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.  

 Read More 

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."

• The unpredictability of Trump’s tariffs will increase the pain (The Economist, 3-27-25) The cost of uncertainty. Businesses are struggling to adjust.

• 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  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 CHECKLIST:  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)

   "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.

• Meet the 8 MAGA Outlets Disrupting the White House Briefing Room (Ian Ward and Frances Chung, Politico, 4-22-25) The “new conservative media” entered the briefing room in the early days of the second Trump administration. Most of them have adopted Trump’s hostile relationship to the mainstream media. Without dedicated seats of their own, a group of about a dozen new media reporters have taken to gathering in the “conservative corner” — as some reporters call it — along the far wall of the briefing room, near the “new media seat” that Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has set aside for a rotating cast of alternative outlets and conservative influencers.

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

• 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 shame of Columbia University (Robert Reich, 3-21-25)

     Columbia University’s president and trustees today surrendered the university’s academic freedom to the Trump regime. Trump threatened to cancel $400 million in federal funding if Columbia didn’t put its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department in “academic receivership.” In surrendering to Trump, it's opening all universities to Trump's tyranny. A cornerstone of academic freedom is that professors can research and teach what they want. Not even during the communist witch hunts of the early 1950s did a university agree to put an entire academic department under special oversight because of what its faculty researched or taught. Trump also demanded that Columbia ban the wearing of face masks, so that protesters can be more easily identified. It’s all about intimidation — not only at Columbia but at every other university in America. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and dozens of other schools face federal inquiries and fear similar penalties.

---The Real Takeover of Columbia Was By Those on the Right (Alisa Solomon, The Nation, 5-6-24) Columbia offers a case-study in how right-wing politicians are using exaggerated claims of anti-semitism to advance a conservative agenda.
---The new definition of antisemitism is transforming America – and serving a Christian nationalist plan (Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, The Guardian, 3-23-25) Redefining antisemitism in the law (equating criticism of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism) "was never about Jewish safety. It is about consolidating authoritarian power under the veneer of minority protection."

 Read More