Donald Trump Has Invented Something New and Chilling

Madness everywhere. Just glance at the headlines leading The New York Times this morning:

A Disregard for Rules Trickles Down From Trump to His Aides
Trump Takes Government Secrecy Seriously. But Only When it Suits Him.
10,000 Federal Health Workers to Be Laid Off
President Trump Moves to Punish the Law Firm Where Robert Mueller Worked

There’s more, but you get the picture. The Washington Post adds a hot scoop: Internal White House document shows agencies preparing to cut between 8% and 50% of staff.

That’s a lot of mayhem, and it barely scratches the surface. The Social Security Administration is being destroyed. ICE is throwing people out of the country for what look to be obviously political reasons, notably a scientist at Harvard Medical School who was detained in Boston and told she’s being sent back to her native Russia. She protested Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion and called for his impeachment. Wonder what’s in store for her.

Across human history, fascism has been imposed upon democracy mostly in one of two ways. First, by brute force—a military coup, that sort of thing. Second, a bit more stealthily, and legally—through legislation, executive decrees, and court decisions that hand more power to the leader.

Donald Trump is inventing a new way. Call it chaos fascism. Destroy the institutions of democracy until they’re so disfigured or dysfunctional that a majority no longer cares about them.

That’s exactly what’s happening with Social Security. The Washington Post reported this week that the SSA is breaking down: Its website “crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts.” A Wall Street multimillionaire who probably doesn’t need his Social Security check and who has pledged that he will “100 percent work with DOGE” has already cut around 12 percent of the staff and doesn’t look like he’s stopping there.

In other words: Start by lying about the agency, with absurd and false claims about 140-year-olds cashing checks. Then wreck the agency so that its service becomes crap. Let public anger at it build. And in time, they can just dismantle it and privatize the greatest social insurance system ever devised by this government and put people’s financial fate in the hands of rich cronies. If that’s not chaos fascism, I don’t know what is.

Trump probably doesn’t have some secret plan. As we know, he doesn’t think far enough ahead. Elon Musk, however, probably does. It’s no accident he called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” That statement either (1) reflected his ignorance of how both Social Security and Ponzi schemes work or (2) was made in full knowledge of how both work—that is, he knew it was nonsense, but he said it anyway because his goal is to destroy Social Security.

This applies to just about everything Trump and Musk are doing.

It applies even to Signalgate. Trump has contempt for rules and procedures, and so he appoints unqualified stooges like Pete Hegseth to run the world’s largest military, who share that contempt—who think being tough means showing the world that they can do anything they want with no consequences. Again—ignore the law, trash the rules, establish that procedure is whatever you say it is. Chaos fascism.

And it will almost certainly go unpunished. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Thursday that the Justice Department wasn’t the least bit interested in looking into it. Some GOP lawmakers are making noises about the need for an investigation of some kind. But really—are the GOP’s leaders in Congress, Senator John Thune and Representative Mike Johnson, really likely to green-light an investigation? Seems pretty unlikely to me, unless it’s done with the secret, express goal of exonerating all involved.

Some senators say the Pentagon inspector general should conduct a probe. OK, we might get that. But remember that Trump has already fired 17 inspectors general, so who’d really care if he fired one more? Break the rules, and then ensure that there’s no accountability. Chaos fascism.

And if you want an image, just one image, that absolutely screams chaos fascism? Feast your eyes upon this photo of Department of Homeland Security Secretary and noted dog killer Kristi Noem at that notorious El Salvador prison this week, the prison where the Trump administration sent a couple hundred alleged Venezuelan gang members. They positioned her in front of prisoners behind bars, most of them bald and tattooed as if extras in a dystopian sci-fi movie, warning others that what happened to those Venezuelan men could happen to you. It’s a chilling photograph—to think that this is now the kind of image the United States wishes to project to the world.

And remember—those men are being held in that notorious prison in defiance of a federal court order. Wreck the rules. Chaos fascism.

Where in the world will we be six months or a year from now? What shape will Social Security be in? Veterans Affairs? What will be the impact of all these tariffs? Trump thinks he’ll force American companies to build factories here, and no doubt a few will, enough that Pravda (Fox News) can promote them as “proof” that the tariffs were a miracle. But most economists predict—well, chaos.

Trump will orchestrate no military coup. The Republican Congress will probably pass no laws that make Trump president for life. That would be too obvious. What they’ll do is make stealthier moves across the board that discredit and destroy our democratic institutions until he and his billionaire friends can strip them for parts. Chaos fascism is here to stay.

Think we’re not in a constitutional crisis yet? We’re not. We’re in several.

One involves Elon Musk and DOGE, barging their way into the United States Institute for Peace, created by Congress under Ronald Reagan, with DOGE staffers apparently ripping the organization’s logo off the wall. DOGE is not an arm of the government. It’s a quasi-private goon squad taking a machete across Washington, D.C., at the personal whims of two men. Any non–ideologically zealous court would toss its actions in five minutes—as indeed at least one already has, with respect to USAID.

There’s so much more. The revocation of birthright citizenship. The attempted federal spending freeze. The attempted firings of agency heads. The ordered removal of federal employees with civil service protections. That birthright citizenship order—contravening the plain text of the Constitution—was issued on Donald Trump’s very first day in office. Arguably, the constitutional crisis started right then and there. Since, three different judges have blocked the order.

But shocking as all that has been, nothing touches what Trump is trying to do to Judge James Boasberg over those three planes full of alleged Venezuelan gang members. The administration’s latest legal gambit, to invoke the state secrets privilege in an attempt not to have to disclose any information about the detainees or the flights, amounts to an effort by Trump to say that he can take any action against anyone he deems a danger to the state. That’s an attempt at dictatorship.

Let’s go back in time. First of all, what was the Alien Enemies Act, whose authority Trump invoked to detain the Venezuelans? It was part of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, passed by Congress under President John Adams. If you learned high school history the way I did, you were told that passage of that law was, to put it mildly, not one of America’s finer moments. Passed as the young United States stood on the brink of war with France, with various French nationals milling about our cities, it gave the president extraordinary emergency powers. The next president, Thomas Jefferson, allowed all aspects of the broader law to expire except for the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to declare certain unnaturalized persons “alien enemies.”

It’s been invoked only three times, all during wartime. It does include language referring to “any invasion or predatory incursion,” which is what Trump is claiming. But Georgetown law prof Steve Vladeck told NPR: “No one has tried to argue that that ‘invasion or predatory incursion’ language could be used in any context other than a conventional war.” That is, until last week.

Meanwhile, the state secrets privilege has its roots way back in Aaron Burr’s treason trial, when the government suppressed a letter from a colonel to President Jefferson on the grounds that the letter contained state secrets. The Supreme Court didn’t speak on this until 1953, in United States v. Reynolds, which saw the first formal recognition of the privilege: namely, that evidence in court proceedings could be excluded if the government says its disclosure would reveal state secrets. It was invoked a few times by George W. Bush after 9/11.

Now Trump wants to use it to bar federal Judge James Boasberg from seeing specific information about two Saturday night flights to El Salvador with the Venezuelans aboard (what time they took off, where they were when Boasberg issued his initial order, etc.). Attorney General Pam Bondi (remember how she was supposed to be so much better than Matt Gaetz?) and her deputies argued that Boasberg’s requests for this information constitute “grave usurpations of the President’s powers under the Alien Enemies Act and his inherent Article II powers.”

Simultaneously, of course, Trump is demanding that Congress impeach Boasberg, calling him a “radical left lunatic” and a “local, unknown” judge. He’s the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He was originally elevated to the federal bench by George W. Bush. John Roberts appointed him to a term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He once ruled against Hillary Clinton in a case involving her emails. And: He once ruled for Trump in a case involving his tax returns.

So now we can summarize Trump’s position here. He invoked an ancient (and often criticized) law during non-wartime, which no president has ever done. A federal judge said, Hey, wait a minute and ordered the action ended (that is, he ordered those airplanes turned around). Trump ignored that order; the planes flew on. Now Trump’s attorney general has invoked yet another obscure and controversial law in an effort to shut the judge up. And finally, Trump now demands that Congress impeach the judge because of his refusal to accept the laws of the land.

It wasn’t some lefty who said, of these breaches, that Trump “has declared war on the rule of law in America.” That was conservative retired Judge J. Michael Luttig.

Let us recognize the stakes: Today, it’s noncitizens who are the victims of Trump’s lawlessness. Maybe Trump will stop there. But if this gets to the Supreme Court and a majority there upholds Trump’s position, do we really think Trump won’t at least be sorely tempted to galumph his way through that open door? What will happen when a future roundup includes naturalized citizens? Or even birthright citizens, a category we know Trump wants to eliminate? And what happens when it simply becomes anyone who the president doesn’t like?

And if the House votes to impeach Boasberg, do we really think that won’t chill and intimidate other judges? We don’t have to wait for Trump to defy the Supreme Court to think it’s a constitutional crisis. We are in crises, plural, right now. And it’s only been two months.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

You may have seen the headline Thursday that two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of fired government workers. This was, certainly, a defeat in court for President Trump and Elon Musk. But it was a lot more than that.

It was a royal spanking. One judge in particular shredded the administration’s arguments and humiliated the lawyer who was arguing the government’s case, all but openly calling her a liar. And it was something else too: a great example of the opposition working for the millions of people who are counting on it.

Let’s start with the sum and substance of the judges’ orders. Some 25,000 federal employees will be back at work Monday. One judge’s order covers the employees at the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. The other covers those at Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the General Services Administration, the Small Business Administration, and USAID.

I’m not exactly sure which employees that leaves out. But the two injunctions leave in a hell of a lot of people, people despised and excoriated by Trump and Musk and idiots like Linda McMahon, who called her terminations at the Education Department “a humanitarian thing” and says she took care to keep “the good people.” She has no business running this department—she once lied about having a bachelor’s degree in education. (Remember when that might have mattered to a few U.S. senators? Remember when a president wouldn’t even have nominated such a person?)

The judges’ rulings leave in the people McMahon heave-ho’ed. They leave in the people at the agency (USAID) Musk called a “criminal enterprise.” They leave in everyone at the hated consumer protection bureau. They leave in everyone at the IRS (under the Treasury Department). All of them were unfairly mocked and marginalized, and all of them are back on the job.

Granted, these are temporary injunctions, which last just a couple weeks. We’ll have to see where it goes after that. But if the way the arguments unfolded Thursday is any indication, especially in Judge William Alsup’s San Francisco courtroom, the administration has a long way to go in making arguments the court will find credible.

Alsup more than once called the government’s arguments a “sham.” At one point, he said to Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelsey Helland: “I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth.” At another, observing that Helland had no witnesses testifying in support of his case, Alsup said: “You will not bring the people here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so, because … it would reveal the truth. This is the U.S. District Court.… I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years, and I know how we get to the truth.”

It was no picnic for the administration in the other courtroom, either. Judge James K. Bredar in Maryland quoted Musk’s line about moving fast and breaking things, saying: “Move fast? Fine. Break things? If that involves breaking the law, then that becomes problematic.”

Complete repudiation. And it’s hardly in just these two courtrooms. Earlier this week, a third (!) federal appeals court ruled against the administration’s efforts to end birthright citizenship. And this week isn’t unusual. On February 25 alone, the administration lost three cases: on the attempted freezing of federal grants and loans, on the payment of foreign-aid-related money to government contractors, and on refugee admissions and funding.

Spank, spank, spank, spank, and spank. The law is kicking their asses. And it’s happening because a lot of people are standing up and making it happen. With respect to the cases heard by Alsup and Bredar, it’s Democratic state attorneys general who brought these suits.

When liberals take the measure of the opposition, they tend to zoom their mental camera in to a very narrow field of view. There’s a lot of complaining right now about Chuck Schumer’s decision to let the House GOP’s spending resolution have the eight Democratic votes it needs to pass the Senate.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Schumer made the wrong decision—a defensive and feeble decision of the sort I’ve seen Democrats make far too many times in my life. They’re always thinking of reasons why they shouldn’t throw caution to the wind and try something bold. Blocking the resolution would have carried risks, and yes; a shutdown might have resulted in even more harm to the American people. But rank-and-file Democrats are pretty tired of watching their party’s leaders mothball their fortitude like this.

The good news, though, is that the resistance isn’t limited to what happens in the halls of Congress. It’s in the hands of those attorneys general. It’s in the hands of governors (at least those who aren’t inviting Steve Bannon onto their podcasts). It’s in the hands of a range of nonprofit litigators who are in many cases, trust me, probably risking their funding and/or their 501(c)3 status, considering who’s in charge of the IRS.

And it’s in the hands of millions of people who are enraged. If you’re not watching Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC these days, you should. Every night, toward the beginning, she offers a sampling of that day’s protests and actions around the country—of which there are many all over the country, including in red states and towns. People are registering their shock and disgust at what’s going on.

Cast your gaze a little more widely. The resistance is, in fact, strong, and as the madness multiplies, it’s just going to get stronger.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Remember the word “sanewashing” from the 2024 presidential campaign? It referred to the mainstream media’s coverage of Donald Trump’s rallies, and their tendency to pluck out quotes for their stories that made him sound like a normal candidate when he was in fact spouting fantastical lies and gibberish and authoritarian threats. I was apoplectic about it, as were TNR’s Greg Sargent and contributor Parker Molloy.

The media sanewashed a lot of what Trump said, from his hate-filled rhetoric about transgender people to his descriptions of Kamala Harris. But in retrospect, his sanewashing on the economy probably benefited him more than anything else. The economy was voters’ top concern, and the common narrative in the press went like this: The economy’s terrible; inflation is punishing; voters blame Joe Biden, “fairly or not” (a classic dodge of a phrase); the Trump economy was strong until Covid, which wasn’t his fault, and Trump says he’ll bring down prices on day one and protect American workers with his tariffs.

Many of these claims weren’t true, and now we’re starting to see the consequences of the casual lies Trump got away with last year. How many times did we hear him say things like, “Tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”? Everybody knew then what’s obvious today. Tariffs are taxes. They raise prices on Americans. A lot of people said it, mostly Democrats, but Trump denied it, and the right-wing media-political complex that exists to support his every lie cranked into gear to say tariffs are great.

That was then. Now we’ve moved from campaign rhetoric to policymaking, and what we’re seeing is even more obvious and embarrassing than I’d imagined. Tariffs were the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign—they were his most important proposal on the most important issue to voters. It doesn’t get more central than that.

And now we’re seeing that it’s a joke. Trump has twice now imposed sweeping tariffs and twice now withdrawn or delayed them almost immediately in the face of criticism and the plunging stock market.

Can you imagine if Harris had done that? If any Democrat had done that? If any other Republican had done that? Imagine that John McCain or Mitt Romney had run on some core economic promise and had won, and then once in office had put forward that core proposal but been hammered by the reaction and reversed course within 24 hours?

Their credibility would have been shot. They would have had their defenders, but even most Republicans at that point would have admitted that it was embarrassing. We’ve had a few Republicans criticize Trump’s tariffs, but most, as usual, are silent. Dear Leader can do no wrong.

And on the broader issue of economic performance, we keep hearing stuff like this:

Peter Navarro: “The economy is in good shape right now because the Trump cavalry is riding to the rescue,” but the “Biden inflation” remains a problem.

Newt Gingrich: “Just as Reagan inherited Carter’s bad economy, President Trump inherited Biden’s bad economy.”

Larry Kudlow: “Right now the economy is doing poorly. This is still the Biden economy.”

Stephen Moore: “These numbers that have come in so far are really the Biden numbers.… This is a bit of the Biden hangover.”

Some of this is just normal partisan swordplay, but where Trump is involved, there is always a sense of a particularly potent Kool-Aid being drunk by all those who go out there and parrot these obvious, blatant lies—who even cheer them.

I mention “cheer” with specific reference to Tuesday night’s address to Congress. It was filled with embarrassing moments, but the biggest laugher was when Trump pledged that “we are going to balance” the federal budget.

I’m glad I wasn’t sipping a bourbon, because I would have spit it out on the dog. A lot of Democrats laughed. But the Republicans, of course, cheered wildly.

Are they kidding? How many times do we have to go over this? In the last half-century of this country’s history—50 years is a long time now—these are the numbers. They’re so lopsided that most Americans wouldn’t even believe them:

• Jimmy Carter added $25 billion to the deficit.
• Ronald Reagan added $74 billion. That seemed bad at the time; just you wait.
• George H.W. Bush added $102 billion.
• Bill Clinton reduced the deficit by $383 billion, leaving the budget in surplus when he left office.
• George W. Bush added $1.54 trillion to the deficit.
• Barack Obama got the deficit down to $585 billion; that is, he reduced it by $825 billion.
• Donald Trump added $2.1 trillion to the deficit.
• Joe Biden reduced the deficit by about $942 billion.

See a pattern there? Under Republican presidents in the last half-century, the deficit has increased by a total of $3.8 trillion. Under Democrats, it’s gone down by $2.1 trillion.

It’s a joke. And it’s a crime that Americans don’t know this and still tell pollsters that Republicans are more responsible stewards of the economy. Shame on Democrats for failing to hammer these facts home.

Ronald Reagan left office with a healthy economy. But ever since—for 40 years—the pattern, the clear and obvious pattern, is this: Republican presidents wreck the economy, and Democratic presidents clean up the mess. This is inarguable.

Fine, put an asterisk by Trump because of the pandemic. But the numbers are the numbers. If Hillary Clinton had been president during that economic collapse, do you think Republicans would have been thoughtful enough to say, “Well, in fairness to President Clinton …”

The same thing is likely to happen again, by the way, and on an even grander scale. Trump wants to cut nearly $7 trillion in taxes. Congressional Republicans want to cut domestic spending by $4.5 trillion. Even a Fox News host could do that math, if he wanted to. It equals a massive budget deficit, to say nothing of the pain about to be felt by people—the people Trump professes to love—with cuts to Medicaid and other programs that, as more and more people are learning, actually do some good things.

Can Donald Trump do that math? I doubt it. He’s an economic idiot. Always has been. He ran a good economy? No, he inherited Obama’s economy. If you compare Obama’s last three years as president (taking out a Great Recession that began before he took office) to Trump’s first three (taking out a pandemic-related collapse because the pandemic wasn’t his fault), Obama created around 43,000 more jobs per month than Trump.

These are indelible facts. As is the fact that tariffs are taxes. American consumers will pay them, as will farmers and importers, if Trump ever gets around to imposing them for real. If he keeps “imposing” tariffs and then backing off, well, it will be better for the economy than if he leaves them in place. But Democrats and our free press had better make sure that the public understands that the candidate who supposedly was “in touch” with the working class built his campaign around a proposal that’s about as real as spinning straw into gold. The sanewashing must not continue.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Elon Musk appeared on stage in oversized sunglasses, a black gothic MAGA hat, a thick gold chain around his neck—and wielding a chainsaw. Ha ha. Over at Politico’s Playbook, the new team may not have heard of the New Deal, but thank goodness they do have enough sense to know that the richest man in the world and the president he works for (or is it the other way around?) might—make that will—come to rue that cringey image.

The way Musk’s DOGE is going about these cuts is the equivalent, as I heard former Biden administration official Mitch Landrieu say on TV this week, of a man thinking he needs to lose 30 pounds and deciding to saw off his leg. That’s funny, and true. But this is even worse. A man sawing off his leg hurts only himself. What Musk is doing will hurt millions of people in ways that we’re only beginning to see.

Here’s one small example, which you likely haven’t read about but which I take a little personally. If you’re one of my regular readers, you know that I was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and went to my hometown university, West Virginia University, or WVU (not UWV, thank you). A week ago, West Virginia Watch, a small nonprofit news organization in the state, moved a story noting that the university expects to lose $12 million annually in funding that supports cancer and vascular research.

Under dynamic Dean Clay Marsh, a native of the state recruited back to West Virginia from Ohio State by WVU President E. Gordon Gee (and the son of hell-raising newspaper editor Don Marsh, who once upon a time made The Charleston Gazette one of the most aggressive regional newspapers in the country), the cancer institute has made tremendous strides. The cuts, a university spokeswoman told West Virginia Watch, could cost the school the faculty it has recruited to do the research and conduct the clinical trials that could lead to the breakthroughs that would save a lot of lives in the state with the third-highest cancer mortality rate in America.

And if it’s $12 million at the smallish West Virginia University Health Sciences Center, imagine what it is at New York University, or UCLA, or Johns Hopkins, or even much larger state research hospitals in Florida or Washington. And it’s happening to every state university medical system in the nation.

But the broad story here is far worse. The real-world impact of the cuts is bad enough. What’s even worse is the cynicism bred by the endless lies told by Musk, promoted by the right-wing media, and bought hook, line, and sinker by so many Americans. The lies promote the same old right-wing ignorance about how the world actually works.

The right-wing myth about how things work is that the federal government is full of waste and bloat and you could cut two-thirds of it and nobody would even notice. This view is based on utter cynicism and stupidity on the part of right-wing shock jocks and cable hosts and others who want to promote hatred and keep people in a state of outrage.

Here’s how things actually work. It’s a vital point, one that isn’t well enough understood, and that Democrats don’t make nearly enough.

Public sector workers, for the most part, are really different from private sector workers. Private sector workers, as a rule, produce tangible things. Factory workers make car bumpers and furniture and all kinds of things. Other kinds of workers innovate and give us new products. Bankers extend the credit that makes all this production and innovation possible. We all understand that this is how an economy works, because we learn it in school, and it’s completely intuitive (yes, far too many private sector workers in modern capitalism “produce” mostly for themselves, but that’s a separate problem).

What most public sector workers do is different. In fact, it’s completely the opposite. They prevent things from happening. They don’t produce goods, but they do make sure that the goods the private sector produces are safe and don’t injure people. They don’t innovate, but they ensure that innovations aren’t fraudulent. They don’t create workplaces, but they make sure that workplaces are safe.

This is a part of the economy, too—and it’s one that no one ever thinks about. No one takes a drink of water and thinks, “Hey, I didn’t get sick or die from that water, thank you, Environmental Protection Agency.” No one gets on a flight that lands safely and thanks the Federal Aviation Administration. No one buys a toy for their infant or toddler that does not contain any parts the child could accidentally choke on and thanks the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

No one does that, and on the one hand, no one should do that. These people signed up to do this work, and when drinking water and airplane flights and children’s toys are safe, they’re just doing their jobs.

On the other hand, maybe we should thank them once in a while. They do invaluable work. And the world only notices them—and this is another big reason that public sector workers are easy to pick on, and why they have bad reputations—when something screws up. Think about it. When have, say, the goings on at the Department of the Interior made The Washington Post? Answer: When something goes wrong. You’re not likely to see a headline like “Things Going Great Inside Interior,” because that isn’t the nature of the news business. It’s not news when bureaucrats are doing their jobs right.

To its great credit, the Post last year ran a series of articles positively profiling government workers. But generally, it’s only news when these folks get something wrong. These kinds of stories appear with some regularity in our lives. But in fact, when you consider the size of the federal bureaucracy and how many things it does, they are actually comparatively rare, which means that about 99 percent of the time, federal bureaucrats are doing their jobs well.

And yes, they, too, are an important part of the economy. Imagine what the U.S. economy would be like if even 0.5 percent of airplane flights ended in a crash (domestically, that would mean 275 crashes every day) or if 1 percent of America’s beef supply carried some disease. It’s the federal government, not “self-policing” industry, that makes sure these calamities aren’t happening. If they did, the economy would be a shipwreck.

Yet here comes the world’s richest man, in his unfathomable vanity and ignorance, tearing all this to pieces. And lies. Endless lies. The most conspicuous one is this nonsense about tens of millions of 150-year-old people getting Social Security checks. Of this alleged situation, Musk posted on X: “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”

It’s all a complete lie. There are only 108,000 centenarians in the United States. The lie started because the brilliant Musk and his brilliant interns misread the data from the Social Security Administration’s computer operating system, which is 65 years old. In other words, it’s a mistake that could be rectified easily if Congress appropriated a few million dollars for the SSA to modernize its computers. That, of course, will never happen in this Congress. It’s too busy getting ready to pass tax cuts for the 1 percent.

How much will Congress’s plan cut Musk’s taxes? I don’t own a calculator with that many zeroes. The man makes, it is estimated, at least around $55 million a day. He reportedly makes around $8 million a day from the government alone, in the form of federal contracts with his businesses. Aside from the fact, dear Democrats, that every single person in America should know those figures, they also may help explain how he can see the U.S. Agency for International Development as a “criminal organization” and cancer researchers at WVU as pointless people doing the pointless work of saving pointless lives.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.