Month: November 2025

One does NOT question the Master of the Budget Process:

Democrats have long expressed concern about the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold congressionally appropriated funding, arguing that the White House is attempting to circumvent Congress’ power of the purse. But so far, their demands to add guardrails to funding bills to stop the administration from engaging in so-called “pocket rescissions” have gone unanswered.

One senior House Republican, though, did try to add such a provision to an appropriations bill — only for the White House to intervene and stop him, NOTUS has learned.

The Office of Management and Budget’s director, Russell Vought, is the mastermind behind the administration’s pocket rescissions strategy which involves a request from the president to withhold money already appropriated by Congress. But the request comes so late in the fiscal year that Congress doesn’t have enough time to act within the allotted timeframe. and the administration considers the money rescinded once the fiscal year ends.

[…]

But in July, Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, vice chair of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the 12 so-called “cardinals,” quietly added a provision to the fiscal 2026 bill for the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Subcommittee — which funds the agencies most impacted by Trump’s two rescissions requests — that would have addressed pocket rescissions. The clause, Sec. 7065, would have given Congress an extra 45 days to consider rescissions requests submitted late in the fiscal year.

After the bill text was released, Vought reached out to Díaz-Balart, explaining that the White House was concerned about the provision, one senior White House official told NOTUS. The official said that after Vought relayed the issue, Díaz-Balart removed the provision.

The White House did more than just reach out to Díaz-Balart. Republican appropriators started receiving pressure from the White House to not support the bill if the provision remained, according to a source familiar with the matter. A second source familiar with the matter told NOTUS that some GOP appropriators contacted the White House shortly after the bill came out to let officials know that they were “working to get it out.”

Members quickly spoke to Díaz-Balart about the provision, urging him to remove it. Rep. Andy Harris, a top appropriator and chair of the House Freedom Caucus, which has continuously supported the White House’s rescissions efforts, confirmed to NOTUS that he spoke with the Florida congressman, saying “there was discussion about (the provision) and it never came to fruition.”

I have no doubt that Trump doesn’t know what rescission is. He’s busy with redecorating anyway. So Vought is running the budgetary process in the White House and has no use for the Congress. As he promised. In Project 2025.

Let’s see if the Sup[remes sign off on this.If so, it will be among the worst betrayals of the constitution we’ve ever seen. Until recently we were told that the Justices are “originalists” unwilling to acknowledge the living constitution. If they do this the constitution will effectively be dead and the founders will be screaming from their graves.

The first ten months of the second Donald Trump administration feels like ten years, and nothing brings that home more than the recent exclusive from Reuters that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — also known as Elon Musk’s pet project — has ended its reign of terror eight months earlier than mandated. 

The era of Elon feels like a bygone time, back when Trump’s return to the White House still felt surreal, as if we were all trying to run through water, stunned that the country actually voted for him again after all he’d done. To make matters worse, he seemed to be even worse than he was during his first term, his bromance with the world’s richest man offering the most vivid evidence that we were already halfway down the rabbit hole and it was only going to get weirder. 

Musk was everywhere, glued to Trump’s side like a giant leech, practically running the transition from Mar-a-Lago, where he took a bungalow so he could be there to advise Trump around the clock. But his personal baby was DOGE, and the president was so dazzled by his vast fortune that he quickly gave Musk the mandate and the power to raze federal programs by any means he felt necessary. Having recently bought Twitter and immediately cut personnel to the bone, Musk felt he had more than enough experience and knowledge to do the same with the federal government.

DOGE ended up being a collection of young nerds Musk imported from his other companies, led by a couple of trusted aides, and the first thing they did was dig into data the government collects on companies and individuals. (Why that access was so vital has never been fully explained. But some suspect it was to be used for Grok, Musk’s artificial intelligence project.) DOGE started slashing programs that Musk personally deemed to be wasteful, like medical research. Contracts were cancelled willy-nilly; businesses were shuttered. Foreign aid was of particular interest to Musk, who is originally from South Africa, so he immediately targeted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and programs that were keeping people alive around the world. They were abruptly halted. A study published in the Lancet projects that the cuts could result in 14 million deaths by 2030, of which four million will be children. DOGE has quite a legacy. 

Musk famously appeared at a conservative gathering wielding a chainsaw and proclaiming, “this is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!” The federal workforce was devastated. As of Nov. 18, data collected by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service indicates that over 211,000 civil servants have left the workforce, most of that a result of the DOGE purge. 

From a financial perspective, DOGE’s value for the American taxpayer has been negligible. A POLITICO analysis from August showed that DOGE had saved less than 5% of its claimed savings. No wonder they are closing up shop and sneaking out of town. 

The story of the department’s dissolution is a testament to how dysfunctional it was — and how Musk’s supposed business genius is clearly overrated. POLITICO’s Sophia Cai and Daniel Lippman wrote about the succession drama that took place when Trump and Musk had their dramatic, public falling out last spring. With Musk gone, the young DOGE employees — including one who infamously went by Big Balls — were left adrift, unsure if they were going to be ousted as well.

Rival factions formed within the group, with battles for control culminating in the bizarre spectacle of DOGE’s top operational lead being fired and refusing to leave. People throughout the administration worked behind the scenes to uproot various DOGE employees until they finally brought in a veteran hand to run the General Services Administration, where DOGE had been burrowed, and he finally got control of the situation. 

Now, with DOGE officially disbanded, there are a few remnants dispersed across the government, such as the National Design Studio, which has been assigned to make the government websites more attractive. A few people have been reassigned to jobs at the same agencies they had been tasked with cutting. But it’s over. 

Musk had no idea what he was doing. Like so many wealthy men — including Donald Trump and most of his Cabinet — he was convinced that because he had been successful at running a company and making money, he was a genius who could do anything. And like so many who erroneously believe that government should be run like a business, Musk failed to understand that it is a completely different animal, requiring political skills, coalition building and finding consensus. His strategy of tearing everything up and fixing it later simply doesn’t work in government (and frankly, it’s unlikely it works very well in business either).

But Musk did manage to make the real slash-and-burn artist, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, look like a strategic genius by comparison. It could even be said that Musk paved the way for the much more systematic and ruthless government cutting under Vought without all the drama.

Months after their dramatic feud came to a climax, there now seems to be something of a rapprochement between Musk and Trump. They sat together for an awkward few moments at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in September, and last week Musk attended the state dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Musk even managed to get his chosen NASA administrator renominated for the post by Trump, who had withdrawn it because he’d given money to Democrats. On the other hand, Trump took a rude swipe at him at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, saying “You’re lucky I’m with you, Elon,” and wondering if he’d ever thanked him. 

Like most people who spend too much time on X, Musk has become more radical than ever. His AI experiments get more bizarre by the day, and his SpaceX projects, which include driverless cybercabs, have been repeatedly delayed. Tesla shareholders just agreed to pay him a trillion dollars, but considering the stock price maybe they should have taken a page from DOGE and cut their losses like Trump did.

Salon

A year ago all you heard from Republicans, Democrats and the political media was that the Democrats had lost the Latino vote for the foreseeable future because almost half of them had defected to the GOP permanently. They hated “woke” they didn’t like the newer immigrants, they hated Democratic economics, didn’t trust “authoritarians” and communists etc. etc. Texas even went so far as to assume they could redistrict to accommodate their new converts and win five more seats in the House.

For some reason, they also believed that they could terrorize Hispanics throughout the country in the most brutal way possible and split up families and communities all while making economic conditions for everyone worse and they’d stick with them.

Well, they aren’t:

The MAGA Republican Party ‘s greatest weakness is that they believe their own hype. I guess that makes sense since they worship the greatest hype artist (liar) in world history. Democrats should resist buying into it too and adjusting their strategy accordingly. The GOP is living in a dream world.

It’s the power, stupid

The right’s intellectuals gazed long into an abyss. And guess what?

George Packer and Jonathan Chait offer their takes on how American conservatives became reactionaries. Both critique the intellectual decay on the right while, being intellectuals themselves, overlooking the abyss.

Packer has been reading “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right” by political theorist Laura K. Field. Several schools of thought pulled like magnetic poles at conservatism: Straussians at the Claremont Institute, post-liberal Catholic critiques of liberalism at Notre Dame and Harvard, and techno-monarchist rejection of democracy in Silicon Valley.

MAGA reactionaries, Packer explains, “believe that justice and the good life can be found only in traditional sources of faith and knowledge.” Liberalism and pluralism, they believe, “have corroded the moral and spiritual fiber of America by accommodating false ideologies and harmful groups. Their modern hero is Viktor Orbán.”

(Those harmful groups wouldn’t happen to be non-white and non-European, would they?)

The right’s dark visions need enemies to propel their movement and sharpen their focus. “The movement is, in many respects, untethered from the ordinary decency and common sense that characterize America at its idealistic best,” Field writes—“and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today.”

For its part, liberalism has been asleep at the switch. Or rather, Boomers who ushered in their social revolution in the 1960s grew too settled and content to foster their own response to “a vacuum created by popular disenchantment with globalization, neoliberal economics, mass immigration, political corruption, technological power, and democracy itself.” MAGA filled it.

Chait considers the internal rifts tearing at the Heritage Foundation. Once the “intellectual crown jewel of the conservative movement,” it is today riven by “an ugly public spat over the organization’s approach to anti-Semitism.” It reveals “previously forbidden bigotries have penetrated the heart of the Trump-era Republican Party” and heralds “the brain death of the conservative movement.”

An organization that that once nurtured its young in conservative principles and catechisms has dropped its mask: “The debacle at Heritage illustrates the impossibility of abiding by the long-standing intellectual values of open debate and truth-seeking while retaining any influence in a party led by Donald Trump.” It also reveals the long-standing shallowness of said values.

Heritage fell silent as Trump demolished both the East Wing and the conservative china shop. As the strongest magnet in Washington, D.C., Trump has conservatives tacking this way today and that way tomorrow. It’s not political winds so much as the wild swings of their Trump-brand compasses. Principles they once declared as their North Star have been discarded like last year’s fashions.

Chait reviews how actors like Grover Norquist once set the conservative agenda in D.C. But then along came Fox News to pander to the Republican hoi polloi’s baser instincts:

By the Obama era, liberal critics began to notice a phenomenon that the writer Julian Sanchez called “epistemic closure,” which described the way many conservatives refused to accept the legitimacy of anything outside of conservative media.

Except Donald Trump consumed even the Fox world like he gobbles fast food:

More important, Trump grasped that the party’s rank and file had grown so detached from reality, so suspicious of mainstream purveyors of information, that large segments of it would believe anything he said, however preposterous, as long as it flattered their beliefs.

Trump’s unlikely victory in 2016 meant a) conservative audiences “had no appetite for criticism of Trump” and b) conservative elites found themselves sidelined as truth became “whatever Trump said.”

Chait concludes:

Identifying and correcting errors is an important role for a political movement’s intellectuals. Conservative critics forced George W. Bush to ultimately recognize the failure of his occupation strategy in Iraq and change course. The Democratic partisans who shouted down criticism of Biden in the run-up to the 2024 election were ultimately out-argued by those who demanded his ouster. It is impossible to fulfill this role when a lone man defines what counts as success or failure—often in self-contradictory ways and regardless of the evidence. If the Republicans hope to stay in power, it would be wise for them to recover the ability to think.

Packer and Chait write for The Atlantic. So of course their analyses come from a thinking man’s perspective. But I can’t help seeing their autopsies of conservative brain rot as exercises involving pigs and lipstick.

Trumpism has revealed conservatives’ intellectual output as window dressing for American conservatives’ baser impulses. It as if Leslie Nielsen’s starship crew unknowingly brought back with them from the burial place of the Krell civilization one of Dr. Morbius’s monsters from the id. Morbius with all his intelligence did not grasp the danger he’d unleashed because rationality had no part in it. Nor could conservative intellectuals. Trump is a creature of pure id.

Republicans gazed long into that abyss and the abyss glared back. The party succumbed to Trumpism because it stripped away its intellectual pretensions. Trumpism revealed the raw thirst for power underneath. Trying to analyze the GOP’s intellectual decay is like trying to reason with the body’s autonomic system.

Packer writes, “They’ve abandoned tradition for radicalism, careful scholarship for vulgar discourse, reason for the irrational, universal truths for narrow identities, and philosophy for partisanship.” Except worse. Trump could subsist on power alone and forgo the fast food.

“Trump’s most outrageous innovation,” Chait argues, “was dispensing with the pretense that he needed to provide reasons for his positions.” Like the planet-killing doomsday machine from the original Star Trek, he chews up whatever is in his path simply for the power. Power is his only imperative. He thought money was power until he tasted the presidency. Gold for him is huckster bling.

To see what powers his movement, read responses from Trumpish reactionaries to social media posts regarding Customs and Border Patrol arrests in Chicago and Charlotte. The deep hostility toward anyone not perceived as their tribe reveals among many professed followers of Christ an unnerving deficit of compassion and deep wells of cruelty. Jefferson cut Christ’s miracles from his Bible. MAGA cut out all the red letters and bolded Leviticus. Trump doesn’t even read.

Conservatism under Trump is not simply intellectually bankrupt. The id has no use for reason. But it does for power. The Krell learned that the hard way.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
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

Linda McMahon clears up the confusion

Donald Trump’s soon to be abolished Department of Education felt it necessary on Monday to issue an important clarification:

Myth: The Trump Administration does not view nurses as professionals because they are not classified as a “professional degree.”

Fact: The definition of a “professional degree” is an internal definition used by the Department to distinguish among programs that qualify for higher loan limits, not a value judgement about the importance of programs. It has no bearing on whether a program is professional in nature or not. 

(The Department used the English spelling of judgment for some reason.)

I’d first spotted this little tempest on Facebook:

Thank goodness the Department cleared that up. But not before The Onion had fun with it:

WASHINGTON—Describing the practice as a “fun little side project” rather than an occupation, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced Monday that nursing would be reclassified as a hobby under new student loan regulations. “While those seeking degrees in veterinary medicine, law, and podiatry will still have access to the full financing available to future professionals, our department will henceforth limit loans for those Americans simply blowing off a little steam by attending nursing school in between shifts at Buffalo Wild Wings,” said McMahon, who questioned the federal government’s role in loaning out money so students could purchase masks, gloves, and stethoscopes for their “fun little nurse costumes.” “There’s a lot of cutting and sewing in nursing, so it’s really an activity that falls under arts and crafts. Some moms choose to knit, others choose to nurse. Plus, rushing between ER patients is a great way to stay active, just like riding your bike. And what’s also great is you get to brush shoulders with doctors, who can give you career advice should you choose to pursue a real job in the medical world some day.” McMahon concluded her statement by announcing the loan cap for theology degrees had been increased to $800,000.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
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

As much as I hate to say it, James Carville is right about this:

We are not even two weeks from the government shutdown, and the public conversation on the matter has fled the building. This shows, no matter what you believe, there’s a simple truth. The shutdown will have zero lasting consequence for next year’s midterms. The only thing that will persevere is economic pain. And that’s exactly why Democrats won on Nov. 4.

Zohran Mamdani, Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill — even down-ballot Georgia Democrats — all won with soaring margins because the people are pissed. And the people always point their anger at the party in charge. Rent is out of control. Young people can’t afford homes or pay student debt. We’re living through the greatest economic inequality since the Roaring Twenties.

President Trump has done nothing to curb the cost of what it requires to take even a breath in America today, the centerpiece promise of his 2024 campaign. The people are revolting, and they have been for some time.

This offers Democrats the greatest gift you can have in American politics: a second chance. I am now an 81-year-old man and I know that in the minds of many, I carry the torch from a so-called centrist political era. Yet it is abundantly clear even to me that the Democratic Party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression.x

It is time for Democrats to embrace a sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and altogether unmistakable platform of pure economic rage. This is our only way out of the abyss.

He goes on to rail against “woke” which is like freaking out about men with long hair and women going braless — it feels like it’s from another era. The culture war battles change very quickly these days. His age is showing and it’s annoying.

But he says that Democrats have to embrace their rage which I think it probably right. As much as I’d like to see these rural Trump voters wake up and start marching in No Kings protests and understand that our democracy is under siege from their Dear Leader, it’s just not realistic. In fact, it’s not realistic to think that less than 40% of voters will ever abandon the GOP. Even Herbert Hoover got almost that many in the depth of the Great Depression. But economic populism could bring over 5-10% of those who are watching Trump hob-nobbing with billionaires and festooning the White House gold filigree and beginning to realize that his economic promises are nothing but hot air.

If the Dems can unapologetically articulate their rage and give them reason to believe they are ready to tackle the problems without restraint, it’s possible that they can lure at least some away from the unabashed plutocrat party to which they have inexplicably hooked their wagons. It’s certainly worth a try.

The beauty queen insurance lawyer was not lawfully appointed to the job and the cases are voided. And the fact that they couldn’t dredge up any qualified prosecutor to do their dirty work says everything.

A federal judge on Monday dismissed the criminal indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James after finding the prosecutor who brought the cases, former Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan, was not lawfully appointed.

U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie said that she agreed with Comey, who moved to dismiss the case on the grounds that Halligan’s appointment was illegal.

“Because Ms. Halligan had no lawful authority to present the indictment, I will grant Mr. Comey’s motion and dismiss the indictment,” Currie wrote in finding that Halligan lacked the authority to present a case to a grand jury.

“All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment, including securing and signing Mr. Comey’s indictment, were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside,” the judge wrote, describing the insurance lawyer as “a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience.”

She issued a separate, similar ruling dismissing the James case.

“This case presents the unique, if not unprecedented, situation where an unconstitutionally appointed prosecutor, ‘exercising power [she] did not lawfully possess,’… acted alone in conducting a grand jury proceeding and securing an indictment,” the ruling said.

Because Halligan, who was appointed interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia at President Donald Trump’s direction, was the only prosecutor to present the cases and sign the indictments, the indictments should be voided, the judge found.

The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. Halligan and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Unfortunately, the case was dismissed without prejudice which means they can bring it again (pending certain decisions about the statue of limitations) and from what the White House said, they plan to do it. (The fact that it’s the White House and not the DOJ saying it is telling in itself.)

The wingnuts are all screaming “he was let off on a technicality!” like that means it was corrup. It should have them being embarrassed that their Dear Leader and his henchmen are so amateurish and incompetent that they couldn’t find a real prosecutor to bring the cases. But they, like Trump himself, are shameless so they will never admit that his revenge tour is childish and unAmerican.

Comey put up a video. And Leticia James issued a statement:

I am heartened by today’s victory and grateful for the prayers and support I have received from around the country.

I remain fearless in the face of these baseless charges as I continue fighting for New Yorkers every single day.

It’s stunning that it’s happening in the first place but at least there are still judges that believe in the rule of law.

Will the military?

This could be one of the biggest cases we’ve yet confronted. I wish I felt sure of how it’s going to go:

The Department of Defense on Monday said it is launching a “thorough review” into Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, citing “serious allegations of misconduct.”

The announcement comes days after President Donald Trump accused Kelly and other Democratic lawmakers of “seditious behavior” for a video in which they said that U.S. service members could refuse illegal orders.

In a statement posted to X, the Department of Defense said it “received serious allegations of misconduct” against Kelly, who is a retired U.S. Navy captain.

“In accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 10 U.S.C. § 688, and other applicable regulations, a thorough review of these allegations has been initiated to determine further actions, which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures. This matter will be handled in compliance with military law, ensuring due process and impartiality. Further official comments will be limited, to preserve the integrity of the proceedings,” the statement read.

“The Department of War reminds all individuals that military retirees remain subject to the UCMJ for applicable offenses, and federal laws such as 18 U.S.C. § 2387 prohibit actions intended to interfere with the loyalty, morale, or good order and discipline of the armed forces. Any violations will be addressed through appropriate legal channels,” the Pentagon said.

This is insane.

Here is the oath of enlistment:

I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God. (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

Here’s the explanation:

• Members of the military take an oath to the Constitution, not the president. They swear an oath of enlistment to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies” and “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” Military officers all swear the oath of commissioned officers, which is similar.
• The oath is also clear that they should be obeying orders “according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” The UCMJ makes clear that service members are required to obey “any lawful general order or regulation” or they could be “punished as a court-martial may direct.”
• The Manual for Courts-Martial states that the requirement to “obey orders does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.”

The Conversation did a poll of military members about following illegal orders. They clearly understand these rules:

Our poll, fielded between June 13 and June 30, 2025, shows that service members understand these rules. Of the 818 active-duty troops we surveyed, just 9% stated that they would “obey any order.” Only 9% “didn’t know,” and only 2% had “no comment.”

When asked to describe unlawful orders in their own words, about 25% of respondents wrote about their duty to disobey orders that were “obviously wrong,” “obviously criminal” or “obviously unconstitutional.”

Another 8% spoke of immoral orders. One respondent wrote that “orders that clearly break international law, such as targeting non-combatants, are not just illegal — they’re immoral. As military personnel, we have a duty to uphold the law and refuse commands that betray that duty.”

Just over 40% of respondents listed specific examples of orders they would feel compelled to disobey.

The most common unprompted response, cited by 26% of those surveyed, was “harming civilians,” while another 15% of respondents gave a variety of other examples of violations of duty and law, such as “torturing prisoners” and “harming U.S. troops.”

One wrote that “an order would be obviously unlawful if it involved harming civilians, using torture, targeting people based on identity, or punishing others without legal process.”

This whole thing is a patented Trump political brouhaha designed to get the rubes excited and change the subject.

Kelly said, you can refuse to obey an unlawful order. But it looks like it’s going to be some kind of “trumped up” charge about “interfering with morale” or some other bullshit.

Hegseth tweeted this:

I’m sure they’re looking forward to persecuting a decorated pilot and astronaut. It’s the kind of thing that sends a thrill down Whiskey Pete’s leg and gives Trump a monarchical tumescence. And maybe they’ve purged every JAG in the military who would tell them that this is ridiculous. But if there is any sanity left in the military this will go nowhere.

He still believes that foreign countries pay the tariffs even as he says right there that “buyers of goods and services“ stocked up to avoid paying the tariffs and now they’ll have to start paying them since their inventory is running low. Does he really not know that those buyers are American companies who will have to pass on the expense to their American customers? Is he truly that thick?

Can we really survive three more years of this?

One of the truisms of American politics over the past few decades has been that voters want their presidents to be someone you’d like to have a beer with, a regular guy — yes, it’s only guys —  you could relate to. Since politicians are very rarely regular guys, they often go to great lengths to create a persona designed to at least give that impression. Mostly that has meant pretending to be a Real American by riding horses, going hunting or driving around in a pick-up to prove they aren’t some effete city slicker. Sometimes they try to fake it by being a Rust Belt kind of fellow or a military man. But the most important thing is to not act like some wealthy nob, even though most of them are, lording your superiority over the common folk whose votes are necessary for victory.

In 2016, Donald Trump took that strategy and blew it to smithereens. He flaunted his wealth at every turn, refusing to do the standard meet-and-greets in diners and living rooms in favor of big rallies where he stood above the crowd and regaled them for hours on end. Instead of wandering around state fairs and talking to the locals, he would land in a field in his personal helicopter and take some kids up for a ride. And all those people who insisted that they couldn’t stand a city boy fell in love with the rich, braggadocious New Yorker.

But in a way, Trump did have the common touch. He liked fast food and sports and, most importantly, he shared all their gripes and complaints and articulated them in the same terms some used themselves. For all his crowing about his money and showing off, he really didn’t put on airs. He was just like them.

He wasn’t, of course, and he reportedly had nothing but contempt for his followers. But for all of Trump’s flashy displays of wealth, he was never really a member of the Billionaire Boys club either. He was a climber, always on the outside looking in. 

But since he won the presidency the second time, it’s different. He’s one of the Big Money Boys now, and that club loves him as much as any MAGA redhat. 

So far, the most indelible image of Trump’s second term is the line up of wealthy tech oligarchs standing right behind him at his inauguration: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, Amazon CEO and Washington Post publisher Jeff Bezos and his then-fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and, of course, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. All of them were there to demonstrate their fealty to the man who would be king. And why not? After fomenting an attempted coup, inspiring an insurrection and being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and massive fraud, Trump’s ballsy reelection was the most impressive act of legerdemain they had ever seen, proving once again that rich men can do whatever they want. 

Trump spends a good deal of his time as president these days exhibiting his exemption from all accountability. He brazenly parades his corruption right out in the open now, caring nothing for the fact that the American people are angry about the economy and resent that their needs are going unmet. He is swallowing a firehose full of money for himself and his family, selling access to himself and the White House, blackmailing institutions and accepting “gifts” from foreign countries and individuals alike. 

And he’s more interested in entertaining Saudi princes and tech broligarchs than he is in holding the rallies that were a constant feature of his first term. Even in the middle of the longest government shutdown in history, Trump invited CEOs and billionaires to the White House for a lavish meal to thank them for their generous donations to his $300 million ballroom pet project. They dutifully bowed with great respect. 

Donald Trump can get away with anything — and so can they. 

The biggest scandal of his political career has unsurprisingly turned out to be a sex scandal. He has, after all, been dogged by them since his first wife Ivana confronted his then-mistress — and future second wife — Marla Maples on the ski slopes of Aspen in 1989. And in 2016, the Access Hollywood tape nearly ended his presidential campaign. From Stormy Daniels to E. Jean Carroll to all the women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault over a period of decades, it’s hardly surprising that his long friendship with deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein would eventually result in some very close scrutiny by the public. Nothing could have been more predictable.

Aside from the horrors of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s alleged underage sex trafficking operation, this scandal has revealed itself as yet another example of the culture of impunity the elite members of our society enjoy. In 2008, Epstein himself was given a sweetheart plea deal by federal prosecutors, and in retrospect it’s hard not to conclude that it was the result of his relationships with all these rich and powerful men. Trump was one of them, a close friend of Epstein’s for over 15 years, but he was hardly alone.

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., told FBI Director Kash Patel that he’s been informed “there [is] one Hollywood producer worth a few $100 million, one royal prince, one high-profile individual in the music industry, one very prominent banker, one high-profile government official, one high-profile former politician, one owner of a car company in Italy, one rock star, one magician and at least six billionaires” that were part of Epstein’s orbit. That, one suspects, is just the tip of the iceberg.

As the fight over releasing the Epstein files — which the president opposed after having promised in 2024 to do so — played out, Trump’s followers were getting restive. Even after he flipped to endorse the release at the last possible minute and signed the bill into law, they know something’s wrong but they aren’t able to fully accept that their leader is one of those hated elites they’ve always loathed. Last week, even Mike Cernovich, one of the most hard-core MAGA influencers and purveyor of the Pizzagate pedophile conspiracy theory, wrote on X, “During a recent visit in DC, the talk of everyone was how overt the corruption was. It’s at levels you read about in history books. In nearly every department.” No kidding.

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We are living in a period of unimaginable wealth among the upper 1%, who are getting richer by the day. Elon Musk, despite how badly Tesla’s stock performs or how outrageous he behaves, was just given a trillion dollar payday by the company’s shareholders. As the world’s richest man, he does what he wants. In fact, according to a new report by Oxfam, the 10 richest people in the United States have seen their collective fortune grow by nearly $700 billion since Trump secured a second term. 

With all that money they can buy any number of lawyers, harass their enemies, reward their friends and elude any consequences for their criminal behavior. Just like Trump. He’s their leader now.

Salon