Elon Musk has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
It is unheard-of for a White House staffer, even one with part-time status, to make such large political contributions to support the agenda of the boss. But there has never been someone in the direct employ of an administration like Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who is leading Mr. Trump’s aggressive effort to shrink the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.
In case you forgot:
Elon Musk says he’ll recuse himself if there’s a conflict of interest—because nothing says accountability like self-policing, especially when his financial disclosures won’t even be available to the public. pic.twitter.com/uVE7ajIEyM
In fairness, Musk doesn’t really have conflicts of interest. It’s just outright corruption. He and Trump never promised they wouldn’t steal the country blind.
Trump has spent his first months back in office seeking to sharply cut spending and reduce the federal workforce. The public’s views of that effort and Elon Musk, to whom Trump has given a prominent role, are largely negative.
Just 35% of Americans express a positive view of Musk, with 53% rating him negatively and 11% offering no opinion – making him both better known and more substantially unpopular than Vice President JD Vance (whom 33% of Americans rate favorably and 44% unfavorably, with 23% having no opinion.) Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say that Musk has neither the right experience nor the right judgment to make changes to the way the government works. There is uneasiness about Musk even among some of the president’s supporters: 28% of those who see Trump’s changes to the government as necessary doubt the tech billionaire has the judgment to carry them out.
A 55% majority of Americans say that the Trump administration’s changes to the federal government are being made largely to advance his agenda, with 45% calling the changes necessary to ensure the government functions properly.
Asked to weigh whether they’re more concerned about the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal government going too far or not far enough, 62% of Americans say they’re more worried about the former and fear important programs being shut down. The other 37% say they’re more worried about the cuts not going far enough in eliminating fraud and waste in the federal government. Nine in 10 Democrats and 69% of independents say they’re more concerned about losing important federal programs, while 73% of Republicans say they’re more concerned that fraud and waste will remain an issue in the government.
We’re currently watching the saga of the Continuing Resolution to keep the government open until September unfold in the Senate. The Democrats can filibuster this one but it’s unclear if they are going to be willing to do it. (I know….)
I believe they should filibuster with one demand: Trump must get rid of Musk and DOGE. Nothing less. If he does that they will vote for the CR. I don’t expect he will do it but after a period of him defending his “right”to have a billionaire slashing the government and angering the people even more, the Democrats could finally agree to break the filibuster making it clear that Trump is willing to put his billionaire boyfriend ahead of the American people.
There is such a thing as “losing well” and I think those numbers above show that the public is not happy with Trump’s buddy destroying the federal government. They should use the meager leverage they have to highlight that to the whole country and push Trump’s approval ratings even lower.
President Donald Trump’s tariff salvos have deeply rattled a stock market previously bullish about his supposedly pro-growth agenda. With recession fears mounting, a widely respected economist at Goldman Sachs has decided to downgrade the entire U.S. economy.
No longer looking toward share prices for signs of success and approval, the president and his economic officials have signaled they will look past short-term pain in their bid to reshape America’s finances. On Tuesday, Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius revealed the storied investment bank forecasts U.S. GDP growth to come in below Wall Street’s consensus for the first time in 2½ years.
Goldman’s GDP projection for 2025 now sits at 1.7%, down from 2.4% at the start of the year. That’s because the firm now sees the average U.S. tariff rate rising by 10 basis points this year, twice Goldman’s previous forecast and about five times as high as the increase during Trump’s first term.
Disappointing economic data over the past few weeks did not prompt the new projection, said Hatzius, who gained renown for his bearish forecasts prior to the onset of the great financial crisis in 2007.
“Instead, the reason for the downgrade is that our trade policy assumptions have become considerably more adverse, and the administration is managing expectations towards tariff-induced near-term economic weakness,” he wrote Tuesday in a note to clients.
Members of the starry eyed “Trump is awesome” set have awakened as well:
President Trump’s stop-and-start trade policy and uneven economic messaging have rattled some of his own allies, triggering a flood of calls from business executives, concerns from Republican lawmakers and tension in the White House.
Senior officials, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, have received panicked calls from chief executives and lobbyists, who have urged the administration to calm jittery markets by outlining a more predictable tariff agenda, according to people familiar with the discussions. Many in the business community have abandoned efforts to get the president to reverse course on trade, instead pleading with the White House for clarity on his approach, the people said.
In a meeting Monday in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, the president and his top advisers huddled with the chief executive officers of International Business Machines, Qualcomm, HP and other tech companies. Some of the CEOs voiced their concerns about Trump’s tariffs, warning that they could hurt their industry, according to a person who attended the meeting. Trump told reporters that attendees at the meeting talked about investing in the U.S.
I just love this:
The mixed messages from the president and his advisers have raised concerns among some Republicans that Trump lacks a cohesive economic plan.
Ya think?
I guess these people, mostly men, were so excited about being allowed to say pussy at the office again that they couldn’t hear anything else he said, or didn’t say, during the campaign. Well, at least they’re getting some tax cuts. At some point. Right?
Following up on my piece this morning about the COVID amnesia and America’s new quest to destroy all the scientific institutions that keep us safe, here’s another bit of fodder for our nightmares:
In December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century.
Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.
DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”
More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.
Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.
The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.
Why? Does anyone really know the answer to that question because I honestly don’t. Project 2025 wants to remake the United States into a Christian nationalist theocracy so they need to destroy all government and science which interferes with their need for patriarchal authoritarianism. But that’s not Musk’s goal. He thinks the techno nerds should run everything but he’s clueless about what “everything” is just assuming that he and his nerds will figure it all out later. Ok. And we know that Trump is just bent on destroying everything in his quest for vengeance and the delusions that it will somehow make him into the Emperor of the world.
The rest of the elected Republicans are just cowardly people of low character who are willing to help them all destroy the world and I’m afraid that the MAGA voters are simply too brainwashed and addled by Trump’s demagoguery and conspiracy theories to even grasp what’s actually happening.
So is it just that these people all have different goals that just happen to be served by a leader who is so imbecilic and psychologically damaged that he will let them use the United States of America as their tool? I think so. And what it adds up to is chaos and catastrophe.
Five years ago yesterday, the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 was officially a pandemic and the whole world embarked on a shared experience like nothing before in any of our lives. Although the quick roll out of vaccines and accumulated knowledge about how to treat the illness saved millions, the pandemic lasted for over two years and took 1.2 million lives in the U.S. and over 7 million worldwide. Many people were left with serious lingering effects of the virus the reasons for which are still being studied.
Hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed and the world economy was brought to an abrupt halt in March of 2020 which quickly brought mass unemployment and a shortage of goods as the global supply chain was disrupted. We learned very quickly that the federal government under Donald Trump was so lacking in logistical and crisis management ability that America had one of the worst responses of any developed country in the world. The U.S. experienced 16% of the world’s deaths with just 4% of the population.
We should have seen it coming. As Judd Legum at Public Notice presciently posted on Twitter:
Months before that a prominent Democrats had warned the country about the possibility of a pandemic and the country’s lack of preparedness:
The President of the United States downplayed the threat and insisted that he wanted to “keep his numbers down” — he was beginning to understand that this was going to interrupt his plans for a triumphant return for a second term. On March 9th, Trump made one of his most famous public appearances of the COVID era when he went to the Centers For Disease Control in Georgia and declared himself a genius:
🚨FLASHBACK
Trump at the CDC in 2020:
“You know my Uncle was a great — he was at MIT. He taught at MIT for a record number of years. He was a great super genius, Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it…Maybe I have a… pic.twitter.com/1b85AlHtzI
Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.
Over the next few months he proved that he had definitely not missed his calling as a medical expert or a president. In fact, it became more obvious than ever that his talents, such as they are, are completely useless in a crisis.
Two days after that memorable visit, when the W.H.O made its announcement (an act which Donald Trump has never forgiven and so petulantly withdrew the U.S from the organization) the world stopped. Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson announced that they had contracted the virus and the NBA suspended its schedule. The highly respected virologist Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before Congress that the pandemic could result in “many, many millions” of deaths.
That night Trump made the only semi-dignified announcement of the crisis from the oval office shutting down travel from Europe but the order was typically poorly drafted and had to be repeatedly walked back over the following days. It was the beginning of the Trump COVID response and it was a horror show.
Those of us who were not essential workers sat cloistered in our homes watching the unfolding horror on television as the news kept a countdown clock of cases, hospitalizations and deaths that grew exponentially over the weeks that followed. And unfortunately, it became clear that we were led by a man who was completely in over his head.
Before long Trump was blaming Democrats, his go-to, for the pandemic because they suffered the greatest death toll in the big blue cities in the first wave. He demanded that they lick his boots before they could get vital medical supplies and forced them to bid against each other for them. If they failed to adequately grovel and praise him, he punished their states by delaying the needed supplies and publicly derided them as incompetent.
His main concern at this juncture was the effect it was having on the economy which he needed to be booming before the fall campaign. Unemployment was still very high and businesses were shuttered and he wanted them open now, whether people would die or not. He had signed the first relief bill called the CARES Act but did not want to extend any more government help and basically told the country he wanted them to get back to normal now.
Unfortunately, the vaccines were still months away and new variants were springing up so he resorted to his usual tactics of pitting people against each other. He encouraged anti-mask and anti-shutdown MAGA people to rebel against all mitigation efforts. He trained his followers to distrust the science and the scientists by pushing snake oil cures on television (now linked to at least 17,000 deaths) and encouraging them to believe crackpot conspiracy theories. By the time the vaccines came online, his MAGA voters had such contempt for scientists that they rejected them, ironically denying Trump the great moment of victory he had craved.
All that and much, much more happened with a federal government that still had a working CDC, NIH, HHS and friendly, cooperative relationships with the world’s leading scientific research institutions and their countries’ leaders. Now imagine what will happen if another pandemic comes along.
Here’s a little preview of the kind of scientific expertise we’ll be relying on going forward:
RFK Jr on the measles vaccine: "There are adverse events from the vaccine. It does cause deaths every year. It causes all the illnesses that measles itself cause." pic.twitter.com/Y0IVybltDa
RFK Jr: "It used to be that everybody got measles. And the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn't do that … it used to be that very young kids were protected by breast milk. Women who get vaccinated do not provide that level of… pic.twitter.com/C3ALSwbmwz
Meanwhile, HHS is “reevaluating” existing contracts for MrNA vaccine development for a potential avian flu epidemic. Their plan is apparently this gobbledygook:
Kevin Hassett on Trump's avian flu plan: "What we need to do is have better ways with bio-security and medication and so on to make sure that the perimeter doesn't have to kill the chickens. To have a better, smarter, perimeter… they're killing chickens to stop the spread, but… pic.twitter.com/a3s8WvMWFg
It has struck me as very odd these last couple of years that the pandemic has gone so far down the memory hole that it’s like it never happened. But it did, millions died and our society was scarred by the experience even if we don’t want to admit it. Our political culture was divided even worse than before largely because the man in charge at the time didn’t know how to deal with an emergency and was more concerned with his re-election than saving lives.
Sadly, our national amnesia allowed that same man to be restored to the White House where he is furiously tearing up the federal government including the world class scientific research centers and public health institutions that were all that stood between him and millions more dead the last time he was confronted with a crisis. It will be a hundred times worse if it happens again on his watch.
Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), opens new tab on Monday slashed its first-quarter profit estimates by half, sending its shares down 14%, and its CEO said the environment had weakened due to U.S. economic uncertainty.
The Atlanta-based airline is the first major U.S. carrier to report that mounting economic worries among consumers and businesses are hurting domestic travel.
“We saw companies start to pull back. Corporate spending started to stall,” CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC. “Consumers in a discretionary business do not like uncertainty.”
Define uncertainty.
“The National Transportation Safety Board today recommended that helicopter traffic be banned from a four-mile stretch over the Potomac River when flights are landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport,” reports CNN:
Warning signs were missed: The warning signs leading up to the disaster over the Potomac River were there, NTSB investigators said, citing data detailing thousands of near collisions at the airport over a number of years. Investigators uncovered 15,214 “near miss events” between 2021 and 2024 where aircraft were within one nautical mile of colliding, with a vertical separation of less than 400 feet. Additionally, there were also 85 cases where two aircraft were separated by less than 1,500 feet, with a vertical separation of less than 200 feet, according to the NTSB.
On the east bank of the Potomac, Elon Musk’s unofficial junior G-men are slashing the nation’s air traffic controller workforce. But that’s not all (The Atlantic):
As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.
Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”
Between his rapid unscheduled disassembly of government agencies, his cosmik debris endangering air traffic, and consolidation of communications infrastructure under one man who can turn it off at the flick of a switch, Musk is a Bond-villain-level threat to national and world security as well as to air traveler safety.
The Atlantic article continues, “A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is ‘very safe’ or ‘somewhat safe,’ down from 71 percent last year.”
Emphasis mine:
Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports$1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.
“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”
Delta is not the only airline that will be reporting slashed profit projections this year.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 3.6% since Trump’s second inauguration, with the S&P 500 index off 6.4% and the Nasdaq composite tumbling 11%. The small-cap Russell 2000 has slumped 11.3%.
Thank you for flying Trusk Airways. Enjoy your flight.
He fantasized about shooting people in the middle of Fifth Avenue and getting away with it. He grew up learning tax dodges from his father. He learned tough-guy bluster from mob consigliere, Roy Cohn: attack attack attack; admit nothing, deny everything; always claim victory. He bought concrete from firms run by mafiosos Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano for building Trump Plaza and Trump Tower.
He ran for president not to be president but to build his profile, enjoy the public attention, and enhance his family brand. Then on November 8, 2016, to his surprise, he won. His mafia stylings that worked in New York brought legal scrutiny in D.C.
Now with Elon Musk’s help he actually gets to kill people in bulk from the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and get away with it. But the man who doesn’t use email and discourages note-taking knows how to hurt people without getting his hands dirty. He learned that in New York City. Handed a Get Out of Jail card from the Roberts court, Fifth Avenue now seems like small potatoes.
The Trump administration has terminated $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, spurring the nation’s top spender on research and development to plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique.
Trump has stopped weapons shipments to Ukraine and cut intelligence support. More people will die, says a Ukrainian MP (The London Times):
Ukraine’s key weapon systems were dramatically weakened on Wednesday after the US severed its intelligence sharing with Kyiv, leading to warnings that the move will result in more civilians dying.
Weapons systems stopped receiving data they rely upon to hit Russian targets, hampering Ukraine’s ability to effectively defend itself against incoming attacks. There were also fears that those personnel operating UK-supplied equipment, such as Storm Shadow cruise missiles, could struggle to identify military positions without intelligence from the US.
Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian MP, told Times Radio that the “brutal” decision to pull American intelligence sharing after denying the country military aid meant “so many people will be doomed”. While insisting that the move would not change Ukraine’s resolve to fight on, she said: “It is obviously brutal and I cannot imagine how many people will pay the ultimate price for the decision.”
Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services secretary, vaccine skeptic RFK Jr., recommends eating better and ingesting castor oil for avoiding the measles outbreak that’s spreading on his watch (ABC News):
The measles outbreak in western Texas is continuing to grow with 25 cases confirmed over the last five days, bringing the total to 223 cases, according to new data published Tuesday.
Almost all of the cases are in unvaccinated individuals or in individuals whose vaccination status is unknown, with 80 unvaccinated and 138 of unknown status, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. At least 29 people have been hospitalized so far.
Two deaths are reported so far, one child in West Texas and an adult in New Mexico. Both were unvaccinated. More are coming.
Trump’s team of DOGE assassins led by Musk is busily performing “hits” on tens of thousands of civil servants more loyal to their country and their missions than to Mafia Don. They’re losing their jobs. They may lose their homes soon enough.
Proposed cuts to Medicare could leave tens of millions of low-income Americans without health care, force rural hopitals to close, and likely cause more unnecessary deaths.
In true Mafia Don fashion, Trump hopes to bribe citizens into keeping their mouths shut about it by issuing a “DOGE Dividend” (USA Today):
“We’re considering giving 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% to paying down the debt,” Trump said in a during the Saudi-sponsored FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach last month.
If it happens, people will get “a piece of the action” taken out of the hide of neighbors who’ve lost government jobs or private-sector jobs that cease to exist because Musk has cancelled contracts that paid their mortgages, fed their families, and supported local businesses.
As far back as he can remember, Donald Trump always wanted to be a gangster. But getting rich as a mobster is nowhere near as sweet as being able to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people you’ll never know. And get away with it. That’s power. Mobsters just whack individuals. Donny and Elon have an entire republic in their sights.
Meanwhile, where I live boxes of breakfast cereal now go for $5.
Jake Tapper doesn't bother fact-checking Rep. Brandon Gill as he lies that Trump "inherited an economy and country that is bankrupt" pic.twitter.com/lajVtrdbEu
Trump’s Grand Narrative that rationalizes all the chaos and extreme policies is that Biden left him the worst economy since the Great Depression, maybe even worse than that. They are all saying that it was in a massive crisis requiring emergency measures to keep the country from collapsing.
The media is not correcting them and people are all too eager to believe that the price of eggs is a catastrophe and that we must to anything and everything including decimating the federal government in order to bring it down. We are a very stupid country and our mainstream press is not helping.
Trump believes, and not without reason, that he can convince most Americans that up is down and black is white and he may just do it. It’s Bizarro World.
Reality just last fall:
Look what Biden inherited and what he did with it:
And yes, inflation spiked briefly in the wake of the pandemic due to the supply chain being disrupted but look where it ended up: right in the range of where it had been during the previous 10 years. By October it was down to 2.6%. (Let’s see how that holds up with Trump reckless temper tantrums.)
I don’t want to hear anyone agreeing that the economy was in crisis when Trump took over. It is now and it’s all on him, every single bit of it. If he had any faculties left he would have played it cool and had Elon do some “studies” and hold off on the tariffs and he could have ridden the Biden recovery to success the way he rode Obama’s. Instead he’s acting like the demented old man he is and here we are.
With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.
No public memorial services are planned.
In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of your choice.
A Facebook page, ‘In Memory of Kevin Drum’, has been created as a place for friends and family to share memories of Kevin. I encourage you to post your thoughts and memories there.
Thank you to all the wonderful blog readers who supported, encouraged and challenged him through the years.
He will be greatly missed.
Kevin was one of the earliest bloggers, maybe even a bit before me, and like a vanishingly few number of us he kept to the form over these last 20+ years. First with CalPundit, then Political Animal at the Washington Monthly, his eponymous blog at Mother Jones and his last one called Jabberwocking he was a blogger to the core.
They were all great blogs, delivered with his characteristic sharp, informative style. He was one of the people who created the form way back when this whole thing was the wild west and his particular method was unique in its calm, clear, analytical style which we all linked to in order to back up our more hyperbolic analyses. We trusted him to be right and he always was.
He invented Friday Cat blogging as a way for all of us to take little breather at the end of the week and remind our readers and ourselves that we were human beings. ( My Friday Night Soother was modeled on it.) Kevin and his famous cat Inkblot were even featured in the NY Times:
“It brings people together,” said Kevin Drum, who began the cat spotlight last year on his own blog, Calpundit (www.calpundit.com). “Both Atrios and Instapundit have done Friday catblogging. It goes to show you can agree on at least a few things.”
He was not only a great blogger, he was a real mensch. His former Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffrey revealed on BlueSky that he had always refused raises, telling them to give the money to younger journalists. He was always kind to me as well. Although we lived not far from one another we only met in person a handful of times, once when he generously hosted a book party for Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland. But we emailed from time to time although I did not reach out as often as I should have as his illness progressed over the past few years.
I read his blog religiously, however, and I learned so much from his writing, all the way until the end. I will miss it very much. R.I. P. Kevin. Say hi to Inkblot.
