Elon Musk’s Revolutionary Terror | New Yorker

Almost twenty years ago, Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandraskaran wrote a classic account of the shambolic American acquisition of the Iraqi government, “Imperial Life in Emerald City. “Most memorable he described what one Times Reviewer called “The Deadly Combination of Official Arrogance and Bookout,” which plagued the foreign occupiers from Washington, who, after the US invasion of 2003, moved into the green zone-wall that was together that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein. Young conservatives were preferred, effortless with experience. Some job seekers were asked about their views on ROE v. Wade. Others were hired after sending their resume to right-wing findation back in DC, while Baghdad spiralized for violence without control, Revamp Tace ideologists reporting to service in desert and launching an anti-smoking campaign. A clueless 24-year-old was responsible for opening an Iraqi stock exchange. It didn’t work well.

I was reminded of this gloomy chapter in American history while reading accounts this week by Elon Musk and his small army of anonymous internhacers that have been deployed on Donald Trump’s behalf inside a number of agencies to take control of computer payment systems and government Mr. -Features. A nineteen year old high school that now has access to sensitive government information is known online as “big balls.” A former trainee at Musk’s SpaceX who dropped out of the University of Nebraska is now working out of General Services Administration. Scenes with low comedy and spy film drama are reported throughout the federal government-an unclassified email list, where all recent CIA employees were sent to the White House to comply with a musk decree; Workers at NASA was ordered to “drop everything” to scrub the space program’s websites for insulting references to banned phrases such as “diversity”, “original people” and “women in leadership.” Musk and his command team at the Department of Government Efficiency, a composite agency without any legal power that Trump created at the first day back in the office, has slept in the Personnel Management Office.

In its short existence, Musk’s small occupation force has gained access to the entire US Treasury’s Federal Payment System — to which end, no one has yet-and has orchestrated the settlement of USAID, the decades old federal agency in charge of distributing US foreign help around in the world. Upcoming goals reportedly include everything from the Department of Education to Government Weather-Proecting Service and the US Aviation System. Federal employees got a deadline on Thursday at midnight to accept Musk’s offer of a government-exposed exposed upbringing- “Buyout.” A federal judge has delayed the move, which was expected to give more than forty thousand takers – far from the five percent or more of the federal workforce that Musk hoped to clean, but still a huge upheaval whose consequences will repeat for years.

In a series of posts on X, the social media place that Musk’s owner, the world’s richest man claimed it was a “criminal” business, and galled to “settle the radical-left shadow government. “This seemed like a far from his original mandate to serve as an” exterior volunteer “to advise Trump on possible budget cuts. Let the plate show that at. 3:59 IS On the day sixteen of the Trump restoration, when the Democrats sputtered ineffectively about a non -selected billionaire’s illegal power trap, Musk openly declared his project as nothing less than “The Revolution of the People. “

A day later, I spoke with a Republican who worked closely with the architects of America’s Botched Iraq -Invasion. I asked if he had been surprised by something so far in a Trump administration designed to shock. Yes, he replied – Musk’s Luske Taking over the apparatus from the huge American executive branch was something new in the annals of Global Coups. “Elon figured out that the government’s staff, information technology-rhythm in the government essentially it was the 21st century equivalent of nineteen-nineties TV tower in the Third World,” he observed, and “that you could take over the government essentially with a handful of people if you could access all that. “My friend also chose to speak on the background despite his years of public criticism of Trump and noted that a think tank he is affiliated with receives government contracts. Fear of this revolution, as in all revolutions, is perhaps the most effective weapon of all.

Two decades ago, Bush’s Republican Party chose to overthrow the remote regime in Saddam Hussein. It is worth taking a moment to reflect that only a short political life later, the government that Trump’s GOP has chosen to go for is our own.

Trump and Musk have pushed a steady stream of propaganda and lies to justify their claims as to why a revolution completely outside established laws, procedures and norms are now needed. According to a Thursday morning post on Trump’s own Truth’s Social Network, USAID – which, as far as I can tell, Trump is never mentioned on the campaign track in 2024 – one of several agencies where “billions of dollars have been the chair,” including AS an “Payout “To” False News Media “to promote Democrats. This conspiracy, he warned, could be “the biggest scandal of them all.” In the upheaval of the all-out assault on USAID, Trump’s press secretary spread in the White House, Karoline Leavitt, Absurd storyVia Musk’s team, of $ 50 million, which the agency allegedly earmarked for condoms to be sent to the Gaza Strip. When Trump later repeated the story, he had raised the non -existent wills of condoms to a hundred million dollars. Think of this as an information war -equivalent of covering fire from the artillery before the Earth’s assault begins. Days later, the United States Report with the report, which proved that there were no condoms for Gaza, taken offline. In the middle of the week it was the site back but deprived all content except a Curt message Informed readers that “all USAID staff” were placed on “Administrative Leave Global”, which became effective at midnight on Friday. In the end, the Trump administration is apparently planning to keep only about two hundred of the agency’s more than ten thousand employees.

We do not yet know to what extent this brave ploy will of course succeed. Congress Democrats and others have mobilized to defend various Embated Agencies; Litigation has been brought; Protests have been summoned. But so far, the policy can even work for Trump and Musk. Democratic strategist David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, former staff chief of the White House of Barack Obama, have both warned that they fear that their party is falling into a trap of defending USAID “My heart is with the people out on the street without For USAID, but my head tells me, ‘man, Trump will be well pleased to have this fight,’ ‘Axelrod told Politicos Rachael Bade. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut Foreign Aid.”

It is also true that if cutting the federal government is what it is all about, Trump and Musk would not bother with Tiny USAD if the estimated budget of some forty billions is less than one percent of the federal government. The point is not a political struggle; It’s a execution. They kill an agency to scare a thousand others. Congress should be one of the most important disturbed parties here, considering that it adopted the laws that authorized USAID and other departments under attack and awarded to them, but this is the Republican controlled congress in Trump’s age. Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday rejected the puror over Musk’s power play as “Gross overreaction in the media.” Perhaps the most perfect distillation of where the chosen Republican officials are right now came from North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis. When asked what Musk is doing on Trump’s behalf, he replied, “It runs for the constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he added, “No one was going to stomach over it.”

The message here is high and clear: The revolution will not be stopped at Capitol Hill. And in fact on Tuesday, two of Trump’s most controversial nominees, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., were for secretary of health and human services, and Tulsi Gabbard for National Intelligence Director was voted out of the Senate Committees after the most important Republican senators gave up their objections to them. Despite a democratic Filibuster on Thursday night, despite a democratic Filibuster all night against the nomination of Russell knowing to be Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Senate was expected to move on and confirm him. Vought is an intellectual architect for the attack on the federal government that helped write the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the new administration and he has done a little secret to the pain he hopes to cause. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said At a conference in 2023, whose ties were later obtained by Propublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work. . . . We will put them in trauma. “

Earlier this week, I spoke with one of Vought’s millions of goals, a career prosecutor who has spent decades in the Justice Department’s environmental department. The cleaning of her corner of the bureaucracy had not yet made headlines, but it had nevertheless arrived. “They’ve already arrived,” she told me. Four of the division’s eight sections of the division had been removed and awarded a task force on combating so-called sanctuary cities. Several employees whose roles involved “diversity” had been put on administrative leave. The division’s section attorneys “Law and Policy” were told that their entire office would be removed. And all that was before the incoming legal lawyer, Pam Bondi, was confirmed by the Senate. “It’s just basically as if we’re in a black hole where our leadership has been removed, but no political leadership has come in,” she said.

If trauma is the target, Trump and his Minions have already succeeded. But my source also offered a eloquent return to the mindless cut, an approach she compared to an elementary school principle that decided she rather than trimming the budget a few percent. . Should we get rid of air traffic controllers and FEMA And EPA test for lead in your children’s water too? She asked. Honestly, her defense of the federal government was better than almost everything I have heard from the fated Democrats. However, the revolution gets the last laughter: After more than thirty years of public service, she already planned to retire later in the year. Congratulations, Elon Musk.