Yes, yes, “the wheels of justice grind slowly” and all that. But when do the courts get involved?

Happy Wednesday.

Never Musk

by William Kristol

It’s grim out there. Limiting the damage done by Donald Trump and the Trumpists to our government and the rule of law, and reversing the momentum of Trumpism politically and culturally—all of this seems difficult and daunting.

Let’s be honest: It doesn’t just seem difficult and daunting. It is difficult and daunting.

It’s also as important a task as any in my political lifetime. And the good news is that difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Daunting needn’t be frightening.

Even critics must concede that the Trump blitzkrieg has been impressive. Many of our laws, norms, and procedures designed to provide guardrails against arbitrary, reckless, and lawless actions have proven ineffective.

But defensive lines can fall and the forces of freedom can still ultimately prevail. And vulnerabilities in the apparently formidable Trumpist movement have already begun to appear. Here’s one vulnerability: Elon Musk.

No one voted for Musk. Trump, on the other hand, has won the votes of 63 million, 74 million, and 77 million Americans in the last three presidential elections. Trump was sworn in as president just two weeks ago. For better or worse, the half of the country who voted for him is going to be reluctant to rush to judgment—however warranted that judgment might be!—that they made a mistake. It’s going to be hard to dramatically roll back Trump’s support for a little while. The strategy, for now, has to be more like containment.

About half the electorate also voted for Republicans just three months ago, as they have been doing pretty consistently in recent decades. The partisan polarization is both steady and deep. It seems a safe bet that in the short term, basic partisan alignment isn’t going to change suddenly. In dealing with Republicans as well, containment seems for now the best course.

Polling confirms these common-sense judgments. A Quinnipiac poll late last week showed 46 percent of voters approving of the job Trump is doing so far, with 43 percent disapproving. Trump won on Election Day by a point and half. So not much of a honeymoon—but no quick divorce either.

As for the Republican party, 43 percent of registered voters now have a favorable opinion and 45 percent an unfavorable opinion. You might think this isn’t great for the GOPb . . . until you take a look at voters’ opinion of the Democratic party: 31 percent favorable, 57 percent unfavorable. Yikes. What this suggests is that it won’t be advantageous, for now, for the democratic resistance to look like merely a Democratic resistance. A counter-attack against Trump that looks merely partisan isn’t promising.

So what’s the vulnerability? How about the richest man in the world, the second-most powerful man in the Trump White House, who is reshaping America despite never having been elected or confirmed to any public office?

There’s a striking finding in that same Quinnipiac poll from last week: 53 percent of voters disapprove of Musk playing a prominent role in the Trump administration, while only 37 percent approve. In an earlier Quinnipiac survey in mid-December, the same number, 53 percent, disapproved of Musk, while 41 percent approved. So as Musk has become ever more prominent, there’s been a slight erosion of support for him, even as Trump’s numbers have improved a bit over that period.

Turning that slight erosion into a cascade of disapproval is the task. But it should be a pretty doable one. Already, there is evidence of it happening, as relayed by Rep. Jared Golden, perhaps the most centrist Democrat in the House:

I’ve been getting a lot of calls over the past few days, and the interesting thing is none of them are about Donald Trump. They’re all about Elon Musk. My constituents, and a majority of this country, put Trump in the White House, not this unelected, weirdo billionaire.

A friend with long experience in the U.S. government who’s also a student of the Soviet Union recently remarked in an email on “the Stalinoid ethos that seems to permeate Trump 2.0.” He continued:

Since we are in the early stages of the process the closest analogy would seem to be the mid-1920s, when Lenin (Trump) was not really exercising oversight of the day to day operations of the party and government. Stalin (Musk) was busy operating the system of personnel management and accruing power that would make him ultimately an unstoppable force.

We are seeing purges and secrecy and firings and, yes, law-breaking by a bunch of arrogant young Muskovites, acting at the direction of their Alternative für Deutschland–supporting unelected and unaccountable “special government employee” boss. Americans already have their doubts about Musk. His presence, looming in the wings and off-putting to most Americans, is a vulnerability to be exploited.

Remedial Civics for Tech Bros

by Hannah Yoest

Every other day tech bros reinvent things they seem to be totally ignorant of already existing. There are whole Tumblrs documenting the phenomenon. It’s what happens when you have “STEM without the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities,” says anthropologist Holly Waters: “More ‘innovative’ tech bros who giddily reinvent rent, roommates, taxes, and now . . . roller skates. With complete, straight-faced, sincerity.”

Now—lucky us—we get to watch this same pattern play out in our nation’s capital, where a team of tech bros handpicked by Elon Musk are suddenly discovering this entity called the government and this concept called democracy. Just as Musk seemed to have never seen a bus before, his crack team in D.C. appears never to have considered any aspect of civic life or duty.

With Trump’s call to address “massive waste and fraud” in the government, Musk had a very original, very bright idea: More fraudulent government. His Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, named for one of Elon’s brain rot fixations: a dog meme cryptocurrency) is, according to the bizarre Trump executive order that duct-taped it together, supposed to “moderniz[e] Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Several executive agencies and offices already existed to do just that sort of work.

Barely two weeks into its existence, DOGE is already facing litigation. It hasn’t discovered new “waste,” just programs that Musk doesn’t like. As for making the government more efficient, what they’re really doing is staging a quasi-coup.

One theme in the reports of the young DOGEbros’ rampage through the federal government—taking over offices, demanding access to hypersensitive computer systems, threatening civil servants who stand in their way—is their combination of blithering ignorance and swaggering self-assurance. It makes sense, of course. Musk, with his arrogance and smug superiority, is the final boss of a culture that has for too long heralded STEM as a new vanguard of the intellectual elite while dismissing and trivializing the humanities as frivolous. And yikes, does it show.

Who needs to read the classics when you know how to code? Why bother to learn American history when you can write America’s future in C++? Unfortunately for everyone, it turns out running a country it’s a little more complicated than building apps or cars or NFTs fake-money schemes. The whole country is at the mercy of conceited twenty-something computer science dipshits as they get a remedial crash course in government, learning the kinds of things that college freshman in political science 101 are expected already to know.

Musk and his lackeys seem to think they are the very first galaxy brains ever to ask where the money in the Treasury goes. Apparently, according to these geniuses, no one else has ever bothered to look into it before. Here’s how one of Musk’s admiring fans imagi