips Trump showed, firebrand opposition leader Julius Malema of the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is singing the song.

Three South African courts have ruled against attempts to have it designated as hate speech, on the basis that it is a historical liberation chant, not a literal incitement to violence. In a statement following the meeting between Trump and Ramaphosa, the EFF said it was “a song that expresses the desire to destroy the system of white minority control over the resources of South Africa” and that it is “a part of African Heritage.”

4. Trump played a video clip that showed a long line of white crosses on the side of a highway, which Trump said were “burial sites” for white farmers.

The video was made in September 2020 during a protest against farm murders after two people were killed on their farm a week earlier. The crosses did not mark actual graves. An organizer told South Africa’s public broadcaster, SABC, at the time that the wooden crosses represented farmers who had been killed over the years.

5. The opening scene of the White House video shows Malema in South Africa’s parliament announcing “people are going to occupy land. We require no permission from … the president.” It also shows another clip of him pledging to expropriate land.

Some land has been illegally occupied over the years, mostly by millions of desperate squatters with nowhere else to go, although some land seizures are politically motivated. The land is usually unused and there is no evidence the EFF orchestrated any land invasions.

I can’t believe that we have such a stupid, racist, addled president and a self-serving, power hungry staff that we have to explain this stuff. It’s one of the lowest moments in his second term so far.

A strategic failure

Following up on the post below, Donald Trump’s reconciliation bill passed in the U.S. House early this morning. Not one Democrat voted for passage. The measure passed by a single vote. A hat tip to Lee Papa for identifying why: “Three Democrats 70 and older have died since this Congress was sworn in.”

Three Democrats 70 and older have died since this Congress was sworn in. Sigh.

— The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit.bsky.social) 2025-05-22T11:18:58.895Z

Sylvester Turner (70) of Texas died on March 5 of “enduring health complications.” He filled the seat of the late Sheila Jackson Lee who died last year at 74. Turner was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer in 2022. He served a total of 61 days in the House.

Raul Grijalva (77) of Arizona died on March 13 from complications of cancer treatments.

Gerry Connolly (75) defeated New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (35) in December to become ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. He died at home in Virginia on Wednesday (yesterday). He’d been diagnosed late last year with esophageal cancer. 

The last 8 members of Congress to die in office have all been Democrats

We send condolences to their families.

But passage of Trump’s “One Big Brutal Bill” makes it clearer than ever that Democrats’ geriatric leadership is not just a seniority culture problem or the fallout from personal ambition. It’s a strategic failure.

Katie Glueck writes in The New York Times:

For a party struggling with a litany of problems, perhaps no subject in recent years has been more painful, delicate or politically perilous than the matter of age — an issue that keeps rearing its head in 2025 as party leaders now acknowledge the problem but remain hesitant to directly call out aging colleagues.

Former Rep. Joe Cunningham, 42, of South Carolina tells Gleuck:

“You can take a look at folks who are up there, who’ve been up there for 30, 40, 50 years, and say, ‘Look, it’s probably best time that you move on and create a bit of a room for some new leadership,’” he said. “Considering where the Democratic Party is now, I think it’s a big problem.”

He cited the deaths of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, and alluded to Mr. Biden’s decision to seek a second term, which he would have concluded at the age of 86.

Friends still litigating “Biden’s too old” are missing Cunningham’s broader point. Amanda Litman gets it.

“All of that hammers home how important it is to have this conversation in public, even when it’s messy, even when it’s walking over land mines, even when it can feel painful, because we can’t assume that it’s happening in private,” said Amanda Litman, who leads Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits younger Democrats to seek local office. “We can’t assume that the individual elected is going to know when it’s their time.”

She praised several older Democrats who have decided to retire on their own terms.

“They are being patriots, and when they do move on, they open up the floodgates for new leaders up and down the ballot,” she said. “The ones that are refusing are being primaried, and those primaries are going to be personal. Like, it’s not going to be a fun primary that they’re going to romp to victory on.”

The donkey in the room

David Hogg, the new and newly embattled DNC Vice Chair, gets it, though he goes unmentioned by the Times. His group Leaders We Deserve launched a $20 million project in April to primary perceived ineffective Democrats in safe House seats. The DNC is not amused:

“We’re not only focused on targeting Democratic incumbents when necessary,” Hogg told The Hill in a Wednesday interview. “We are here to elect young people who are running in open seats. We’re here to elect young people that are running open, competitive seats as well, and support them when they align with our values.” 

“There are older people who are great; there are young people who suck,” Hogg told MSNBC’s “The Weekend Primetime” on Sunday. “It’s about effectiveness and being able to meet this moment.” Hogg claims his effort is “more nuanced” than just about age. But this morning’s House vote makes clear that age is the donkey in the room.

I’m there already. Democrats’ age problem is a strategic failure. More than sinecures and pensions and speaking fees are on the line. Constituents’ lives are.

But then there’s a lot of strategic wrongheadedness inside and outside the party.

Behold. At donor retreats, the party’s megadonors are examining pitch documents aiming to throw money at finding a Democratic counterpart to Joe Rogan:

Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump’s victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.

The quiet effort amounts to an audacious — skeptics might say desperate — bet that Democrats can buy more cultural relevance online, despite the fact that casually right-leaning touchstones like Mr. Rogan’s podcast were not built by political donors and did not rise overnight.

Head : Desk. Democrats are always fighting the last war. It’s like a candidate instructing his staff to “make me go viral.”

Most Democrats overlook that the blue-bubble influencers here—the left’s existing Joe Rogans—are openly critical of the Democratic Party establishment (Piker, TYT, Seder, Noah, Mehdi, Charlemagne, etc). The audience craves honesty and anti-system populism, not DNC branding.

— Waleed Shahid (@waleedshahid.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T16:41:55.460Z

What’s undersized in the February graphic above is the MediasTouch Podcast (Ben, Brett and Jordy Meiselas). Newsweek reported weeks later that “the MediasTouch Podcast received 125.6 million downloads in March, an increase of 126 per cent. Rogan’s podcast received 65.4 million downloads.”

But as a friend observes, Democratic donors would rather support social media stars they cultivate and own. These donors (from tech and Wall Street) think like investors and in terms of a quick return on investment (ROI), not like right-wing ideologues who sink billions long-term into developing conservative infrastructure.

Besides, Democrats’ gerontocracy would rather support people who need their money more than the investor class needs them. That’s why the Meiselas brothers will remain blue-headed stepchildren.

As Waleed Shahid observes, “The audience craves honesty and anti-system populism, not DNC branding.”

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Three-card monte on Capitol Hill

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed Donald Trump’s budget bill (you know what he calls it) by a single vote early Thursday (The New York Times):

The House early Thursday narrowly passed a wide-ranging bill to deliver President Trump’s domestic agenda, after Speaker Mike Johnson put down several mini-rebellions in Republican ranks to muscle the legislation to its first major victory over unified Democratic opposition.

The early morning vote was 215 to 214, mostly along party lines. The legislation would slash taxes, steer more money to the military and border security, and pay for some of this with cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education and clean energy programs, adding significantly to federal deficits and to the ranks of the uninsured.

Lee Papa notes, rudely, that Democrats’ age problem contributed to the bill’s passage, but that’s another story:

Three Democrats 70 and older have died since this Congress was sworn in. Sigh.

— The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit.bsky.social) 2025-05-22T11:18:58.895Z

When is a budget cut not a cut? When it’s a reform, of course. Republican chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Jason Smith, quickly corrected himself on Fox News when he first let “cuts” slide from his lips. Even Republican voters oppose cuts.

Donald Trump is giving tax breaks to his rich friends while you pay more at Walmart and lose Medicaid and Medicare coverage. The trick is to disguise the cuts, argue Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan in their op-ed:

To control the political damage, Republicans are pursuing a strategy to reduce benefits, while pretending otherwise. They’ve mostly abandoned transparent cuts, such as eligibility changes or spending reductions to states, because it’s easy for voters to understand that damage. Instead, Republicans are opting for opaque cuts, which will shed millions of eligible beneficiaries by overwhelming them with pointless paperwork and other needlessly complicated administrative requirements.

Over the past 15 years, Herd and Moynihan argue, real Medicaid reforms have made it easier for Americans in need to access the health care, including “simplifying applications, eliminating confusing paperwork and automating processes, especially when it comes to renewing benefits.” You know, efficiency, that sprite Elon Musk’s DOGEes claim to want more of.

This resulted in more Medicaid beneficiaries, more spending, and more happier Americans with health insurance. Naturally, our overlords had to put a stop to that.

Hoops, hurdles, and false economy

Adding work requirements to Medicaid access has drawn a lot of attention. (Herd and Moynihan flesh out more of that element this morning at Can We Still Govern? And, no, work requirements don’t “work.”) Republicans don’t have to drown government in the bathtub when they can drown popular programs in red tape.

Digging deeper into the bill, the pattern of using burdens to quietly kick off eligible beneficiaries becomes undeniable. The bill would pause a series of comprehensive new rules, issued by the Biden administration, to make it easier for people to navigate Medicaid’s eligibility and renewal processes. The mixture of reforms would have ensured that millions of people who were eligible for benefits, including disabled people, actually received them.

The Republicans’ bill would also require more beneficiaries to renew their coverage twice a year. Since the passage of Obamacare, most people have had to repeat this process only annually. Not only would the twice-a-year requirement cost people a lot of additional time and effort, many eligible people would lose coverage during this process. By some estimates, one-third of people who lose Medicaid quickly regain it, signaling they lost it because of procedural mistakes rather than becoming ineligible. That is why recent reforms have lengthened periods between renewals.

Another new burden would require beneficiaries to pay when they go to the doctor. Co-pays reduce health care use, but do not produce cost savings. One study found that even a $12.50 co-pay discouraged women from getting a mammogram. Moreover, there’s evidence that some of the people needing health care the most are among the most likely not to get it.

There’s more, of course. Gotta reduce waste, fraud, and abuce, dontcha know. But that’s just Medicaid. The structure, if not the language, of the bill will force cuts to Medicare without mandating them. Hiding the cuts with sleight-of-legislation is the Capitol Hill version of three-car monte.

“Medicaid, you gotta be careful,” Steve Bannon warned in February. “Because a lot of MAGAs are on Medicaid, I’m telling you. If you don’t think so, you are dead wrong.”

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that Trump’s bill will add $2.3 trillion to the debt over 10 years. Jacob Bogage and Abha Bhattarai explain what that means in The Washington Post:

When legislation significantly adds to the national debt, which already exceeds $36.2 trillion, it triggers “sequestration,” or compulsory budgetary reductions. In that scenario, Medicare cuts would be capped at 4 percent annually, or $490 billion over 10 years, the CBO reported in response to a request from Rep. Brendan Boyle (Pennsylvania), the top Democrat on the Budget Committee.

“Sequestration isn’t a given,” Nathaniel Weixel instructs at The Hill. “Congress can ignore the rules requiring mandatory offsets or pass legislation later that will cut the deficit.” But when Medicare cuts arrive seemingly out of thin air, they will sting.

But neither Medicaid or Medicare cuts will sting America’s richest.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

I wrote a piece about Musk today and I sure wish I’d read this one by Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker in the Atlantic (gift link) before I did. This lede is something else:

Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was shouting at Elon Musk in the halls of the West Wing last month, loud enough for Donald Trump to hear and in a language that he could certainly understand. Bessent and Musk were fighting over which of them should choose the next IRS leader—and, implicitly, over Musk’s bureaucracy-be-damned crusade. Without securing the Treasury chief’s sign-off, Musk had pushed through his own pick for the job. Bessent was, quite obviously, not having it.

The fight had started outside the Oval Office; it continued past the Roosevelt Room and toward the chief of staff’s office, and then barreled around the corner to the national security adviser’s warren. Musk accused Bessent of having run two failed hedge funds. “I can’t hear you,” he told Bessent as they argued, their faces just inches apart. “Say it louder.”

Well!

A ton of good stuff in this. We don’t know where it’s all going to end up:

Musk struggled to adjust to life outside his companies, where his whims reigned supreme and he rarely needed to build consensus. “He miscalculated his ability to act just completely autonomously,” one outside Trump adviser told us. “He had some missteps in all of these agencies, which would have been fine because everyone acknowledges that when you’re moving fast and breaking things, not everything is going to go right. But it’s different when you do that and you don’t even have the buy-in of the agency you’re setting on fire.”

Musk also found himself clashing with other Trump advisers on policy questions that could take a bite out of his personal fortune. The billionaire argued against the administration’s tariff bonanza—at one point, he urged “a zero-tariff situation” between the United States and Europe—and publicly attacked Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, calling him “dumber than a sack of bricks.” In late March, according to a New York Times report, Musk was preparing to receive a secret briefing from the Pentagon on the country’s planning for a potential war with China. After the Times story published, Trump posted on social media that Musk’s trip to the Pentagon would not include any China briefing. But the report prompted a public outcry, including over Musk’s many potential conflicts of interest.

“You could feel it, everything changed, the fever had been broken,” the longtime Trump ally and Musk foe Steve Bannon told us in a text message about the Pentagon uproar. In Bannon’s view, government officials had opted to leak to the Times rather than directly confront Musk or bring their concerns to the president—a troubling sign, he told us, of Musk’s outsize power.

Now Trump-administration officials wonder just what will happen to DOGE once Musk pivots elsewhere. In some cases, DOGE employees have already become more formally enmeshed in the administration, taking on official roles within government agencies. A top Musk aide is now the Interior Department’s assistant secretary of policy management and budget, and a DOGE point person to the Department of Energy is now chief of staff. One administration official told us that Musk’s much-vaunted—and initially chaotic—reductions in the federal workforce are now coming to fruition across the government, but in a more organized fashion.

I’ll believe it when I see it. The agency heads are all MAGA dolts and they have either antagonized or fired all the people who know how to do things. I suspect it’s going to continue to be a big dud.

We’ll see. Trump still loves that the richest man in the world is his toady. He’s not going to be totally ostracized. But the days of Musk’s dominance are over.

The Nazis industrialized their crimes against humanity. We’re just outsourcing ours:

A judge in a late Tuesday order said the Trump administration must “maintain custody and control” of immigrants “being removed to South Sudan or to any other third country” in case he finds such removals were unlawful.

 Immigration attorneys have accused the administration of deporting immigrants from Myanmar and Vietnam to South Sudan in violation of a court order, per a filing Tuesday that requested their “immediate return.”

The attorneys made the filing in a Boston-based federal court to U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, who’s already ruled that sending undocumented immigrants to countries they’re not citizens of would “clearly violate” an earlier order against sending people to third countries. The Biden-appointed Murphy said in his order he’s leaving “the practicalities of compliance” to the Trump administration, but he expects the immigrants “will be treated humanely.”

DHS identified eight individuals ICE deported and listed crimes they were convicted of in a news release also shared on the White House’s website on Wednesday. That list includes Cuban nationals Enrique Arias-Hierro and Jose Manuel Rodriguez-Quinones; Thongxay Nilakout, a citizen of Laos; Mexican national Jesus Munoz-Gutierrez; Dian Peter Domach, a South Sudanese citizen; Myanmar (Burma) citizens Kyaw Mya and Nyo Myint; and Tuan Thanh Phan, a Vietnamese national.

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in the release the men were removed “from American soil so they can never hurt another American victim.” She called the judge’s decision “absurd” and said the men “present a clear and present threat to the safety of the American people.”

The lawyers said the man from Myanmar, identified in court documents as N.M., was delivered a notice in English without an interpreter on Monday, saying he’d be sent to South Sudan, an East African country that the State Department advises U.S. citizens not to travel to due to “continued security threats” that include crime, kidnapping and armed conflict.

There were at least 10 other immigrants on the plane.

I feel sick. South Sudan is a nightmare dysfunctional state in a state of war. Sending anyone there is an act of sheer sadism.

And it looks like they’ve finally just done it. They’ve openly violated a court order. Buckle up.

Trump explains why he supports a higher federal tax burden for blue states:

“These are all very blue states that I don’t really believe had honest elections. I think I would’ve won CA, I would’ve won NY. I even think I would’ve won Illinois.” @atrupar pic.twitter.com/Sa5B3Z65Qm

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) May 21, 2025

He wants residents of blue states, which already contribute more to the federal government, to pay higher taxes because he believes they rigged the election against him. That is insanely stupid and unAmerican. And his little marionette Mike Johnson just stands there nodding along. Say good-bye to your blue state House members Mike. Say good-bye to the gavel.

Sociologists find that Trump voters are motivated by racism.

A new study reports the obvious:

“A lot of people find it really hard to believe that people would really want what Trump represents,” said Smith, who began researching authoritarianism as a sociology graduate student more than 40 years ago. “My experience is the hard core of people who support Trump election after election is they really mean it. They support him because of what he says and does, not in spite of it.”

While this wouldn’t be the first time the academic community identified dictatorial red flags in Trump, ascribing them to a significant portion of the U.S. electorate reflects a rarer scholarship. Yet Smith and Hanley don’t shy from the implications in “Authoritarianism From Below: Why and How Donald Trump Follows His Followers,” in which they write that “75% of Trump’s voters supported him enthusiastically, mainly because they shared his prejudices, not because they were hurting economically.”

Smith and Hanley built their assessment around surveys into voter behavior by the American National Election Studies, a multi-university project that has employed lengthy questionnaires and follow-up interviews to understand the motivations and demographics of U.S. voters since 1948.

[…]

Respondents were asked to rate their level of agreement or disagreement to two statements: “Our country would be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the ‘rotten apples’ who are ruining everything” and, “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path.”

Using a statistical method called multiple logistic regression, Smith and Hanley weighed the responses against 17 independent variables to see which ones factored most heavily in the decisions of 1,883 white voters, 979 of whom voted for Trump, 716 who did so enthusiastically. The sociologists discovered that strong support for a domineering leader coincided with a big preference for Trump and big biases against women, immigrants and Black Americans. They also determined that belief mattered much more than demographics.

“If you looked at just demographic variables, then it is true that a higher percentage of people without college degrees were more likely to support Trump,” Smith explained. “But when you also factored in attitude variables, they completely eliminated the statistical significance of the population variables.”

Smith said these indicators were also present in voters who backed Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama in 2012, though to a lesser extent. “The wish for a domineering leader was a very powerful predictor of support for Donald Trump,” he said.

The good news, if you want to call it that:

Smith, who recalled once coming across a poll showing strong support for President Ronald Reagan despite most voters believing he didn’t care about them, believes the U.S. audience for domineering leaders is actually getting smaller if louder. He bases that long view on ANES surveys from the 1950s, which included questions from an early authoritarian scale, his work with Hanley and a nationally representative survey Altemeyer did with Monmouth University in 2019 for his book “Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers.”

The bad?

He said 37% to 41% of U.S. voters were inclined toward authoritarianism a decade ago, but ANES didn’t include the authoritarian measurements in successive surveys. Smith and Hanley have proposed reincorporating them in ANES’ 2026 survey, and have pitched analogue surveys in other countries.

“So far no biters,” Smith said.

It’s not a kitchen table issue so …

Trump met with the South African president today. OMG.

Trump argued with him about the “genocide” that’s supposedly taking place against white South Africans. It’s clear he has no idea what the word means. And he insists on it because Elon wanted it, despite the S. African president telling him it isn’t happening and producing a white member of the government opposition to tell him so.

REPORTER: Genocide is a very strong word. Have you made up your mind if you believe that genocide is occurring? If you have made up your mind, why invite President Ramaphosa here today?

TRUMP: Well, I haven't made up my mind. I hate to see it. pic.twitter.com/BXkNQKN45V

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025

Can’t make up his mind if it’s a genocide? WTF???

Trump on his fake white genocide allegations against South Africa: "It'll be the end of the country if it's not resolved." pic.twitter.com/3n0MXFVdjx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025

Trump on current conditions in South Africa: "This is sort of the opposite of apartheid." pic.twitter.com/ig2L9zPN87

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025

Trump: "Elon is from South Africa. I don't want to get Elon involved. That's all I have to do — get him in another thing. This is what Elon wanted." pic.twitter.com/FKOBOz0TOA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025

Trump to Ramaphosa: "You're taking people's land away from them. And those people in many cases are being executed. And they happen to be white." pic.twitter.com/djzq88qeIK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025

It’s clear now that Trump is completely disengaged. He’s just taking the word of whatever his close coterie tells him whether it’s Miller (for instance telling him the Supreme Court rules 9-0 for him instead of against him) or Bobb Jr’s daft choice of Surgeon General and on and on. He’s engaged with the tariffs and enjoying the vengeance, grifting and golf. Other than that he’s checked out.

Aaaand, by the way, he ordered up an other plane:

RAMAPHOSA: I am sorry I don't have a plane to give you

TRUMP: I wish you did. I'd take it. If your country offered the US Air Force a plane, I would take it

RAMAPHOSA: Okay pic.twitter.com/TgvODTok9P

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025

After spending the last six months stuck to Donald Trump like quick drying cement, Elon Musk is backing away from politics and sounding mighty petulant about the whole thing. Appearing at the  Qatar Economic Forum Musk was questioned if he was going to donate more money to politics and he said no, that he had “done enough.” It’s not because he’s hurting for cash, of course. It’s true that his car business is in big trouble but he still has plenty of lucrative government contracts all over the world and remains the richest man in the world. His political contributions equal what you or I would find between the couch cushions. No, he’s backing out of politics because his feelings are hurt that people don’t love him the way they used to.

Here he is lamenting that people criticize him for making what appeared to be a Nazi salute (after publicly pushing for German voters to elect a neo-Nazi party to run their government) because, after all, he’s never harmed a single person:

Elon is now crying on CNBC blaming the media that he’s not a Nazi and hasn’t hurt anyone while doing his DOGE grift pic.twitter.com/mygEgD42LI

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) May 20, 2025

I would just point out that many thousands of the poorest people in the world who are suffering because he took his chainsaw to the USAID program that was their only lifeline for food and medication, might have something to say about whether he’s “harmed” anyone.

Musk has had a very rude awakening about politics, the kind of awakening most of us have sometime in our late teens when we realize that not everyone thinks like we do. He went at politics like a college freshman, assured that he was right, that he knew everything and that everyone except the rankest moron agreed with him. He even bought Twitter so that he could have fun trolling them, secure in the knowledge that he was in the majority. He soon found out that there are millions of people in this country who are not impressed with his adolescent philosophizing.

And apparently, it never occurred to him that mercilessly attacking the left and the center left might impact his car sales even though they are his customer base. Donald Trump’s followers don’t even believe in climate change much less want to drive electric vehicles. What kind of so-called entrepreneurial genius wouldn’t have thought about that?

It’s taken its toll. Musk’s approval ratings are worse than Trump’s and his companies’ reputations have sunk in the public mind just as much. The 2025 Axios Harris Poll 100 survey, which looks at the public approval of the most famous companies in America doubt that Tesla fell 50 spots in one year, to #83 and even SpaceX, his sexy spaceship company dropped 36 to #84.

Sales of his cars are in the dirt around the world. They’ve fallen 9% in the first quarter of 2025 in the U.S., at a time when EV sales are up 11%. The Cybertruck, which some have referred to as the Edsel of the 21st century (which, for you kids who don’t know what that means, it’s a reference to a famously ugly car back in the 1950s that was a total dud in every way) is a disaster. The company is stuck with an inventory of somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 units to the tune of about $800 million. And they just built a shiny new factory to build 250,000 more. Sales of the car are, in the words of one analyst, “hemorrhaging” sales in Europe. (In fairness, that’s not just a Tesla problem, it’s the Trump effect. Sales of many American brands are all being hit hard in Europe for obvious reasons.)

As you can see from the video above, Musk is very hurt that people don’t like him anymore. And one has to think that might just include Donald Trump. It wasn’t that long ago that he was having sleepovers at the White House and sharing bowls of ice cream late at night with the president. He seemed to appear at every press conference and cabinet meeting and was almost always getting on and off Marine One as Trump’s first bud. But lately, he’s been very scarce even though his “special employee status” isn’t technically expired.

It’s hard to know exactly when things between them might have changed but there is some speculation that it happened around the time that Trump’s cabinet staged a temper tantrum over Musk’s DOGE crew usurping their power to fire who they wanted. Trump took their side saying that Musk needed to start using a “scalpel instead of a hatchet.” That was probably another hurtful moment for Elon.

His pet project DOGE has failed to deliver any real savings and basically just caused havoc in the federal government. For instance, their recent foray into the Social Security Administration has resulted in massive delays of service while finding essentially no fraud:

DOGE said 40% of phone calls into Social Security centers were fraud, so it built a tool to track it. Turns out the 40% was actually 0.0018% and the tool slowed down processing significantly. https://t.co/HeRfgz2FnB

— Eric Katz (@EricM_Katz) May 15, 2025

Over the last months or so the bloom is definitely off the DOGE rose and the administration has allowed their other henchmen, like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to assume much of the slashing and burning of vital, life-saving programs.

But for all that, I suspect the freeze actually came from the Wisconsin Supreme Court humiliation when Musk went all in on the race spending $100 million, making it the most expensive judicial race in history. It was expected to be very close and most people put their money on the conservative winning in the wake of Trump’s nine point victory in the state. Musk was everywhere, wearing a cheese-head hat and running contests to give away million dollar checks. He was the face of the right wing and Trump’s emissary and his campaign flopped bigly. In a major upset the liberal won by 10 points.

I think from that moment on, Musk’s shine was off for Trump because it embarrassed him that they lost so badly when Musk had spent all that money. More importantly, it showed that Musk and his money were not some kind of Death Star that could automatically take out any Republican in a primary who failed to do his or Trump’s bidding. It turns out that money isn’t everything and Musk himself is a liability on the campaign trail.

That’s not to say that Trump has actually disowned the richest man in the world. He would never do that. In fact, he brought him along on his Middle East Grift Trip where he was hawking his companies to all the same Kings and potentates. And just as the Trump family has been doing ever since he got back in the White House, Musk’s parents and his brother have all been over there putting together deals to further enrich themselves. Billionaire birds of a feather stick together.

I have no doubt that Elon Musk will still participate in politics and despite his pledge to stop spending he could very well change his mind. But he has now demonstrated that his alleged power and command of business and politics were highly overvalued. He’s still sickeningly rich but the Musk bubble has floated down to earth.

Salon

About that human trafficking….

TPM picked up this story last night:

DHS is violating a court order to remove a group of detainees to South Sudan, lawyers told a federal judge on Tuesday.

Around one dozen people — including a person with a removal order to Myanmar and a person with a removal order to Vietnam — were loaded onto planes and sent to South Sudan on Tuesday, court filings say. The deportations are either currently in progress or have already taken place, lawyers for the group wrote.

The ruling that DHS is allegedly violating in this case is clear. Last month, U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy for the District of Massachusetts ordered DHS to give individuals set to be removed to a country that is not their own written notice in a language they understand, and to offer them the chance to contest their removal. That included providing the detainees a window of at least 15 days in which they could challenge DHS’ efforts to remove them to a third country.

If I were Murphy, I might be pissed. I might be wondering whom to throw in jail for violating my court order. I mean, Trump’s acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba — and we do mean acting — is arresting members of Congress and a mayor. Fair is fair.

So will the Trump administration argue that deporting people to South Sudan comports with court orders because it’s not Libya? Less than two weeks ago, Reuters reported that DHS “was poised to deport immigrants held in the US to Libya, despite a court order against such a move.” Team MAGA may be reluctant to spend funds responding to disasters on U.S. soil, but Marco Rubio seemingly has enough to explore trafficking human cargo around the Mediterranean and Africa (The Arab Weekly):

The US secretary of state said that he was not aware of Libya being included in the list of countries being approached about the relocation of Palestinians.

The US embassy in Libya had also denied on Sunday a report that the US government was working on a plan to relocate Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya.

Last week, NBC News said the Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate as many as one million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya.

NBC News cited five people with knowledge of the matter, including two people with direct knowledge and a former US official.

“The report of alleged plans to relocate Gazans to Libya is untrue,” the US embassy said on the X platform.

Trump has previously said he would like the United States to take over the Gaza Strip and its Palestinian population resettled elsewhere.

But shipping humans to South Sudan is currently “operative,” as they say in D.C., and possibly Rwanda, Benin, Angola and Eswatini. Murphy previously enjoined the administration from shipping human cargo to Libya and Saudi Arabia.

The Washington Post:

U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy in Boston wrote that the Trump administration must not let the migrants being transported to South Sudan out of their custody to ensure that the migrants will be able to be returned to the United States if the court finds that their attempted deportations are unlawful. The order also applies to other migrants being deported “to any third country” — meaning nations where deported migrants are not citizens.

The court, Murphy wrote, would leave “the practicalities of compliance” to the discretion of the defendants, which include the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. Murphy wrote that the defendants must answer several questions during an upcoming hearing scheduled for Wednesday, including the amount of notice each migrant received ahead of their attempted removal to South Sudan and any details about their current whereabouts.

Yeah, Brian, good luck with getting Cosplay Kristi and Bondi Pam Bondi to give you straight answers instead of defiant speeches.

Who’s left to enforce punishment against an administration that at every opportunity gives its middle finger to federal courts?

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