Writers and Editors

  • Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’ (Makena Kelly, David Gilbert, Vittoria Elliott, Kate Knibbs, Dhruv Mehrotra, Dell Cameron, Tim Marchman, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer, 'The Big Story,' Wired, 3-13-25) Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI. 'In Musk’s mind, Washington needed to be debugged, hard-forked, sunset. His strike teams of young engineers would burrow into the government’s byzantine bureaucratic systems and delete what they saw fit. They’d help Trump slash the budget to the bone.'

 

• Techno-Fascism Comes to America (Kyle Chayka, New Yorker, 2-26-25) When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests.

    The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms.

     In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. The historic parallels that help explain Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government.

• Trump Team Eyes Politically Connected Startup to Overhaul $700 Billion Government Payments Program (Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro, ProPublica, 4-17-25) SmartPay, a little-known firm with investors linked to JD Vance, Elon Musk and Trump, could get a piece of the federal expense card system — and its hundreds of millions in fees. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards,” one expert said.

• Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington (Simon Shuster and Brian Bennett, Time, 2-9-25) No single private citizen, certainly not one whose wealth and web of businesses are directly subject to the oversight of federal authorities, has wielded such power over the machinery of the U.S. government. So far, Musk appears accountable to no one but President Trump, who handed his campaign benefactor a sweeping mandate to bring the government in line with his agenda.

• Labor Leaders Fear Elon Musk and DOGE Could Gain Access to Whistleblower Files (Caroline Haskins, Business, Wired, 4-10-25) Companies tied to Elon Musk have dozens of workplace health and safety cases open at OSHA. Union leaders and former OSHA officials are concerned.  

• US DOGE Service Agreement With Department of Labor Shows $1.3 Million Fee—and Details Its Mission (Caroline Haskins, Business, Wired, 4-10-25) Special Edition: The most dangerous hackers you’ve never heard of.

• Struggle Over Americans’ Personal Data Plays Out Across the Government (Andrew Duehren and Cecilia Kang, NY Times, 2-19-25) Employees from Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency are gaining access to vast amounts of information held by federal agencies, sparking security concerns and legal challenges over privacy risks.

    “The episode at the Social Security Administration, which did not respond to requests for comment, has played out repeatedly across the federal government. In its stated quest to root out fraudulent government spending, Mr. Musk’s team of software engineers has repeatedly sought unfettered access to the wide range of personal information the U.S. government collects about its residents. The requests have often alarmed career civil servants used to jealously guarding data whose improper disclosure can in some cases violate federal law.”

• How Elon Musk Became a Kingmaker (Simon Schuster, Time, 11-21-24) No matter how often the Democrats reminded us that Trump’s fortune grew out of inherited wealth, multiple bankruptcies, and decades of corporate shenanigans, they could not deny Musk’s achievements as a businessman. Not since the age of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who greased FDR’s ascent nearly a century ago, has a private citizen loomed so large over so many facets of American life at once, pulling the nation’s culture, its media, its economy, and now its politics into the force field of his will. For now Musk and Trump act like partners, but their agendas do not align on everything. Both are willful, impulsive, and accustomed to being in charge. What will happen if they start to clash? Musk is “just realizing that being in control, directly or indirectly, of U.S. government budgets, is going to put us on Mars in his lifetime. Doing it privately would be slower.”

• Protesters in cities across the US rally against Trump’s policies, Project 2025 and Elon Musk (Morgan Lee, AP News, 2-5-25) Protesters in Philadelphia and at state capitols in California, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana and beyond waved signs denouncing President Donald Trump; billionaire Elon Musk, the leader of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency; and Project 2025, a hard-right playbook for American government and society. Websites and accounts across social media issued calls for action, with messages such as "reject fascism" and "defend our democracy." 

    They gathered to protest the Trump administration’s early actions, decrying everything from the president’s immigration crackdown to his rollback of transgender rights and a proposal to forcibly transfer Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The protests were a result of a movement that has organized online under the hashtags #buildtheresistance and #50501, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, one day. Websites and accounts across social media issued calls for action, with messages such as “reject fascism” and “defend our democracy.”

• ‘0 to 1939 in 3 seconds’: Why Anti-Elon Musk Satire Is Flourishing in Britain (Michael D. Shear, NY Times, 4-6-25) Humor and art have been used to mock the powerful in Britain for centuries. Now Elon Musk is on the receiving end. On the side of an East London bus stop, one of them shows Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, emerging from a Tesla’s roof with his hand pointing upward in a straight-armed salute. “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds,” the ad reads. “Tesla. The Swasticar.”

• I want to share my story about Elon Musk and Tesla. (Rufus Gifford on Facebook, 3-19-25) "My experience here is unique and firsthand. I share this as someone who owns and loves his Tesla, as someone who has met Elon, who has helped Elon and who will boycott any product that Elon is affiliated with going forward. (Read the comments.)

• Musk’s Team Is Building a System to Sell ‘Gold Card’ Immigrant Visas (Ryan Mac and Hamed Aleaziz, NY Times, 4-16-25) Members of Elon Musk’s government-slashing task force are building a system for the United States to sell special immigration visas, which President Trump has labeled “gold cards,” for $5 million apiece. The project represents something of a shift in mission for Elon Musk’s initiative, from cutting government costs toward a new goal of generating revenue.

• The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers (Dana Mattioli, WSJ, 4-15-25) The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump. He recently took a paternity test in a battle with one woman over money and privacy.
---Ashley St. Clair's Son's Name Is Revealed as Elon Musk Is Confirmed to Be the Father (Kayla Grant and Elizabeth Rosner, People, 4-16-25) According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, the 26-year-old influencer's infant son, who was previously referred to as R.S.C., is named Romulus. Musk is also the father of 13 other children, whom he shares with three other women.

• Racially charged row between Musk and South Africa over Starlink (Khanyisile Ngcobo, BBC.com, Johannesburg, 4-16-25) To his more than 219 million followers on his social media platform X, Mr Musk made the racially charged claim that his satellite internet service provider was "not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because I'm not black".

    But the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) - a regulatory body in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors - told the BBC that Starlink had never submitted an application for a licence. To operate in South Africa, Starlink needs to obtain network and service licences, which both require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups. This mainly refers to South Africa's majority black population, which was shut out of the economy during the racist system of apartheid. Mr Musk - who was born in South Africa in 1971 before moving to Canada in the late 1980s and then to the US, where he became the world's richest man - appears to see this as the main stumbling block for Starlink to operate in the country.

• Trump Axed Elon Musk’s Secret Pentagon Meeting in Pure Outrage (Hafiz Rashid, New Republic, 4-16-25) Donald Trump was apparently mad at Elon Musk for planning to attend a secret briefing on China at the Pentagon last month. After news of that briefing was reported in The New York Times, Trump angrily canceled it, saying, “What the f**k is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn’t go,” an unnamed top official told Axios. Elon Musk is finally facing (some) consequences for trying to play president.

[Back to Top]

Trump's tariffs: a roundup, updated 4-17-25

 

• 'The Economist' editor unpacks the 'biggest trade policy shock' of Trump's tariffs (Terry Gross, Fresh Air, 4-9-25) President Trump's sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs have upended the global economy, sending stock markets into turmoil. "This is, without a doubt, the biggest trade policy shock, I think, in history," Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor-in-chief of The Economist, says.

    "Trump last week ordered a minimum 10% tax on nearly everything the U.S. buys from other countries. He's also ordered much higher levies on things the country buys from China, Japan and the European Union. However, a lot of those tariffs are in flux, because almost each day the president has either increased some tariffs or paused others."

• Politically Connected Firms Benefit From Trump Tariff Exemptions Amid Secrecy, Confusion (Robert Faturechi, Trump Administration, ProPublica, 4-22-25) The administration’s lack of transparency about tariff exemptions has experts concerned that some firms might be winning narrow carve-outs behind closed doors. “It could be corruption, but it could just as easily be incompetence,” one lobbyist said.

• How to Think About the Tariffs (Matthew C. Klein, The Overshoot, 4-4-25) This is bad policy, executed thoughtlessly. But it is worth thinking through exactly *why* it is bad.

• This Is What Trumponomics Is Really About (Kyla Scanlon, Opinion, NY Times, 4-16-25) Reindustrialization. But "the Trump administration sometimes appears to ignore that advanced automation means far fewer workers to produce the same manufactured goods. Even if factories return, they will employ a small fraction of the people they once did.
    "To reindustrialize will require investment in people and machines — and a coherent strategy. Given the Trump administration’s aversion to collaboration and the internal contradictions of the factions within the administration, its reindustrialization drive appears disconnected from reality and destined to fail."

• Larry Summers on Trump: ‘The First Rule of Holes Is Stop Digging’ (Lawrence H. Summers, NY Times, 4-14-25) The former treasury secretary on the president’s chaotic trade war. Summers explains the dangers of President Trump’s economic policies, and why we should expect more instability ahead. Tariff levels are still at once in century levels in terms of what they’re taking out of the economy and the punitive level of tariffs on China creates an entirely unprecedented situation. What has people most scared is that the U.S. has switched its pattern from being a bastion of strength to trading like an emerging market. And that’s a pretty profound thing because it takes decades to build up credibility, but it can be lost in a matter of days or weeks.
• Oren Cass makes the case for tariffs. (NY Times, 4-10-25) Is the short-term economic pain of President Trump’s unpredictable approach to tariffs a reasonable price to pay for a more resilient America? Mr. Trump appears to think so, and so does Oren Cass — sort of. On the first episode of “Interesting Times,” the founder and chief economist of the think tank American Compass joins Ross Douthat to discuss and debate the Trump administration’s drastic trade war.
• The Kleptocracy Presidency (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 4-14-25) Once upon a time (and not even that long ago), blatant conflicts of interest, especially involving foreign entities, were something presidents sought to avoid. Under Trump, conflicts of interest are just part of the system.

• Tracking Every Trump Tariff and Its Economic Effect (Bloomberg's tariff tracker, 3-22-25) Financial Times also has a tariff tracker. Search and you'll find several tariff trackers (some may be behind paywalls).
---Trump’s Trade War and the Economic Impact: Tariff Tracker (Jeremy Diamond, Adrian Leung, Jane Pong, Christopher Udemans, and Jason Kao, Bloomberg Law, 4-14-25)

• The Economic Effects of President Trump’s Tariffs (PENN Wharton's Budget Model, 4-10-25) "Tariffs are estimated to raise about the same amount of revenue as increasing the corporate income tax from 21 to 36 percent, in the absence of these recent tariffs. While raising the corporate tax rate is generally seen as highly economically distorting, tariffs would reduce GDP and wages by more than twice as much. All households, regardless of age or income, would be worse off. The estimated economic declines are likely lower bounds, with actual declines potentially even larger.
&nbsp nbsp;   "Many existing trade and macroeconomic models fail to capture the full harm caused by tariffs, focusing mainly on the “current account” flow of goods and services. Larger tariffs would also decrease international capital flows, reducing worldwide demand for U.S. Treasuries. This is especially costly under the nation’s current baseline debt path, which is increasing faster than GDP. U.S. households would need to purchase more bonds, requiring bond prices to fall (yields increase), domestic capital investment prices to fall (the marginal product of capital increases), or both. Even conservatively assuming only domestic capital investment prices fall, the reduction in economic activity is more than twice as large as a tax increase on  Read More 

If this column is too narrow to read, scroll down and click on one of the headings/links. That should bring the columns back to a readable width.

 

Trump Watch

A steadily growing batch of links, continually updated (most recently 4-22-25)

 

Sign seen recently:
TRUMP FIRED THE WATCHDOGS. PROJECT 2025 IS HAPPENING NOW.
Trump and Musk are tearing down democracy to expedite Project 2025—threatening everything from fair elections to Social Security.  

  See more about Project 2025 here.

• Obamacare would be even harder to kill now, but Trump promises to try anyway (Tami Luhby, CNN, 1-7-24) Nearly 60% of adults had a favorable view of the Affordable Care Act in May 2023, close to the highest share since the law was passed in 2010, according to the KFF Health Tracking Poll. In November 2024, Trump posted on his Truth Social site that Republicans should “never give up” trying to terminate the law and that he would replace it with “MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE.”

 

• The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out. (Michael Schaffer, Politico, 11-15-24)

   I quote: The first Trump administration sparked waves of public activism and aggressive media coverage. This time, not so much. Trump returns to office with far more radical ambitions than he had in 2016, and much more coherent plans for achieving them. If you’re against gutting environmental regulations, bulk-firing public servants, doing away with Obamacare or instituting mass deportations, public fury is a way to push back — or at least stiffen the spines of Democrats who might collaborate with the administration. The left will have to wait for actual presidential deeds to drive the backlash. For better or worse, those will happen soon enough.

• Federal worker unions sue to block Trump’s effort to strip them of bargaining rights. (NY Times, 4-4-25) The complaint, filed late Thursday night in federal court in Oakland, Calif., is the latest development in the unions’ escalating battle with the administration over its attempts to slash the federal work force and roll back the protections afforded to the civil service employees. Unions representing government workers have repeatedly sued over the efforts to cut jobs and dismantle offices and agencies, winning at least temporary reprieves in some of those cases.

• The rise of end times fascism (Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, The Guardian, 4-13-25) The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them. Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state. (This very long article will not be reassuring.)

     Further (quoting Robert Reich ("The secession of the billionaire class"): "As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor put it, the billionaire bros are basing their secessionist plans on "the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies."
    "A bevy of billionaires in Washington is now attacking Social Security and Medicaid, obliterating health and safety regulations, destroying much of public education, and deciding who in America should be abducted and sent to a brutal prison in another country."

 

 • Trump Moves to End Union Protections Across Broad Swath of Government (Tyler Pager, NY Times, 3-28-25) An executive order signed by the president would cancel collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of workers, the largest federal employees union said. “Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: fall in line or else.” Unions have been a major obstacle in Mr. Trump’s effort to slash the size of the federal work force and reshape the government to put it more directly under his control. They have repeatedly sued over his blizzard of executive actions, winning at least temporary reprieves for some fired federal workers and blocking efforts to dismantle portions of the government.

• Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions (Just Security)

• Trump’s War on Measurement Means Losing Data on Drug Use, Maternal Mortality, Climate Change and More ( Alec MacGillis, ProPublica, 4-18-25) By slashing teams that gather critical data, the administration has left the federal government with no way of understanding if policies are working — and created a black hole of information whose consequences could ripple out for decades. Year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide. The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.
• Trump’s DEI Undoing Undermines Hard-Won Accommodations for Disabled People (Stephanie Armour, KFF Health News, 4-3-25) Sign-language interpreters have been noticeably absent from Trump administration press briefings, advocacy groups say. Gone, too, are the American Sign Language interpretations that used to appear on the White House’s YouTube channel. A White House webpage on accessibility, whitehouse.gov/accessibility, has also ceased working.

    Musk has previously attacked Social Security, calling it a “Ponzi scheme” and reposting a meme calling people who receive federal benefits “the Parasite Class.” Democrats have warned that those cuts could affect Americans’ ability to collect their benefits and said that further cuts could decimate the system.

• The Unchecked Authority of Trump’s Immigration Orders (Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker, 1-24-25) The President is recasting migration as a form of “invasion,” broadening his already expansive powers and making anyone in the U.S. who’s undocumented a potential target.

• White House insists Musk cuts to Social Security, Medicare won’t affect benefits (Justine McDaniel, WaPo, 3-11-25) Elon Musk alleged that up to $700 billion in entitlement spending could be “waste and fraud,” raising alarm among Democrats. That figure is much  higher than what has been identified by watchdogs.

See also blog post on Musk generally: Should Elon Musk have that much access to private data and power?

• Trump Whacks Tiny Agency That Works To Make the Nation’s Health Care Safer (Arthur Allen, KFF Health News, 4-3-25) On April 1, the Trump administration slashed the organization that supported that research — the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ — and fired roughly half of its remaining employees as part of a perplexing reorganization of the federal Health and Human Services Department.

 

  The Tracker is part of the Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of the Trump Administration’s Executive Actions.  Invaluable links.

 

 Read More 

Gathering your personal history

by Mary Scott, Advocate Staff Writer, Calvert Advocate.

5-26-09. Reprinted here by permission.

 

Everyone has a story to tell. A good personal history won’t include just facts; it will also include stories, according to Pat McNees, a professional personal historian.

 

"The first thing to do is start a timeline...make it include a combination of incidents in your life and turning points,” McNees said. "You want to get the significant periods like high school. When you met your husband, got married, or had children.”

 

Instead of just writing these things down, McNees suggested either video or audio recording the person telling the stories so their voice is preserved. “The voice is an essential part of the person. When you hear someone’s voice it immediately brings back a flood of memories,” she said.

 

Photos can also be a part of someone’s personal history. McNees suggested going through your photographs and  Read More 

A long roundup of links to life as being radically changed by Trump and (unelected) Musk.

 

• NPR News Now A roundup of the day's top stories in under five minutes. New podcast episodes each weekday. (Bookmark that, to return to for later roundups.)
• Trump-Musk news (ongoing links to stories, Washington Post)  Keep this link open so you can follow stories as they appear.

• Spotlight on President Trump Ongoing news, New York Times.

• ‘It felt like Squid Games’: HHS employees on finding out their jobs were eliminated (WTOP,4-2-25) Employees with the Department of Health and Human Services tell WTOP they lined up and scanned their badges one by one Tuesday. If the light turned green, they still had their job. If it turned red, they didn't. “It felt like ‘Squid Games,'” one worker said.
    One worker said while they want agencies to be more efficient and accountable, the strategy being used does not make sense. They said many units in the agency consist of “small teams” that are “efficient,” especially in what they are able to accomplish.
   One worker, in response to comments that better jobs will come along, said: “It means so much more than just the job itself … It’s like wiping out an entire collection of history of knowledge and being like, it doesn’t matter … It doesn’t matter, and these groups of people don’t matter.”

• Section on Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine (many sources)

---The Shame of It (Robert Reich).

   Reich's tips on How to help the people in Ukraine. Here's the practical part:
  "Europe and all free people around the world must rally at this time of American emergency. If the United States won’t seize Russia’s frozen assets and put them into an account for Ukraine to pay for further arms, Europeans must do this and let Ukraine buy from European defense contractors.  Read More