The bedlamite billionaire
Michael Tomasky on our new overlord:
It literally sounds like the plot of a dystopian science fiction movie: The richest man in the world befriends—and helps finance—another rich man who becomes president of the United States, who then gives his plutocratic benefactor carte blanche access to the operations of the federal government. The bedlamite billionaire instantly zeroes in on the obscure little office that oversees the writing of all the government’s checks, thus ensuring that he has the power to bring down the U.S. and global economy and even, if he so wishes, topple said president.
Oh, and—he’s also a right-wing extremist who recently spoke to the far-right German political party whose leaders say things like “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” He told them—with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge—that Germans placed “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” And then there’s the matter of that salute, which of course, he denies was what many people—even or especially among those who delighted in it—thought it was.
Well, yes, but clearly Tomasky is suffering from Musk derangement syndrome.
Musk wrote on X over the weekend, according to CNN, that his team had “discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once.”
He was trying to make this sound scandalous. It’s not. Not remotely! The opposite would be scandalous. The bureau spends the money Congress has approved. If fraudulence or terrorism is to be identified anywhere, that’s Congress’s job. Never denying a payment is the bureau’s job.
So that’s how it’s unprecedented. It’s antidemocratic because some of these people don’t even appear to have real positions in the government. Yes, Donald Trump was elected. But Elon Musk was not. And press accounts of these goings-on, you might notice, don’t identify a number of the people working on this effort by their official titles, presumably because they don’t even have them. They’re just called “Musk associates.” One, a man named Baris Akis, heads a venture capital firm. His presence at transition-period meetings, CNN reports, “raised alarms among some of the Treasury officials present for those early meetings, since he was not an official member of the incoming Trump administration and didn’t have a security clearance at the time.”
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Over the weekend, Mike Flynn tweeted out the federal dollars that go to Lutheran services for immigrants and refugees. They are vast amounts, to be sure, but they were approved by Congress. Musk replied to Flynn that “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”
Congress is illegal, and Musk is the cop and the prosecutor and the jury who will shut it down. Good times.
Is it just a matter of time before they cut off congress altogether? It seems like they are heading that way. And congress seems to be OK with it so far. I would expect more protest from congress at this point.
More protest and more action. So would I. I’m horrified that everyone is just lying down.
As an outsider, it appears to me that Congress has shut itself down.
All Senate confirmation hearings should be stopped, forthwith.
The House and Senate should be sitting under whatever your equivalent of our urgency rules are and legislating a halt to this farce.
And the population should occupy the streets until Congress does its job and removes the scum from 1600 Penn under whatever provision of the Constitution that removes sick Presidents.
Of course, one man can write 100 Executive Orders in a day while members of Congress are still looking for their jocks and wondering what to have for lunch!
I haven’t seen much of our resident Musk Whisperer lately, I wonder if this is too much for even he to defend.
Republicans think Trump (and by extention Musk) is Their Man, when in fact they’re out for themselves. As long as the Republicans have some illusion of control, or correspondence of interests, they’re fine with what’s happening (though you could imagine, as someone else pointed out how they would have reacted to such access and power being handed to George Soros). They won’t complain until things impinge upon them personally, until it’s their oxen in the hamberders. Because this hasn’t happened yet, they are not alarmed at the erosion of Congressional oversight and power because they’re more interested in being on Team Trump than safeguarding the integrity of their own offices. The kind of stodgy, by-the-book oversight they are supposed to be exercising is getting in the way of what the Cool Kids want, and Republicans are much more interested in sucking up to them, than in upholding the Constitution. So, they’ll roll over and play dead without realizing they’re doing it. As long as it’s wrapped in Red, White, and Blue, it’s the right thing to do.
They learned the wrong lesson from January 6. They saw that Trump’s own Vice President would likely have l been murdered had the mob caught him. They have chosen the wrong side. Republicans are now aligning themselves with that mob’s goals in helping Trump and Musk take apart the very government to which they were elected rather than defending it. They think this makes them Cool Kids too, that it makes them safe. But it doesn’t. That illusion of control, that illusion of aligned interests will not protect them if Trump turns against them. They fail to realize that they will be as expendable as Pence was if the become any kind of hinderance, which they could if enough of them wake up in time to save their own jobs before they’re “retired.”
Gotta wonder what happens when Trump dies… does that break the spell and they start acting differently (not necessarily better, but different)? Their presidential primary was a preview of what Congressional Republicans would be doing this time around… they had a huge raft of people and supposedly they wanted to be president, but no one would criticize the man who saw no reason to participate (because the nomination belonged to him; it was a fake primary).
Holms @ 4 – our Musk whisperer hasn’t commented since he left a six word sneer about Musk derangement and I deleted it with an explanation (that six word sneers are subject to deletion).