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What happens when you hand the country over to greedy billionaires and total morons?
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Welcome to another edition of F**king Mondays! In the round up today:
Benevolent billionaire or rapacious oligarch?
In tech bro MAGA world Elon Musk is the savior of humanity, a high IQ genius with a messianic vision to rescue us from bad design, trans extremism, and Big Government. His cars are cool, his neurological disorder is edgy, and his willingness to blow things up makes him the perfect antidote to the bloated Deep State.
In Musk they see an iconoclast willing to do what no one else is. His position in the Trump administration is a sort of deliverance — a messianic fusion of free-market purification, neurodivergent genius, and the cold efficiency of iterative disruption. Musk’s army of basement-dwelling, racist, adolescent edgelords might be distasteful, but they are only doing what is necessary to save the Republic from bureaucratic mummification.
Those outside of the Musk fan club see something entirely different. In Musk they see a deeply malevolent, power hungry oligarch using his immense fortune to destroy democracy in America and around the world. For whatever good the Tesla and Space X founder might have done, his transformation into a far right conspiracy theorist makes him uniquely dangerous, particularly given his new alliance with Donald Trump. In DOGE they don’t see a destroyer of bureaucracy, they see a cynical tool being used to transfer wealth and power upwards to the billionaire class.
So which narrative is right?
My contention in cases like this is to always follow the money, or as Roman consul Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla was fond of saying, cui bono? A recent report in the New York Times sheds some light:
Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the globe.
In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut out during the Biden era.
At NASA, after repeated nudges by Mr. Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet.
And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself, Starlink satellite dishes have recently been installed, to expand federal government internet access.
Musk’s formula is simple: claim government waste and inefficiency, fire everyone, then gobble up contracts that just happen to benefit his companies.
Another glaring piece of evidence is the fact that DOGE hasn’t actually found any real government waste — a fact even libertarian outlets like Reason have reported on extensively. Consider this:
The most fleshed-out components of the estimated savings are grant and contract cancellations, which DOGE has touted on its website and X account. But news outlets have repeatedly identified embarrassing and consequential mistakes in those numbers, including contracts that had not been awarded yet, contracts that were not actually canceled, contracts that were canceled before Trump took office, contracts that were counted multiple times, conflation of contract caps with actual spending, the inclusion of past spending in estimates of future savings, and overvaluation of contracts, such as the notorious data entry error that transformed an $8 million Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract into an $8 billion cut.
What about "workforce reductions"? The Office of Personnel Management reports that 75,000 or so employees accepted the Trump administration's "deferred resignation" offer, agreeing to quit in exchange for "a severance package of eight months of pay and benefits." Those departing workers represent about 3 percent of the federal government's civilian employees, who together cost about $300 billion a year in salaries and benefits. The annual savings therefore could amount to something like $10 billion—one-tenth the savings that Elon Musk, the unofficial head of DOGE, projected.
In other words, DOGE is a branding exercise used to disguise Musk’s real agenda. And that real agenda is what fascist oligarchs have done throughout history: decimate democratic government institutions and then rebuild them in a way that centralizes power under a single leader or ruling elite. Musk’s brutalist methods are designed to destroy morale so he can exert maximum control over what is left. Through X, he spreads propaganda claiming that the current system is corrupt, weak, or broken, attacks the media, judiciary, and legislature as enemies of the people, and then proposes himself as the only solution.
Musk isn’t dismantling the state to save it — he’s gutting it to own it.
Trump is destroying the far right in Europe
When Trump was re-elected in 2024, far-right politicians across the world took it as validation. Technocratic liberalism was out, ethno-nationalism was in. This was especially true in Europe, where far-right nationalist parties had already been gaining traction. With Trump back in power, Europe’s future as a liberal, pro-democracy political union looked uncertain.
Unfortunately for the far right, Trump’s ability to destroy everything around him is unparalleled. In just a few months, his incompetence has created a nightmare for his ideological allies across Europe. His belligerent stance on NATO and Ukraine has put leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen in awkward positions — exposing divisions, undermining their credibility, and forcing them to distance themselves from him. As The Economist reports:
“Plenty of hard-right European leaders remain delighted by Mr Trump... But for Ms Meloni and Ms Le Pen, the American president could become a serious headache. Europeans don’t like him: a tiny 6% of French and 8% of Italians told a poll in March that Mr Trump is ‘a friend of Europe’. The more his blustering brand of nationalism seems damaging to the continent, the more voters in Italy and France may doubt its local versions.”
For many liberal leaders, this is a political gift. The chaos in Washington gives people like Macron, Scholz, and even the UK’s Keir Starmer a chance to frame themselves as the adults in the room — steady, pro-democracy, and serious about European security.
Their response hasn’t been just rhetoric either. Liberal leaders are building a new coalition to reassert European independence. The recently launched “ReArm Europe” initiative aims to boost defense spending and build more weapons at home. Countries like France and Germany are pushing for tighter military coordination, and even traditionally U.S.-aligned leaders like Meloni are now hesitating to follow Trump’s lead on Ukraine.
As my friend Bob Cesca is fond of saying, Trump always makes things worse for Trump.
Why you don’t hire morons to run the government
I understand being ideologically aligned with Donald Trump. You want low taxes, stricter immigration controls, and an end to DEI. But voting Trump back into power means accepting a leader who once altered a hurricane forecast with a Sharpie rather than admit he was wrong. And it’s not just Trump — it’s the merry band of drunks, sexual abusers, and halfwits he insists are “the best people.”
Take, for example, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who recently discussed potentially dangerous classified information in a Signal chat about Yemen — accidentally sent to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.
There’s genuine outrage in Congress over this national security breach, but the public has become so numb to Trump-era incompetence that it barely registers. Hegseth, whose qualifications for running the military include a stint at Fox News and running a small nonprofit, is just one more example of what happens when loyalty to Trump outweighs competence, experience, or even basic judgment.
You may like Trump’s policies — but the price of admission is government by grievance, leadership by incompetence, and chaos without end.
