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Author: digby

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Gabe Sherman at Vanity Fair has many contacts in Trump world. He reports on Elon Musk’s crazed rampage in detail and asks whether Trump’s on board:

“Trump is the king on the chessboard and Elon is a bishop. Sometimes the bishop takes the lead,” the Republican said. Plus, it’s useful for Trump if Musk takes political heat. “Trump can let the public hate Elon and Elon doesn’t care. So then Trump can come in and save a few programs and look like the restrained one. He can be ‘Trump the Merciful King.’”

But other Republicans I spoke to said Trump can’t––or won’t––challenge Musk because Trump understands Musk’s unprecedented power. Musk is reportedly worth nearly $400 billion and has more than 216 million followers on X. (Trump has less than half that follower count on X, plus an audience of 8.8 million on Truth Social.)

“How can he say no to Elon?” a former Trump campaign staffer said. “You think he wants to go to war with him?”

It’s ironic that Trump finds himself unable to control Musk, as Musk is doing to Trump what Trump did to the Republican Party. Trump gained control of the GOP by pushing the outer limits of what behavior the GOP would tolerate. Trump’s grip on the MAGA base eventually made it impossible for the establishment to rein him in. Musk has a similar psychic hold over his massive fan base, which gives him significant leverage over Trump. Trump also knows that Musk is willing to out-crazy him.

“Elon is autistic and that scares people. He’s unpredictable and prone to tantrums,” another Trump ally said. (In 2021, while hosting Saturday Night Live, Musk disclosed publicly that he had a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.)

That said, the longer the “President Musk” memes continue, the more Trump might be motivated to act. It’s been a truism since Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015 that there can only be one star in the Trump show. “Trump has a limit to others getting credit,” a prominent Republican strategist told me. Musk’s falling popularity could also hasten Musk’s defenestration. An Economist/YouGov poll recently found that Musk’s Republican support has dropped 21 points since shortly after Election Day. “Elon is going to blow himself up,” the Trump ally said.

I think we all expected Trump to tire of him before now and he hasn’t so who knows? I do think it gives Trump way too much credit to say that he’s strategically allowing Musk to take the heat so he can be the good guy. There’s no evidence that Trump thinks like that at all. I think it’s far more likely that Trump just doesn’t care much about what Musk is doing and until it causes him a problem he’s happy to let him do it.

Remember, Trump didn’t run on slashing and burning the entire government. He ran on destroying the Deep State which he sees as anyone in the government who isn’t 100% loyal to him personally. He wants vengeance. He wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He wants to make money.

Musk is destroying the government to reorder the way the world is structured for his own benefit. Those aren’t the same things.

Musk knows exactly how to play him:

So It Begins

I think we can see where this is leading: “let them enforce it”

Ever since Justice it was understood that the ultimate interpreter of the executive’s “legitimate power” under the Constitution (specifically Article II) was the Supreme Court. I think we’re about to see that concept contested, which has kept our system more or less stable short of civil war, in a way we’ve never seen. It could be the whole ballgame.

By the way, Elon responded to that tweet:

The gall.

Pump And Dump?

Say it ain’t so…

Somebody made a killing on Trump’s memecoin scam, somebody who obviously knew it was coming. Gosh I wonder who it might be?

The curious trade came a little past 9 p.m. on Jan. 17 — a $1,096,109 bet less than two minutes after the soon-to-be president of the United States posted on his social media account that his family had issued a cryptocurrency called $Trump.

In those first minutes, a crypto wallet with a unique identification code beginning 6QSc2Cx secured a giant load of these new tokens — 5,971,750 of them — at the opening sale price of just 18 cents each, starting a surge in the $Trump price that would soon reach $75 per token.

This early trader, whose identity is not known, walked away with a two-day profit of as much as $109 million, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times.

But the fast profits for early traders, whose names are unknown but some of whom appear to be based in China, came at the expense of a far larger number of slower investors who have cumulatively suffered more than $2 billion in losses after the price of the token crashed.

As of the middle of this week, more than 810,000 wallets had lost money on the bet, according to an examination that the crypto forensics firm Chainalysis performed for The New York Times. The total losses are almost certainly much larger: The data does not include transactions that took place on a series of popular crypto marketplaces that started offering the coin only after its price had already surged.

The price of $Trump hovered around $17 this week, less than a quarter of its $75 peak value.

Whether people made or lost money, it was stellar business for the Trumps. Nearly $100 million in trading fees have flowed to the family and its partners, although most of that has not yet been cashed out, the Chainalysis data shows.

Imagine that. And it’s all perfectly fine, apparently. It’s basically a vanilla Pump and Dump scheme dressed up in techno spin.

I think we’re supposed to feel pity for the victims:

In the days before Mr. Trump was sworn in, Shawn M. Whitson, 40, of Walnut Cove, N.C., owner of a small computer repair business, had celebrated Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. “Today, we take our country back!” Mr. Whitson wrote, with a photo of Mr. Trump, on Inauguration Day. He also expressed hope that $Trump would rise in price.But by the end of January, Mr. Whitson was fed up. “Done with this $Trump crap,” he wrote in a social media posting. Mr. Whitson, reached by The Times on Friday expressed disappointment. “That coin is a joke.”

I can’t say I feel sorry for him. Trump’s schemes are legendary. He should have known better.

How many Trumpers will lose their shirts on this one and come back for more?

Last week, Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Mr. Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, announced that it was moving into the financial services industry by creating a brand known as TruthFi that will offer investment products tied to Bitcoin.

Trump Media’s chief executive, Devin Nunes, called the offerings “a competitive alternative to the woke funds and debanking problems that you find throughout the market.”

“The Fun POTUS Is Back”

He’s a barrel of laughs

He’s a real comedian:

Prince Harry can breathe freely in Montecito, because President Donald Trump has ruled out deporting the self-exiled British royal.

Harry’s immigration status is the subject of litigation in Washington DC, with the Heritage Foundation alleging that he may have concealed past illegal drug use that should have disqualified him from obtaining a US visa.

But the president told The New York Post Friday that he isn’t interested in throwing Harry out of the country.

“I don’t want to do that,” he said.

“I’ll leave him alone. He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.”

If there was ever a reason for Harry to mend fences with his family this is it. I know Ted Cruz’s ilk are fine with the president of the United States crudely insuring their wives but there’s not reason for Harry to put up with it.

This is the schoolboy bully part of Trump that the right just loves which says everything about them. Look at the way they celebrated:

I didn’t realize they were thinking of deporting Harry over his past drug use. But Elon Musk using every drug in sight is just fine. GTK.

Our Wall Street Overlords

Just as awful as they ever were

If we’re in the business of removing statues….

Bill Cohen at Puck surveyed some of the Masters of the Universe about Trump’s first moves and they are fine with it. Who are these jerks?

One Wall Street executive, who almost went to work for Trump this time around, artfully told me that the president was simply using the Oval Office and the media as his bully pulpit, itself a form of performance art. “Bullies love to see people cower in fear,” he said. “Why be a bully if you can’t do that? So how much of this is just, ‘Justin Trudeau, I’m gonna fuck with him,’ or ‘Mexico didn’t really do shit to stop immigration, time for them to shit their pants a little bit. Let’s get a reset’?”

A former Wall Streeter who did a stint in Washington described the first two weeks of Trump II as “a giant blender” of “fog and chaos” stirred up to distract people from three of Trump’s near-term goals: getting his “idiot cabinet picks” through the Senate; positioning Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to head the O.M.B., to “take the shit out of the budget”; and getting congressional approval for the extension of the about-to-expire Trump I tax cuts. And, he said, Wall Street is on board. “[The tax cut extension] is what they really want,” he explained. “Until he can’t do that, they’re perfectly happy to back him and focus on the things that warm their hearts, like shutting USAID. But if this goes on too long and/or the stock market goes down, they’re not going to be so pleased.”

Oh really? What a great group of guys. They’re also as puerile and idiotic as Trump and Musk:

Wall Street doesn’t like or want tariffs, per se—“There are only losers with tariffs,” the banker said—but many accept them as part of the price of doing business with Trump. Indeed, many machers preferred Trump II over Biden or Kamala Harris. “To me, it was a prisoner’s dilemma,” this person continued before articulating the internal monologue in the highest ranks of the banking industry. “We had an anti-business Biden opportunity, or a pro-business Trump, who may put tariffs on, or may not. But if he puts them on and he realizes they’re bad, he may take them off within 24 hours. So they said, ‘We’d rather deal with Donald Trump because he’ll take our phone calls and we can tell him how bad these are, whereas Joe Biden won’t take our phone calls.’ Corporate America felt like we could sway Trump. We could get to him, and convince him that these tariffs are wrong.” 

In fact, other than the blanket pardons for the January 6 offenders, and Trump’s press conference where he blamed the fatal helicopter-jet collision near the Potomac on D.E.I., the donor class on Wall Street is generally happy with Trump II, according to this banker, a reality that much of the media still refuses to comprehend. “There are very good reasons to criticize D.E.I., but in this context, it’s a little insane,” he said, referring to Trump’s post-crash commentary. “And insulting and in bad taste.” On the other hand, he continued, “everyone is thrilled” that the “apple cart” at USAID is getting turned over and that people are seeing who is getting paid what from the Treasury—“sort of all that DOGE stuff,” he said, which Wall Street types are giving “a standing ovation.”

Uh, that is not a prisoner’s dilemma. He must have been high on Adderall and Ayahuasca on the day they taught that at the Wharton School of Business. How much do you want to bet he’s the same guy who celebrated because he can now say the word “pussy” in the workplace again?

It’s not about money anymore:

But given the largely foreseeable chaos of the past few weeks, was there anything else that motivated the Wall Street donor class to lean so heavily into Trump last November, I wondered? “They don’t think being rich is enough,” one of my sources told me. “They think they need to be venerated for being rich, and Biden didn’t venerate them for being rich. The idea that wealth equals merit tends to be appealing to the wealthy. They want wealth accumulation to be seen as making them like Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci. These guys are trying to be Averell Harriman, but they’re going to end up being Bebe Rebozo.”

I think this is obviously right. Recall that after the financial crisis they were all whining like 5 year olds about being criticized for destroying the economy. At heart they’re all whiny little bitches.

Trump is one of those guys. He’s desperate to be loved and actually is by millions of people, cementing his grandiose delusions about himself and his personal power. Musk, on the other hand, has a slightly different need. He’s an edgelord, defined as “a person who affects a provocative or extreme persona, especially online — ‘edgelords act like contrarians in the hope that everyone will admire them as rebels.'” In another life, he could have been a mass shooter. I suspect more of those Wall St guys are like Musk than Trump — overgrown adolescent bullies.

We really have to do something about these people. We let it go way too far and now it may destroy us all.

Leopards And Faces

How ’bout them eggs, MAGA?

Oh heck, look at this:

The Trump bump in consumer confidence is already over. 

Tariff threatsstock market swings and rapidly reversing executive orders are causing Americans across the political spectrum to feel considerably more pessimistic about the economy than they did before President Trump took office. 

Consumer sentiment fell about 5% in the University of Michigan’s preliminary February survey of consumers to its lowest reading since July 2024. Expectations of inflation in the year ahead jumped from 3.3% in January to 4.3%, the second month in a row of large increases and highest reading since November 2023. 

“It’s very rare to see a full percentage point jump in inflation expectations,” said Joanne Hsu, who oversees the survey. Republicans have come off a postelection surge in confidence, she said, and Democrats and Independents also seem to believe that economic conditions have deteriorated since last month. 

Morning Consult’s recent index of consumer confidence, too, fell between Jan. 25 and Feb. 3, driven primarily by concern over the country’s economic future. 

“I don’t like the turbulence. I don’t like the chaos in the market,” said Paul Bisson, a 58-year-old, who writes proposals for a flight safety company and co-owns a dog daycare in San Antonio. Bisson voted for Trump, but feels “his policies have led to that chaos.” 

Bisson is hoping to retire in the not-too-distant future, and is worried that won’t be possible if Trump follows through with his tariff threats rather than just using them as a negotiating tactic

“That will make the economy worse, and that’s not what we signed up for.”

Yes it is what you signed up for you moron. He said tariffs were his favorite word in the English language! He talked about them incessantly! They aren’t a negotiating tactic as we just found out when he backed down once Canada and Mexico told him they agree to do what they’d already planned to do before he became president. He just likes to throw his weight around and, in his mind, they’re a way to make the country rich like it was in the 1890s. Whether he follows through on any of them time will tell but you can bet he’ll be issuing more threats and causing more turmoil in any case.

If these people like Trump and voted for him because he owns the libs (which is the real reason they like him) they should just admit it. Saying they didn’t sign up for him to wreck the economy is ridiculous. That’s exactly what they signed up for — and much, much worse. he didn’t try to hide it.

The FCC Police

Apparently it’s now illegal for the press to cover live events that the government doesn’t want them to cover. Good to know:

The Federal Communications Commission is investigating San Francisco-based KCBS for its coverage of immigration enforcement actions in San José last month, sparking concerns from press freedom advocates and drawing right-wing backlash to the radio station.

In an interview on Fox News, Trump-appointed commission chair Brendan Carr said he opened the investigation after KCBS shared the live locations and vehicle descriptions of immigration officials on Jan. 26.

“We have sent a letter of inquiry, a formal investigation into that matter, and they have just a matter of days left to respond to that inquiry and explain how this could possibly be consistent with their public interest obligations,” Carr said.

First Amendment advocates worry the FCC investigation will have a chilling effect on news organizations reporting on the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans.

“Law enforcement operations, immigration or otherwise, are matters of public interest,” said David Loy, legal director for the First Amendment Coalition. “People generally have the right to report this on social media and in print and so on. So it’s very troubling because it’s possible the FCC is potentially being weaponized to crack down on reporting that the administration simply just doesn’t like.”

Loy worried that the move could deter other news organizations from pursuing reporting critical of the Trump administration.

Ya think?

This is certainly an infringement on the First Amendment but that doesn’t matter. It’s being done to intimidate the media into second guessing its coverage of the Trump administration, and Carr is particularly focused on the local press. He knows that’s a place where he can throw his weight around and get to the TV and radio stations that the FCC actually regulates.

These creeps are everywhere.

Where Does He Get Those Weird Ideas?

He lives on Twitter, so where do you think?

Musk has a lot of opinions lately about things he’s never expressed any interest in or knowledge of before. Via CNBC we find out why:

Until recently, Elon Musk seldom posted about the U.S. Agency for International Development on X, where he is wont to share his thoughts on nearly every subject. 

Then on Sunday came a flurry of posts wherein the world’s richest person, the Trump-appointed head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, described USAID, the foreign humanitarian assistance agency, as “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” “evil” and “a criminal organization.”

“Time for it to die,” Musk posted. […]

Most of Musk’s more than 160 posts about USAID have been responses to a handful of small but influential verified accounts, many of them using pseudonyms. The most popular — including posts from Wall Street Apes, Kanekoa the Great, Chief Nerd and Autism Capital — have been viewed hundreds of millions of times, amplified by Musk and his 216 million followers, according to X metrics. As the theories spread, they are repackaged, and in many cases added upon, to further the claims.  

A review of the accounts’ profiles reveals how a lengthy crusade to paint USAID as a malevolent force built up in recent years in relatively fringe internet circles, only to be suddenly elevated and acted upon by Musk. The pattern is similar to one that played out with the so-called Twitter Files in 2022, when selectively framed narratives and out-of-context internal documents were weaponized to fuel allegations of a grand government censorship conspiracy. And it is one likely to continue under Trump and Musk, who have histories of trafficking in falsehoods. 

[…]

A key voice behind both the Twitter Files and the USAID conspiracy theories is Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official-turned-conservative researcher whom Musk has promoted and interacted with on X more than 40 times in the past week. 

Benz, a self-described cybersecurity expert who briefly worked as an assistant deputy for international communications for the State Department under Trump, started tweeting about USAID in 2022. He framed its funding of a handbook on disinformation from a nonprofit democracy consortium as evidence of an agency-run global internet censorship program. 

Over the next two years, he posted waves of tweets and dozens of hours of video presentations marked with highlighted texts and red notes, scribbles, circles and arrows, flicking at a sprawling narrative of USAID as a covert operations division of the CIA in which staff members sought to enrich themselves, spread leftist ideology at home and abroad and harm Trump. The theory alleged that USAID was behind the mass censorship of Americans, as well as global efforts to manipulate social media, rig elections and quash dissent. 

“Benz runs the same playbook every time,” said Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University and author of a book about how fringe creators, including Benz, increasingly influence public opinion. “He picks a villain, pretends it has ties to the CIA or some ‘deep state’ and acts as if he has inside knowledge when he’s really just decontextualizing public content. The remarkable thing is that the masters of the universe seem to repeatedly fall for it.”

Few seemed to question Benz’s qualifications, and fewer still seemed to be aware of his identity as a former alt-right vlogger, a self-described white identitarian who posted videos under the alias Frame Game alleging a mass censorship conspiracy against white people, with links to Jewish organizations, the U.S. government and social media companies. (After NBC News published an article connecting Benz, who is Jewish, to Frame Game in 2023, he said the account was a covert effort intended to somehow combat the antisemitism it espoused.) 

This guy is now making big bucks on the wingnuts freak show circuit. So Elon Musk is destroying the US government on the word of some conspiracy hustlers on Twitter who are little better than QAnon.

It would still be terrible if Musk were the genius he pretends to be and was doing what he was doing. But it’s worse that he’s actually a drug-addled fool who’s gone down the idiotic Twitter rabbit hole. To see a country destroyed by such puerile bullshit is almost too much to bear.

From the book, “Character Limit” about Musk’s takeover of Twitter:

Short Takes

Your president at work:

Don’t blame me. I’m just documenting the atrocities that’s all.

This Is How You Do It

Josh Marshall has been pushing the idea that the best opportunity for Democrats to stop Trump/Musk’s wrecking ball is in the upcoming budget and debt ceiling negotiations that have to be done my March. It’s almost impossible for the GOP to pass anything without Democratic help and the wild, extreme nature of what Musk is doing is having the effect of making Democrats band together. He writes:

The standard should be: no help on the budget or the debt ceiling until the lawbreaking stops. Period. End of story. No wilding gangs marauding through the federal government. End the criminal conduct. Period.

That’s it. No nuance….

If you’re concerned about the constitutional crisis, I would use every opportunity to convey to lawmakers that a flat “no” on any assistance until the criminal conduct stops is the only acceptable position. It is the right thing to do, the constitutional thing to do and it is the only path that holds the possibility of meaningfully changing the situation in the short to medium term. It also demonstrates and shows an understanding of how to use power. And that is something the opposition desperately needs. Make them come to you.

I more or less said the same thing actually a while back only I phrased by saying they haven’t o get rid of Musk and DOGE, period. I think it pretty much amounts to the same thing.

Trump is very exercised about the debt ceiling and very angry that they didn’t raise it before he took office. That’s the leverage point. People are waking up to the chaos and the consequences of a government shutdown will accrue to the Republicans (as if always does) because they are in charge and should be able to get it done without the Democrats.

Meanwhile, Republicans still can’t agree on whether to do one big bill or two. Here’s the state of play from Punchbowl News:

As Johnson and the House Republican Conference search for common ground between unyielding conservative hardliners and everyone else, the Senate has gotten tired of waiting.Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced that he’s going to mark up his own $300 billion budget resolution next week, throwing a massive wrench into Johnson’s plans. Graham announced the budget-resolution markup as Johnson insisted that the House needs to move first.

The Senate’s budget plan won’t look at all like what the House is envisioning. Graham’s proposal would include $150 billion for the Pentagon and other defense programs, plus $150 billion for border security, including Trump’s border wall. There’ll also be energy policy provisions. Graham says the new spending will be offset by cuts to mandatory programs, but he didn’t say which ones.

Graham and Senate Majority Leader John Thune want to hand Trump an early win on the border, defense spending and energy policy — something the president might find attractive. Senate GOP leaders plan to return to extension of the 2017 tax cuts later this year with a second reconciliation package. If the Senate passes its budget resolution before the House moves, it would put the Senate in the driver’s seat in dictating the legislative contours of the 119th Congress.

Meanwhile, Johnson, House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) want a single reconciliation package that includes the totality of Trump’s agenda, everything from border security to energy to tax cuts. House Republicans think one bill is easier to pass than two.

Graham’s gamble — and it is one — may not make it through the House. Graham and Thune admitted as much during the Senate GOP lunch Wednesday, according to multiple Republican senators who attended the session. Yet Graham and Thune insisted that something had to be done, adding that they had little faith in Johnson or House GOP leaders.

This Senate drama shows how badly Johnson is getting squeezed on every side, just weeks after he barely survived a vote to be speaker. And that was only because of Trump’s direct intervention. Conservative hardliners spoke up in a closed party meeting Wednesday, telling Johnson that they want two reconciliation bills, not one. A number of conservative hardliners — Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and others — are backchanneling with Senate Republicans to urge them to spoil the speaker’s plans.

So far, Trump has deferred to Johnson’s one-bill strategy. But the president has left the door open to the idea that two bills may be easier. And there are White House aides who privately agree with Graham, not Johnson.

House and Senate Republicans are sniping at each other with some worried that if they don’t do their precious tax cuts early they could find themselves backed against a wall next fall when they run out. It’s a big mess and there is no reason on earth that Democrats should even think of bailing them out under these circumstances.

Puck reported this a couple of days ago:

Senator Patty Murray usually flies under the radar—she’s not a social media hyperventilator—relying on her considerable power as the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee to talk for her. So it was notable that, while news cameras flocked to outraged Democrats protesting Elon Musk, Murray firmly told Punchbowl that it would be “extremely difficult” for Democrats to agree on a spending bill when the president was “illegally blocking” funding approved by Congress. “Democrats and Republicans alike,” she warned, “must be able to trust that when a deal gets signed into law, it will be followed.”

For those versed in Murray-ese, her commentary could be interpreted only as a shutdown threat. Given their margins, House Republicans can’t pass spending bills without Democratic votes unless they achieve near total unity within their conference—a mathematical reality that gives otherwise powerless Democrats their only serious leverage. Indeed, Murray’s seemingly dry statement caught a lot of attention around the Hill.

It would not be the Democrats shutting anything down. The Republicans have the majority. If they can’t round up enough votes to pass their agenda that’s on them. If they want Democrats to help them out they have to give them something in return and Democrats want this DOGE bullshit to stop. If Republicans don’t want that then they can figure out some other way to pass their bills.

Unfortunately, the press is characterizing this as the Democrats “telegraphing a possible willingness to play chicken with the global economy” but they really shouldn’t care about that. This is too important.

Of course, when Republicans make such threats, they typically extract a few concessions, dutifully cave, and wind up dealing with the opposition to pass a compromise bill. Threats, as Donald Trump will tell you, are just jumping-off points to start negotiations. (See: tariffs.) But there are reasons to take Murray more seriously than the more prolific blusterers of the Senate. She’s the most senior Democratic senator, at the peak of her powers. She’s a close ally of minority leader Chuck Schumer, and she’s not known to go rogue. When Murray speaks, it should be assumed the entire caucus is behind her. She is, moreover, one Democrat that Republicans actually listen to. And whatever the fate of spending negotiations in March, she has crystallized how Democrats see their dispute with Musk: as a war for Congress’s very survival as an independent branch of government.

I have a sneaking suspicion there are a few Republicans who will be glad to see the Democrats take a hard line on this. They’re too cowardly to buck Trump but I believe they’ll play the game to the Democrats’ advantage if they see it could result in shutting down DOGE.

Keep in mind that Trump isn’t really into all this cutting business. It was never his thing. He thinks if he can do tariffs and drill, baby, drill he’ll get enough growth to erase the deficit without having to cut anything. But he’s willing to let Musk run with this for the moment because he’s bought into the shock and awe strategy. I just have a feeling that’s not going to last. Musk is getting too much attention and he’s making Trump look sort of weak and pathetic.

He’s not happy.