"Was it all bullshit?" — Trump asked, about Elon Musk's promise to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget.

We're told in "Inside Trump and Musk’s Complicated Relationship/The president and his aides have sometimes expressed frustration with Musk, but his advisers say the two remain close" (Wall Street Journal)(no paywall encountered).

We're also told Trump has called Musk "50% genius, 50% boy" or perhaps it was "90% genius, 10% boy."

More substantively:

Musk clashed with senior White House officials, as he made dramatic government cuts without consulting others, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and senior officials in the communications office, aides said. For several weeks, top Trump aides regularly learned from news reports or cabinet secretaries what DOGE was doing—even when the cost-cutting department laid off hundreds of people or sought sensitive data from agencies, according to the aides. He also clashed with personnel aides over vetting of some of his staff, some of the people said, believing the White House shouldn’t control his team at DOGE....

I assume that's a misplaced participle and that the phrase beginning with "believing" modifies "He." Don't they have AI to fix things like that?

Anyway, the person who could promise to cut $1 trillion was the person who envisioned himself with vast, unchecked power. Was it all bullshit? Not if you let him do it. Then it wouldn't be bullshit, though it might be crazy. Even on Trump's scale of sane to crazy.

Let me cherry-pick this:

Trump grew irritated in April when he learned Musk was getting a top-secret briefing at the Pentagon on China.... He said Musk getting the briefing was a conflict of interest, two administration officials said. Trump told aides that Musk, who has space contracts, shouldn’t be working at the Pentagon....

And here's some interesting material about the Wisconsin Supreme Court election:

White House aides were... dismayed at how involved Musk became in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, because they believed Brad Schimel, who was backed by Musk and the state’s Republican party, wasn’t going to win, and the race was becoming a referendum on Musk and Trump. Musk was dismissive of those concerns, saying the polling he commissioned showed Schimel had a chance. Trump became annoyed after doing a town hall with Schimel, telling advisers that he was done with him because Schimel couldn’t answer questions cogently about abortion, according to people familiar with the matter....

Of course, Schimel lost.  

"The corruption needs to be immediately defunded. The F.B.I. should no longer exist as it’s constituted now."

"The mission should be divvied up. The money should be divvied up amongst other agencies that take the oath to their country seriously.”

Said Dan Bongino, in a 2023 podcast, quoted in "How Dan Bongino Would Run the F.B.I., According to Dan Bongino/The newly appointed deputy director of the F.B.I. has a long history of criticizing the bureau and its leadership. He has promised 'dramatic change'" (NYT).

Note: "The job, which does not require Senate confirmation, has traditionally been filled by a senior agent with vast operational experience and a deep understanding of how the bureau’s various divisions work. The last two deputy directors together had more than 35 years of experience before they assumed the role. Mr. Bongino served as a police officer and a U.S. Secret Service agent years ago, but has no experience with the F.B.I."

"The Biden administration used so-called 'climate equity' to justify handouts of billions of dollars to their far-left friends."

"It is my utmost priority to get a handle on every dollar that went out the door in this scheme and once again restore oversight and accountability over these funds. This rush job operation is riddled with conflicts of interest and corruption."

Said EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, quoted by Bari Weiss (at X).

Weiss writes: "The Department of Justice is investigating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was part of Joe Biden’s $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act. Created in the spring of 2023, and managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the fund was supposed to be a 'first-of-its-kind' program to address the climate crisis while revitalizing communities that it considered 'historically left behind.' But it appears little of the $27 billion revitalized anything—except the coffers of a range of environmental nonprofits associated with former Obama and Biden administration officials.."

Why did the WaPo Fact Checker call it "false" to say — as Trump did — "We have hundreds of thousands of federal workers who have not been showing up to work"?

I'm reading Glenn Kessler's "Fact-checking 26 suspect claims in Trump’s address to Congress/President makes false claims about border crossings, regulations, the economy, inflation and many other issues" (free-access link).

Kessler explains his judgment of falsity like this:

This is false. Trump appears to equate teleworking with not showing up for work. But he often uses inflated numbers for how many federal workers work from home. The White House budget office reported in August that 54 percent of federal employees “worked fully on-site, as their jobs require them to be physically present during all working hours,” while just 10 percent worked only from their homes. Meanwhile the Congressional Budget Office reported in April that 22 percent of federal employees usually teleworked — compared to 25 percent of private sector employees.

There are 2 problems with this fact check.

First, the numbers Kessler gives do not undermine the assertion that there are hundreds of thousands who don't come into work. There are something like 2.1 million federal employees (if you leave out the military and the postal service). Even if we restrict ourselves to the 10% who work only from home, there are over 200,000. If you add in the people who telework most of the time, that's another 400,000+. Kessler makes it look as though his numbers are powerful, but they support Trump! 

Second — and harder to notice — there's a quibble about the meaning of "not... showing up to work."

Trump is good at explaining the "5 bullet points" email.

pic.twitter.com/3IuSGe3WoK

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 25, 2025

I've been critical of what looked too harsh and unnecessarily scary, but Trump made it sound better to me in that clip (which is part of a press conference yesterday with Macron). 

As Trump put it: "A lot of people are not answering because they don't even exist." The email is a test that at least separates everyone into 2 groups, those who answered and those who did not answer. Among those who did not answer is some number of employees who are simply not there at all. "That's how badly" the government is run, Trump asserts.

Some who don't answer could still exist, but at least the nonexistent workers would be concentrated among the nonanswerers. (An answer could come "from" a nonexistent worker could answer by fraud.) 

"The email said appointees running U.S.A.I.D. were firing 2,000 employees based in the United States...."

"The mass firings are part of a series of layoffs of agency employees by the Trump administration during a broad effort to halt almost all U.S. foreign aid using a blanket freeze. The moves came after a judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration could proceed with plans to lay off or put on paid leave many agency employees and close down operations overseas...."

From "Trump Appointees Fire 2,000 U.S.A.I.D. Employees and Put Others Worldwide on Leave/The announcement, by email, came two days after a judge said the Trump administration could proceed with plans that amount to dismantling the aid agency" (NYT).

"I think we're seeing an antibody reaction from those who are receiving the wasteful and fraudulent money."

pic.twitter.com/MVOmx9lT72

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025

ADDED: In the same interview, a joint interview with Trump, Trump also used an illness metaphor. From the transcript:

They never talk about where the money is going. They just talk about, “It’s a constitutional crisis.” It’s so sad. And honestly, I think they’re bad people. I used to give them the benefit of the doubt, but you almost think they hate the country. I think they hate the country. They’re sick people.

I can't figure out who said this first — but I heard it from one progressive who was describing other progressives — They're sick people stealing each other's medicine.

But watch out for reasoning by metaphor... especially this metaphor of disease (see "Illness as Metaphor" by Susan Sontag)... and especially if you've got enemies hot to frame you as a Nazi (Hitler called Jews "a racial tuberculosis" and said "We must exterminate the Jew as one exterminates a pestilent bacillus").

Whose heart goes out to the fired federal workers?

The 60,000 people who got cut loose when the Keystone XL pipeline extension was canceled after Biden took office know the feeling. Except they weren't bureaucrats. They were skilled construction workers and engineers. https://t.co/5Xv18C84u9

— Joel Engel (@joelengel) February 17, 2025

Do the American people feel outraged when federal workers lose their job?

Or are we happy to see all this vigorous economizing? 

I keep seeing articles that seem to assume that it's a good issue for Democrats: How terrible that humble workers are getting fired! 

Is that the public opinion, or do people think the federal government is over-inflated and not terribly beneficial? Trump got elected for a reason. What's the evidence that people want to see a preservation of the status quo?

The latest article I'm reading is "Records show how DOGE planned Trump’s DEI purge — and who gets fired next/A DOGE team plans to fire federal workers who are not in DEI roles and employees in offices that protect equal rights, internal documents show" (WaPo)(free-access link).

"Elon Musk Gives Rambling Explanation of DOGE’s Work In Oval Office Address."

I'm laughing at that Mediaite headline. Musk speaks at length, extemporaneously, answering all the questions, managing his little son, keeping up good cheer, and making a lot of us viewers feel energized and optimistic, and Mediaite needs to stress that he rambled.

Remember when we had a President who was tightly scripted and couldn't find his way through the script without repeated stumbling? There was little sense that he knew what he was saying and we were utterly deprived of transparency about who was actually wielding the executive power. 

I ran across that Mediaite article because I'd googled "the woman that walked away with about 30 million," which is something Trump said to Musk as he prompted him to tell us about some "things that your team has found."

Musk said: "Right. Well, we often do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there are quite a few people in actually here who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position."

He didn't name the woman, but, as even Mediaite admits, it's Samantha Power.

More Musk rambling:

Does the average American sense that Lawrence Summers or Elon Musk is motivated by the public good?

Listen Larry, we need to stop government spending like a drunken sailor on fraud & waste or America is gonna go bankrupt.

That does mean a lot of grifters will lose their grift and complain loudly about it.

Too bad. Deal with it. https://t.co/7mrwqDxyIc

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2025

ADDED: The Summers tweet links to a guest essay in the NYT: "Five Former Treasury Secretaries: Our Democracy Is Under Siege." Excerpt:

"Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number."

"If accurate, this is extremely suspicious. When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately."

Tweeted Elon Musk.

"Good trouble."

Received a letter from POTUS today purporting to remove me as Commissioner & Chair of @FEC. There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners-this isn’t it. I’ve been lucky to serve the American people & stir up some good trouble along the way. That’s not changing anytime soon. pic.twitter.com/7voecN2vpj

— Ellen L. Weintraub (@ellenlweintraub.bsky.social) (@EllenLWeintraub) February 6, 2025

Readers of this tweet need to remember that "good trouble" is a stock phrase, not some impish creation of Weintraub's. It's serious. As Grok tells us: "good trouble" was used by John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Congressman, to describe his experience participating in protests and civil disobedience.

I can see that some people are reading her tweet to mean that she's refusing to leave, but you don't need to read it that way. On the text alone, I would say she might be abiding by his demand that she leave, even though she also wants to say that he did not use the proper method. Is she going to stay where she's been told to leave?  The reference to "good trouble" might suggest that she is, but it's in a sentence written in the past tense: "I’ve been lucky...."

From the NYT article on the subject:

Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein talk about the "crazy shit" Elon and his 6 "young wizards" have found over at USAID.

Full 3-hour episode — audio and transcript — here, at Podscribe. Full 3-hour video here, at YouTube.

ROGAN: "It's very strange that the media's ignoring it, especially the left wing media. It's just too big of a win for the right. And so they're just ignoring it. And then they're just highlighting the good things that USAID did, which I'm sure it probably did. Probably had to do some good things to like at least justify its existence."

WEINSTEIN: "As a cover story? I'm not even sure. Maybe. It doesn't change anything. Obviously this was a mechanism used to funnel money to all sorts of things that we didn't vote on, that don't make sense in light of our constitutional structure. And I'm, you know, I obviously have concerns like everybody else about where this train takes us, but seeing that structure broken up is, it's a huge relief."

"Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government/The billionaire is creating major upheaval as his team sweeps through agencies, in what has been an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual."

This is an important NYT article — with 6 authors (including Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman) — and I've been trying to force myself to blog it since yesterday evening. I'd read the article and thought of some idea of how to present it. 

"Aggressive Incursion" — was I going meditate on the meaning of "incursion" and the avoidance of its thesaurus roommate "coup"?

Now, I've delayed so long I'm tempted to just drop this and run...

Fraud in the federal government is closer to 10% of disbursements, so more like ~$700 billion per year.

Outright waste is at least 15%, so another trillion+ dollars.

Anyone who works in government knows this. https://t.co/P0622Wr2Y6

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

... but I'll go on. I'll find my way back to where I was going. Ah, yes. It was this:

"Far from draining the swamp, Trump and his administration will soon be bathing in it."

"We need to reveal the populist Trump as a plutocrat. The hypocrisy will be there in the upcoming tax legislation and slashed regulations for the powerful — all paid for by the middle class.... By returning to our roots as the voice of the middle class, we can unite both moderates and progressives in a fight against the well-heeled and well-connected."

Writes Rahm Emanuel, in "The road back to power for Democrats/It begins with messengers and messages that meet the moment" (WaPo)(free-access link).

"How GOP Senators Are Secretly Getting Ready to Surrender to Trump."

Headline at The New Republic. Article by Greg Sargent. Subheadline: "Trump wants to turn the FBI into something so draconian that the political press many not grasp it until it’s too late. And Republican senators are already giving themselves cover to go along with all of it."

Is it "surrender" if you're on his side?

I see I have an old tag "Trump's swamp draining." I'll use that for this. I created it in 2016 but never really used it in the first Trump administration.

"In Russia, you don't drain swamp. Swamp drains you."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

"The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States has effectively forked reality into two versions that are running in parallel."

"Clinton’s supporters believe they are living in a world that is a repeat of 1930s Germany, with Trump playing the part of Adolf Hitler. See this reaction for a typical example. Meanwhile, the other half of the country believes we elected a highly-capable populist who will 'drain the swamp' and bring a business approach to government along with greater prosperity. So how do you know which reality is the real one? The fast answer is that you can’t know. As I said, the human brain did not evolve to understand reality. But just for fun and education, I’ll tell you the best way dig down to the next layer of truth: Look for the Cognitive Dissonance trigger...."

Scott Adams is helping us understand the reality of our illusions.

4 Pinocchios to Trump's claim that millions voted illegally (and without them, he'd have won the popular vote too).

WaPo's Glenn Kessler tries to find some evidence to look at and finds none.

It seems to me that it's Donald Trump's responsibility to point to the evidence, otherwise he simply sounds like an agent of chaos. Why would he want to do that, right when his interest should be in appealing to our desire for resolution, peace, and a smooth transition? He shouldn't be weird! I know he won the presidency by resisting advice that he behave in a way conventional people perceive as normal, but he's not running for the presidency anymore. If he acts as though he thinks he is, he's helping his piddling adversaries. Why?!

Kessler seems to guess that Trump picked up the accusation from "purveyors of false facts as Infowars.com."

Back when Trump was trailing in the polls and was threatening to dispute the election results because the system was “rigged,” we’ve previously given Trump four Pinocchios for making a number of bogus claims about alleged voter fraud.

Among other things, he falsely asserted that illegal immigrants were tipping the results in elections, based on a misinterpretation of disputed data. Even the researcher who produced the data said Trump was taking his findings out of context: “Our results suggest that almost all elections in the U.S. are not determined by non-citizen participation, with occasional and very rare potential exceptions.”

Kessler doesn't really know what Trump knows. How can you know he's lying until he reveals his sources of information? Kessler is jumping the gun. And I'm not very satisfied by a quote from a researcher who admits that he thinks some U.S. elections are determined by non-citizen participation!

ADDED: Could Trump have been joking? It kind of makes sense as a joke, but I'm only arriving at this idea the morning after I read the tweet, so... not much of a joke. Maybe Trump will shout "November Fools!" later today.