This is what happens when someone demonstrates the Dunning-Kruger effect in real time before the whole world. Musk didn’t know anything about politics, government, Washington, history or anything else when he decided to apply his alleged genius to creating a techno-utopia with Donald Trump as his instrument. Lol.
It’s really something to watch someone become disillusioned so quickly.
The sources familiar with the Trump-Musk relationship say there appeared to be four inflection points that led to his caustic attack on Trump’s bill:
The legislation cuts the electric vehicle tax credit that helps car makers like Musk’s Tesla. As of late April, his company had spent at least $240,000 lobbying on behalf of the credit and other company matters. Behind the scenes, sources say, Musk also advocated for the measure in the legislation, but to no avail.
Musk was working at the White House as what’s called a “special government employee,” and he had discussed trying to stay in that role beyond the 130-day time limit set by statute for the unpaid advisory position. But ultimately, White House officials said he couldn’t keep serving in that capacity.
Musk also wanted the Federal Aviation Administration to use his Starlink satellite system for national air traffic control, the sources said. But the administration balked at it because of the appearance of a conflict of interest and for technological reasons. “You can’t have air traffic control just run off satellites,” the second source said.
The final straw for Musk appeared to come Saturday night, when Trump abruptly announced he was withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman, a Musk ally, to be NASA administrator.
After Isaacman’s nomination was dropped, word quickly spread in the White House that Sergio Gor — the director of the Office of Presidential Personnel who had clashed with Musk — was behind the decision.
“This was Sergio’s out-the-door ‘f**k you’ to Musk,” one White House official said.
But two administration insiders said that wasn’t the case: Senators had complained about Isaacman for being a Democratic donor, the insiders said, and the White House wanted a Republican loyalist.
“Perception is reality, though, and I’m pretty sure Elon thought the NASA situation was a last insult,” the White House official said. “So here we are.”
Krugman points out today that the world is not just seeing the United States go off the rails in tens of policy. That’s happened before. But they have always seen America as fundamentally a serious country when it came to economics. There was a reason why we were always considered the world’s safe haven, even in times of great financial stress.
Not anymore and I think you know why:
Why are markets beginning to treat America as unreliable? It’s not just the debt numbers. Yes, we have large debts, but we’re an immensely wealthy country that, among other things, has lower average taxes than most of our peers. So we certainly have the resources to honor our debts.
But do we have the political will? Maybe even more important, do we have the political seriousness?
Like many economists, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing the substance of Trump’s tariffs — how much they are likely to raise prices and reduce trade volumes. I’ve also written about the impacts of policy uncertainty, about how hard it is for businesses to make plans when they have little idea what tariff rates will be even a few months from now, let alone over the next few years.
But I wonder whether we’ve spent enough time looking at the policy process — how decisions get made in Trump’s America. Consider: On April 2, “Liberation Day,” Trump announced extremely high tariffs on many countries, the biggest tariff hike in U.S. history. The tariff rates — which differed hugely from country to country — were determined by a formula universally panned as stupid and ridiculous. And this tariff announcement was made with so little planning and forethought that it included taxes on imports from remote islands inhabited only by penguins.
Then, a week later, these tariffs were replaced by a completely different set of tariffs. How did that happen? Two of Trump’s cabinet members were able to beard him in the Oval Office while Peter Navarro, responsible for the original tariffs, was in another meeting.
Does this sound like policymaking in a serious country?
Then there’s the budget bill making its way through Congress. It’s a terrible thing, imposing savage cuts on social programs (and decimating U.S. science) while giving such big tax cuts to the wealthy that it will explode the deficit. But content aside, notice that this hugely important piece of legislation is being rushed through with essentially no hearings or analysis.
And when outsiders, including the Congressional Budget Office and a variety of think tanks — conservative and centrist as well as progressive — have put out the analyses the bill’s sponsors won’t, pointing out the likely effects on debt, health coverage, and so on, the G.O.P. response has basically been to accuse all of the independent analysts of being part of a globalist conspiracy.
Wait, it gets worse. The name of the legislation — not its nickname, its official title — is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, because that’s what Trump has been calling it. Are we a mature republic with a normal head of state, or are we being ruled by Kim Jong Un in orange makeup?
Why, next thing you’ll be telling me that key policy decisions, leading to layoffs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and many deaths around the world, have been made by a presidential crony whose erratic behavior may have reflected massive consumption of ketamine, Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. Oh, wait.
Imagine yourself as a foreigner considering investing in the United States. You may well know that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a “revenge” provision that would allow the U.S. government to impose extra taxes on foreign investors whose home countries have policies America doesn’t like. You probably know that one of Trump’s advisers has suggested the forced conversion of short-term debt into century bonds. Once upon a time everyone would have dismissed these things as stuff that couldn’t happen in America. Now? Who knows?
In a way, the amazing thing is that we haven’t seen even more capital flight. Presumably investors still can’t believe that America has changed so much from the responsible, reliable nation it seemed to be just a few months ago.
But I think they’re headed for a rude awakening.
It’s a terrifying prospect because bad things happen when everything falls apart. On the other hand, if things don’t get worse … well, they could get even worse. If you know what I mean …
The administration that pardoned every last January 6th insurrectionists, many of whom committed violence against police officers guarding elected officials is doing this:
The Department of Justice is reviewing pardons doled out under former President Biden, citing concerns about whether Biden himself was making decisions about clemency power, a senior administration official confirmed to The Hill.
The official told The Hill that pardon attorney Ed Martin will lead an independent review to determine if “unelected staffers” took advantage of Biden when it came to pardons and commutations.
“The American people deserve to know the extent to which unelected staffers and an autopen acted as a proxy president due to the incompetence and infirmity of the previous president,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement. “President Trump was elected to restore the integrity and transparency of the office, and answering the question of who was actually running this country for four years is well within the president’s rights.”
Martin was originally Trump’s choice to serve as the top prosecutor in the District of Columbia. His nomination was dropped in the face of Republican opposition in the Senate over his ties to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The pardon review comes as fresh reporting and new books, including “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” have reignited debate about Biden’s mental acuity while in office and whether he experienced cognitive decline.
Hats off to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson for the hit job that is fuelling Donald Trump’s merciless crusade to torture Joe Biden. Maybe they can go back on The Daily Caller podcast and suck up to Trump some more and get the inside scoop on this important investigation.
––> @abbydphillip: "For two months, all the attention's been on the mental acuity of the previous president. And while the scrutiny is justified, what about the current president? After all, he's pushing a batshit conspiracy theory that Joe Biden was executed in 2020…" pic.twitter.com/voBtXVTqSA
With all the excited navel gazing about the Democrats’ and the media’s alleged cover up of Joe Biden alleged incompetence during his term, I certainly hope that one day we will see some kind of reckoning among certain media figures about why they seemed to project Donald Trump’s obvious mental and psychological incapacity on to an indictment of the previous president. Abby Phillip is one of the few to at least make it plain that a double standard is in full effect right now.
I would take Joe Biden on his worst day over one second of the destruction this lunatic is unleashing on our country right this minute.
Picture this: You’re a researcher who has spent years developing a grant proposal, gone through layers of expert review, and received National Science Foundation (NSF) approval. Then some kid barely out of college — whose main qualification appears to be founding a company that puts ads on the blockchain — logs into a Zoom meeting, pays more attention to his fingernails than the discussion, and kills your grant with an uninterested thumbs down.
Welcome to science under DOGE.
Here’s the fellow who gave the thumbs down:
Meet Zachary Terrell, DOGE’s apparent authority on scientific merit. Fedscoop identified him as one of three DOGE operatives deployed to NSF. They had such little info on him that they didn’t even list any associations (unlike the other two DOGE kids at NSF). Terrell’s apparent qualifications for overruling decades of scientific expertise? A 2022 bachelor’s degree from Kansas State and a brief career in crypto.
Since graduating, Terrell has managed to found three companies, including “Spindl,” which Coinbase acquired earlier this year for its groundbreaking innovation of… putting ads on the blockchain. His LinkedIn profile lists his current government role as “Yeoman” — apparently the official title for “person who kills research grants while playing with water bottles.”
This is the expertise now trumping peer review at the NSF. Not content knowledge, not research experience, not even basic familiarity with how science works. Just the confidence that comes with being a 23-year-old techbro who thinks he knows better than any actual expert.
This is who Trump and Elon Musk have tasked with making decisions that will kill America’s place as a world leader in research and innovation. Musk thinks AI will do everything. And Trump is too stupid and lazy to give a damn.
Good luck, everyone. These chickens are going to come home to roost much sooner than we realize.
MAGA conservatives want to go back the 1950s. Project 2025 reactionaries want to go back to the first Gilded Age. Techbros want a kind of techno neofeudalism. After Sunday’s presidential election in Poland of Karol Nawrocki, “a former soccer hooligan and historian” from the far-right, ultranationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS), “Polish patriots just want a return to a democratic normal,” The Globe and Mail reports. So do I.
Mr. Nawrocki’s party controlled parliament, the presidency and the courts for eight years starting in 2015, during which Poland’s ranking on international measures of democracy and rule of law plummeted dramatically. The party had seized political control of previously neutral state institutions, and packed the courts and public media with ultrapartisan activists in a textbook example of the process known as “democratic backsliding.”
The U.S. knows what that’s like dating from about the same time.
A liberal-democratic coalition won back parliament in 2023 but failed to regain the presidency. They deferred pursuing much of their reform agenda in hopes of retaking the presidency this week. It was not to be.
“Everything was held back – there was some idea that Poland after 2025 would come back to liberal democratic normalcy,” Karolina Wigura, a Polish sociologist and political analyst, said in an interview on Monday. “But what we had before, it turns out, really was the new Polish normalcy – that is, Poland is divided between two camps, two visions of the future of the country, and we’ll have to deal with it.”
The Polish presidency is a largely ceremonial and symbolic office, but the president does have the power to veto any legislation that does not receive a two-thirds parliamentary majority. And it is now actively supported by the U.S. executive: Mr. Nawrocki received enthusiastic support from Mr. Trump and endorsements from members of his cabinet, and from a circle of European far-right leaders. He has vowed to be more aggressive in resisting the government’s liberal reforms.
So one lesson for U.S. Democrats, and others struggling to return their country to normal, is not to wait until the conditions are perfectly right to act, because they never will be. Mr. Tusk did manage to remove some of the extreme activists from positions in the judiciary, the public service and public media and restore them to neutral professionals, as they had been before 2015, but PiS politicians still characterized those as being “globalist” partisan appointments.
Fearing such responses, critics say Mr. Tusk avoided pushing forward reform legislation – including restoration of abortion rights and sexual equality laws – that he knew would be cancelled or denounced by the PiS presidency. In the view of democrats who favoured a more active approach, this was a missed opportunity to show the public that popular attempts at reform were being trampled by figures from the previous regime.
Democrats are going to have a harder time regaining the presidency here unless they can (somehow) add a couple of more states to the union. Or massively reframe public opinion or something-something with drones.
The GOP-controlled congress is largely a performative one. Showboating is job one (after not riling the toddler in the Oval). Legislation is largely an afterthought. Well, Democrats need to do more of that. Offer more legislation that promotes Democrats’ vision for a better future. Let the GOP quash it. Lose, but lose publically and spectacularly. Make the point. Holding back didn’t work in Poland.
Cartoon by David Cohen, “Cartoonist, drummer, pet portraitist, pot stirrer” and friend.
George Lakoff wrote a popular guide to message framing a couple of decades ago entitled “Don’t Think of an Elephant!” Perhaps we’re due for another entitled “Don’t Talk Like an Alien.”
The Washington Post this morning features a series of LTEs (that’s letters to the editor for those who don’t speak acronym) on Democrats use of language that’s off-putting to normal people. The occasion was a May 27 front page story, “Democratic troubles revive debate over left-wing buzzwords.” Subhead: “From ‘intersectionality’ to ‘equity,’ many say jargon is alienating key voters. But progressives say inclusive language is vital.”
My late MIL (that’s mother-in-law for those who don’t speak acronym) was a Columbia-trained librarian. I once asked how she dealt with the educational fads that periodically sweep through academia. She replied with a grin, “We just tried to ignore them until they went away.” And mostly they did.
The left is as susceptible as much as other Americans to trendiness, especially younger activists. Remember “call outs” and “microaggressions” and “safe spaces”? Where are they now? Today it’s a focus on announcing your pronouns. I get it. But that trend will go away too, in time (maybe after it just settles in). For now, to ordinary Americans they make users sound like aliens not allies.
“Some words are just too Ivy League-tested terms,” said Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona). “I’m going to piss some people off by saying this, but ‘social equity’ — why do we say that? Why don’t we say, ‘We want you to have an even chance’?”
[…]
“I believe that, over time, and probably for well-meaning reasons, Democrats have begun to speak like professors and started using advocacy-speak that was meant to reduce stigma, but also removed the meaning and emotion behind words,” [Kentucky Gov. Andy ] Beshear said, citing such examples as using “substance abuse disorder” to refer to addiction.
“It makes Democrats or candidates using this speech sounding like they’re not normal,” Beshear said. “It sounds simple, but what the Democratic Party needs to do is be normal and sound normal.”
“Substance abuse disorder,” Beshear said, drains all emotion out of a human tragedy and minimizes what it means to beat addiction. “Food insecurity” means children go hungry. Just say so.
During GOTV efforts (that’s get-out-the-vote for those not in our club), when voters tell volunteers they like Donald Trump because he “tells it like it is,” it may not be just his reinforcing their prejudices, but because he talks like they do and not like a overeducated pinhead who’s virtue signaling.
Prostitutes are now “sex workers,” illegal immigrants become “undocumented workers,” a husband and a wife are transformed into “partners,” and someone who is dumb must be “intellectually impaired.”
What these Democrats fail to understand is that empty symbolism is worthless. Their goal should be to get elected so they can provide material help to these people. Using language that is out of touch with societal norms might make them feel good (whether it makes the objects of their concern feel good is another matter). But it will keep them on the losing side of elections. Republicans continue to use the term “woke” as a pejorative, and they have been successful. Moderate Democrats such as myself cringe as more and more independents vote Republican because they believe Democrats are arrogant Ivy Leaguers who have lost touch with mainstream America.
Another writes, maybe code switch, howabout it? Use your trendy term around activists and another around normies. Consider your audience:
I am not suggesting we call everything “a beautiful bill” or find ways to make things “great again.” “Beautiful” has nothing to do with a bill that, say, saves Medicaid. “Beautiful” might be immediately appealing to some, but it is not a useful way to express many policy ideas. To me, the word has the same effect as pouring corn syrup into our cereal. Ugh.
I grind my teeth every time a left-leaning talking head regurgitates and reinforces “big, beautiful bill.” Are you nuts? Lakoff would be turning over in his grave. Except he’s not dead.
But Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) using “oligarchs” seems okay:
A big word differs from so-called jargon. When liberals use “intersectionality,” they slam the door on dialogue with many people, me among them. Too often — though not always — the usage sounds like an attempt to show off a political affiliation, a level of education or a worldview rather than to communicate.
The above is an over-long introduction to this clip from Congressman Stephen F. Lynch (D) of the 8th District of Massachusetts. You want plainspoken? He’s from South Boston. He’s got it down. He pulls no punches.
— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) June 2, 2025
The first thing we learned in my first campaign school was something we were to remember when speaking with voters on their doorsteps: “You are not normal people.” Don’t talk to voters the way you talk with each other.
Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were left baffled on Monday after the head of the U.S. disaster agency said during a briefing that he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season, according to four sources familiar with the situation…
The remark was made by David Richardson, who has led FEMA since early May. It was not clear to staff whether he meant it literally, as a joke, or in some other context.
Richardson said during the briefing that there would be no changes to the agency’s disaster response plans despite having told staff to expect a new plan in May, the sources told Reuters.
Richardson’s comments come amid widespread concern that the departures of a raft of top FEMA officials, staff cuts and reductions in hurricane preparations will leave the agency ill-prepared for a storm season forecast to be above normal.
I’m not sure why he would think that’s funny but considering the level of humor we see from people like Joni Ernst, it’s not all that surprising. It’s also believable that this fellow would not know anything about natural disasters. Here’s his bio at the FEMA site:
Mr. David Richardson was previously appointed as the Assistant Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office (CWMD). CWMD leads DHS efforts and coordinates with domestic and international partners to safeguard the United States against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats.
Mr. Richardson previously served as a United States Marine Corps ground combat officer. In uniform, he commanded artillery units, taught history at the George Washington University, strategy at the U.S. Army Field Artillery School, and Marine Corps Martial Arts. During the Long War, he served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa. Mr. Richardson was awarded for valor during combat operations.
He wasn’t even a logistics officer. But he’s obviously muy macho and no doubt looks like he’s out of central casting so he’s totally qualified. Here is a previous story about Richardson’s “leadership.”
During his first all-hands meeting with agency personnel, acting Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator David Richardson issued a striking warning: “Don’t get in my way,” the former United States Marine Corps ground combat officer told staff, according to a recording of the speech obtained by CBS News.
“Obfuscation, delay, undermining,” Richardson continued, referencing tactics he believed a fraction of FEMA staff might try to subvert his agenda. “If you’re one of those 20% of the people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not, because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent.”
Perhaps you heard that Bobby Jr. canceled a major federal contract to develop a new bird flu vaccine last week? Yeah. He did that. And it’s devastating.
The contract was with Moderna, the Massachusetts-based biotech company that developed and continues to produce one of the original COVID-19 shots. The Biden administration awarded the contract last year, through a special government program designed to fund preparation for future public health threats.
Moderna was trying to use its know-how from COVID to invent a vaccine platform it could deploy rapidly against several types of influenza, including the H5N1 bird flu—a version of which, if you haven’t heard, has spread to the United States and is ravaging poultry farms. But it’s not the price of eggs keeping infectious-disease doctors up at night. It’s the possibility that a strain mutates, jumps species, and ends up in humans, who then start transmitting it to each other.
That death toll would have been even higher if not for speedy development of COVID vaccines, including Moderna’s, whose secret sauce is mRNA technology that generally allows for much quicker production. That’s why two of the scientists most responsible for the breakthrough won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And it’s why that bird flu contract went to Moderna, whose early tests on the bird flu vaccine have already produced promising results.
But the contract was through the Department of Health and Human Services, which thanks to Donald Trump is under the leadership of Kennedy, the longtime vaccination critic whose egregious lies about the COVID shot include grossly exaggerating the prevalence of side effects and claiming it offers no protection against severe disease.
Bobby doesn’t like vaccines, we know that. He is a conspiracy theory crank. And he has surrounded himself with doctors who are also way outside the medical consensus and the dessicated potted plants in the Senate confirmed them all because it was easier. Now, as Joni Ernst says, we’re all gonna die.
HHS says that the mRNA shots have not been thoroughly tested but they were. And as Cohn reports:
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me in a phone interview he estimates as many as 1 billion people have gotten at least one dose of an mRNA vaccine, with only rare reports of serious side effects.
A billion people should be an adequate trial. Same for the measles vaccines and all the rest. But Bobby knows better. So good luck everyone.
Currently, the US makes up for any budget deficits it incurs by issuing bonds of various durations to cover the difference. It auctions those bonds — essentially IOUs issued by the Treasury Department — on the open market, where investors (banks, hedge funds, foreign central banks, pension funds, etc.) can bid on them.
To get them to bid, the US has to pay interest on the bond. And when the US borrows a lot, and especially if its fiscal policy indicates that the country may reach a point where it can’t pay back what it owes, investors will demand to receive more interest to compensate for the risk of default. That means the US has to pay more every year to service its past debt, and those payments in turn become future debt. If the interest they demand is high enough, the result can be an economic downturn, an upward debt spiral, or both.
While politicians pay attention to all kinds of economic indicators, from the unemployment rate to the stock market, the bond market is a different and more powerful animal. The most famous quote about the bond market’s power comes from former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville: “I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”
History is littered with cases of governments that were forced to abandon policies — or that even fell from power — because the bond market revolted. Just a few years ago in the UK, a mass sell-off by currency and bond traders forced the Tory government to abandon its plans for a massive deficit-ballooning tax cut and axe Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, before then-Prime Minister Liz Truss herself was forced to resign after just 45 days in office. Banks like Citigroup were openly declaring that unless the UK got a different prime minister, the markets would continue to punish it. That is power.
I urge you to read the whole thing as it explains in great detail how they can and will do this and the pain it will likely cause to make that happen. The U.S. is not the U.K and they don’t have the ability to topple a government. However, he also probably correctly predicts that these Republicans and Trump cultists will find a way to pass this monstrosity anyway because they love tax cuts and want to appease Dear Leader. The results will not be pretty:
Trump’s second term began with him bringing the richest man in the world to DC, with a promise to slash spending, by trillions a year if Elon Musk had his druthers. Now, Musk is leaving DC in a huff, having not meaningfully cut spending at all and by all accounts disillusioned and frustrated at his failure. But Musk is not the last figure who might try to impose austerity on DC, and while he may have hundreds of billions of dollars, the bond market wields tens of trillions. DOGE was, in retrospect, a bad joke. The bond vigilantes’ coming attack may be something much more serious.
