Into the ditch
Elon Musk arrived triumphantly in Washington “brimming with Silicon Valley swagger,” Zachary Basu writes for Axios. He leaves (to spend more time with his several families?) “with his reputation wounded, relationships severed, companies in crisis, fortune diminished — and little to show for DOGE but chaos and contested savings.” His plan to slash $2 trillion in “bureaucratic fat” from the government has worked as well as his self-driving cars.
Don’t go spending your “DOGE dividend” on tariff-inflated consumer goods just yet. DOGE, an enterprise worthy of the Trump name, has cut only about $150 billion. And that number is contested.
But wait! There’s less!
Elizabeth Williamson of The New York Times explains:
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.
Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Mr. Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department.
“Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”
That achievement makes Musk Employee of the Month in a Donald Trump dictatorship determined to sicken or poison us nuevo-poor. Trump’s tariff mania cost world markets $10 trillion since Inauguration Day. Don’t look at your 401k, said one analyst to Americans who have them.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake sees other “myriad signs that [Trump’s] second-term project may be falling apart.” Trump’s approval ratings are tanking:
Multiple polls this week showed Trump hitting new lows. His approval rating has been double-digits underwater in surveys from the Pew Research Center (minus-19), Economist-YouGov (-13), Reuters-Ipsos (-11) and now Fox News (-11).
Trump was already more unpopular at this point in his presidency than any modern president not named Trump; he’s now flirting with falling below where he was at this point in his first term.
But wait again!
The Fox News poll showed Trump doing well on border security (+15), but his numbers on foreign policy (-14), the economy (-18), tariffs (-25) and inflation (-26) are all worse than his overall approval rating. His tariff gambit has pushed his economic numbers lower than they ever were in his first term, with concerns being widespread and bipartisan.
Blake runs through several other figures showing Trump’s slumping approval numbers in various policy areas.
But it’s early. Trump could rebound by the midterms save for his reflex for quadrupling down rather than admit mistakes and reverse course. He came into office in 2017 with zero experience in governing but largely populated his first administration with experienced hands to ignore. Not this time. Trump 2.0 has hired, and the Republican Senate majority approved, some of the least-experienced but camera-ready team of incompetents a world power has ever seen.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s tenure has devolved into multiple high-profile problems that bolster the criticisms that the former Fox News host simply lacked the experience for such an important job. That includes his sharing of highly sensitive information on the unclassified Signal app and fighting between him and some recently departed top aides. One of those aides just published an extraordinary op-ed citing the “total chaos” at the Pentagon and suggesting Hegseth can’t continue.
I didn’t believe my ears in the car on Thursday. Trump declared progress toward peace in Ukraine when asked what concessions his man-crush, Vladimir Putin, was prepared to make.
“Stopping the war. Stopping — taking the whole country,” Trump declared. “Pretty big concession,” he added. Putin not killing anyone who gets in his way? That’s some Art of the Deal.
On that, Heather Cox Richardson wrote on Thursday:
“Vladimir, STOP!” wrote President Donald Trump on his social media site this morning. Yesterday Trump berated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky for rejecting a peace deal that heavily favored Russia; hours later, Russia launched its deadliest assault on Kyiv since last July, killing at least eight people and wounding more than 70 others. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing,” Trump posted. “5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!”
Trump won the presidency by assuring his base that he was a strong leader who could impose his will on the country and the world. Now he is bleating weakly at Putin.
Trump bleats come in between Trump defeats in the courts, Blake notes, from “a fast-growing and remarkable number of Republicans appointees:
It’s not just the Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices who have sided against him on deportation issues; it’s also Republican appointees ruling against him and using strong language. In just the past three weeks, a trio of GOP-appointed judges have cast the administration as making no real effort to comply with the law, including using such phrases as “brazen” and “a path of perfect lawlessness.”
And just Wednesday, a Trump appointee became the second judge to order the administration to facilitate the return of a man it wrongly deported to the El Salvador prison.
In sum: It’s all an increasing mess. Trump might try to muddle through — including by pressing forward on tariffs and risking a constitutional crisis by challenging the courts to actually make him abide by their orders. Trump has clearly demonstrated he feels more untethered in his second term, and congressional Republicans have shown very little appetite for standing in his way.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa (“How to Stand Up To a Dictator”) watched a dictator rise and democracy fall in her native Philippines. She warns that, incompetent or not, “Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.”
I ignored advice, looked at my retirement funds and wondered how long it will take for them to claw their way back. Or if it will matter by then.
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