The idea of letting billionaires buy, control, and eventually run the government was never particularly popular. But being seen as the last line of defense against the war on Christmas, the invasion of drug dealers and rapists, and letting men in women's bathrooms seems to have turned the tide.
In an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk seemed to be having difficulty speaking. Musk brandished a chainsaw like that Argentina's president Javier Milei used to symbolize the drastic cuts he intended to make to his country’s government, then posted that image to X, labeling it “The DogeFather,” although the administration has recently told a court that Musk is neither an employee nor the leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Politico called Musk’s behavior “eccentric.”
While attendees cheered Musk on, outside CPAC there appears to be a storm brewing. While Trump and his team have claimed they have a mandate, in fact more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024, and his early approval ratings were only 47%, the lowest of any president going back to 1953, when Gallup began checking them. His approval has not grown as he has called himself a “king” and openly mused about running for a third term.
A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released yesterday shows that even that “honeymoon” is over. Only 45% approve of the “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president,” while 53% disapprove. Forty-three percent of Americans say they support what Trump has done since he took office; 48% oppose his actions. The number of people who strongly support his actions sits at 27%; the number who strongly oppose them is twelve points higher, at 39%. Fifty-seven percent of Americans think Trump has gone beyond his authority as president.
Americans especially dislike his attempts to end USAID, his tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and his firing of large numbers of government workers. Even Trump’s signature issue of deporting undocumented immigrants receives 51% approval only if respondents think those deported are “criminals.” Fifty-seven percent opposed deporting those who are not accused of crimes, 70% oppose deporting those brought to the U.S. as children, and 66% oppose deporting those who have children who are U.S. citizens. Eighty-three percent of Americans oppose Trump’s pardon of the violent offenders convicted for their behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent.
As Aaron Blake points out in the Washington Post, a new CNN poll, also released yesterday, shows that Musk is a major factor in Trump’s declining ratings. By nearly two to one, Americans see Musk having a prominent role in the administration as a “bad thing.” The ratio was 54 to 28. The Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed that Americans disapprove of Musk “shutting down federal government programs that he decides are unnecessary” by the wide margin of 52 to 26. Sixty-three percent of Americans are worried about Musk’s team getting access to their data.
Meanwhile, Jessica Piper of Politico noted that 62% of Americans in the CNN poll said that Trump has not done enough to try to reduce prices, and today’s economic news bears out that concern: not only are egg prices at an all-time high, but also consumer sentiment dropped to a 15-month low as people worry that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices. White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in a statement: “[T]he American people actually feel great about the direction of the country…. What’s to hate? We are undoing the widely unpopular agenda of the previous office holder, uprooting waste, fraud, and abuse, and chugging along on the great American Comeback.”
Phone calls swamping the congressional switchboards and constituents turning out for town halls with House members disprove Fields’s statement. In packed rooms with overflow spaces, constituents have shown up this week both to demand that their representatives take a stand against Musk’s slashing of the federal government and access to personal data, and to protest Trump’s claim to be a king. In an eastern Oregon district that Trump won by 68%, constituents shouted at Representative Cliff Bentz: “tax Elon,” “tax the wealthy,” “tax the rich,” and “tax the billionaires.” In a solid-red Atlanta suburb, the crowd was so angry at Representative Richard McCormick that he has apparently gone to ground, bailing on a CNN interview about the disastrous town hall at the last minute.
That Trump is feeling the pressure from voters showed this week when he appeared to offer two major distractions: a pledge to consider using money from savings found by the “Department of Government Efficiency” to provide rebates to taxpayers—although so far it hasn’t shown any savings and economists say the promise of checks is unrealistic—and a claim that he would release a list of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s clients.
Trump is also under pressure from the law.
The Associated Press sued three officials in the Trump administration today for blocking AP journalists from presidential events because the AP continues to use the traditional name “Gulf of Mexico” for the gulf that Trump is trying to rename. The AP is suing over the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Today, a federal court granted a preliminary injunction to stop Musk and the DOGE team from accessing Americans’ private information in the Treasury Department’s central payment system. Eighteen states had filed the lawsuit.
Tonight, a federal court granted a nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive orders attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion, finding that they violate the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.
Trump is also under pressure from principled state governors.
In his State of the State Address on Wednesday, February 19, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker noted that “it’s in fashion at the federal level right now to just indiscriminately slash school funding, healthcare coverage, support for farmers, and veterans’ services. They say they’re doing it to eliminate inefficiencies. But only an idiot would think we should eliminate emergency response in a natural disaster, education and healthcare for disabled children, gang crime investigations, clean air and water programs, monitoring of nursing home abuse, nuclear reactor regulation, and cancer research.”
He recalled: “Here in Illinois, ten years ago we saw the consequences of a rampant ideological gutting of government. It genuinely harmed people. Our citizens hated it. Trust me—I won an entire election based in part on just how much they hated it.”
Pritzker went on to address the dangers of the Trump administration directly. “We don’t have kings in America,” he said, “and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one…. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
He recalled how ordinary Illinoisans outnumbered Nazis who marched in Chicago in 1978 by about 2,000 to 20, and noted: “Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome us when our country needs us the most.”
Today, Maine governor Janet Mills took the fight against Trump’s overreach directly to him. At a meeting of the nation’s governors, in a rambling speech in which he was wandering through his false campaign stories about transgender athletes, Trump turned to his notes and suddenly appeared to remember his executive order banning transgender student athletes from playing on girls sports teams.
The body that governs sports in Maine, the Maine Principals’ Association, ruled that it would continue to allow transgender students to compete despite Trump's executive order because the Maine state Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender identity.
Trump asked if the governor of Maine was in the room.
“Yeah, I’m here,” replied Governor Mills.
“Are you not going to comply with it?” Trump asked.
“I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she said.
“We are the federal law,” Trump said. “You better do it because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t….”
“We’re going to follow the law,” she said.
“You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not going to get any federal funding,” he said.
Mills answered: “We’ll see you in court.”
As Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times put it: “Something happened at the White House Friday afternoon that almost never happens these days. Somebody defied President Trump. Right to his face.”
Hours later, the Trump administration launched an investigation into Maine’s Department of Education, specifically its policy on transgender athletes. Maine attorney general Aaron Frey said that any attempt to cut federal funding for the states over the issue “would be illegal and in direct violation of federal court orders…. Fortunately,” he said in a statement, “the rule of law still applies in this country, and I will do everything in my power to defend Maine’s laws and block efforts by the president to bully and threaten us.”
“[W]hat is at stake here [is] the rule of law in our country,” Mills said in a statement. “No President…can withhold Federal funding authorized and appropriated by Congress and paid for by Maine taxpayers in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will. It is a violation of our Constitution and of our laws.”
“Maine may be one of the first states to undergo an investigation by his Administration, but we won’t be the last. Today, the President of the United States has targeted one particular group on one particular issue which Maine law has addressed. But you must ask yourself: who and what will he target next, and what will he do? Will it be you? Will it be because of your race or your religion? Will it be because you look different or think differently? Where does it end? In America, the President is neither a King nor a dictator, as much as this one tries to act like it—and it is the rule of law that prevents him from being so.”
“[D]o not be misled: this is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation. I believe he cannot.”
Americans’ sense that Musk has too much power is likely to be heightened by tonight’s report from Andrea Shalal and Joey Roulette of Reuters that the United States is trying to force Ukraine to sign away rights to its critical minerals by threatening to cut off access to Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Ukraine turned to that system after the Russians destroyed its communications services.
And Americans’ concerns about Trump acting like a dictator are unlikely to be calmed by tonight’s news that Trump has abruptly purged the leadership of the military in apparent unconcern over the message that such a sweeping purge sends to adversaries. He has fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Chief of Naval Operations, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.”
The vice chief of the Air Force, General James Slife, has also been fired, and Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Trump has indicated he intends to nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan “Razin” Caine to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Oren Liebermann and Haley Britzky of CNN call this “an extraordinary move,” since Caine is retired and is not a four-star general, a legal requirement, and will need a presidential waiver to take the job. Trump has referred to Caine as right out of “central casting.”
Defense One, which covers U.S. defense and international security, called the firings a “bloodbath.”
Against the backdrop of a month of chaos and destruction, something began to shift more or less in the middle of this week. I don’t want to overstate what it portends in the short term. Elon Musk remains firmly in the saddle. And even as many of Trump’s advisors grow concerned about the impact of Musk’s rampage, Donald Trump himself appears to be maintaining his support. The moment was captured yesterday at what are now the more or less constant CPACs where Steve Bannon tossed off a Nazi salute and Musk appeared in a “Dark MAGA” baseball cap sporting a chainsaw and basking in the adulation of the MAGA/CPAC faithful awash in the joy a certain kind of individual derives from destruction and pain. The picture itself is a key signpost in the story. Make a note of it. Musk himself posted it to Twitter, labeled with “The DogeFather” and flexing with the text: “This is a real picture.”
But there’s something else going on — not so much the tide turning as a certain battle being joined. Beginning this week, local TV stations around the country have begun running human interest stories about veterans, members of military families or Trump supporters getting fired as part of Elon’s purge. Meanwhile, we can see a growing cleavage between what congressional Republicans are saying in Washington and what they’re saying back in their districts.
The tenor of the moment first registered in a series of polls which came out midweek showing the first signs of Trump’s approval rating dipping into negative territory. I don’t think we should make too much of those poll numbers either way. Trump’s aggregate approval numbers had already dropped about five points just over the last month. And some of that is simply the inauguration support subsiding. What the polls did was puncture the impression within the mainstream media that political gravity has been suspended or canceled along with all the government contracts DOGE has left in its wake. Meanwhile, you’re seeing House Republicans in all but the most MAGA districts get nervous about what this titanic battle was always going to come down to: your health care coverage for Elon’s tax cuts.
A constituent who’d been fired in Alaska confronted freshman Rep. Nick Begich (R-AK) about losing their job, inspiring Begich to lamely reply that he was only in Congress and couldn’t do anything about budget cuts. Two-term Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) got grilled about the massive round of firings at CDC in Atlanta and awkwardly responded that “a lot of the work they do is duplicitous with AI,” which led to a new round of boos from the crowd. Rep. Troy Balderson (R) from Ohio said simply that the wave of executive orders and mass terminations were “out of control.”
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), who somehow still gets billed as a “moderate” notwithstanding her hard MAGA turn, is out there throwing up red flags about cuts to Medicaid which will float the big tax cuts and calling out the Freedom Caucus as running the show, despite the the size of their caucus. Remember that Republicans can only lose literally a couple votes to pass anything through this House. That reminds you of the instability of this juggernaut and the power in Democrats’ hands. If the likes of Malliotakis are getting spooked, she’s far from the only one. Hard MAGA districts are among the most reliant on Medicaid and Obamacare. And not just non-MAGA people in those districts but the MAGAs themselves.
What is key to focus on here is that Republican representatives are getting cold feet about budget cuts in the legal budgetary process that are substantially less than what Elon Musk claims he is in the process of doing outside the law and constraints of the Constitution. These two trains are on a collision course. And most of the impact of what’s already happened hasn’t hit yet. But it will. It’s like a person who jumps off a skyscraper and they’re halfway to the ground.
I was talking to a person overseeing millions of dollars of research at a major university today. The word he’s heard so far is that the current grants which keep everyone employed are secure. But in that case the university is floating the budget in the hopes that the federal spigot is about the restart. It almost certainly won’t.
I want to state again what I’ve been saying since November: your health care coverage for Elon’s tax cuts. That is the fundamental fulcrum on which the next two years of American history — and quite possibly many years into the future — will turn. This has always been and will remain fundamentally a battle for public opinion. The issue is not “kitchen table issues” versus democracy. The two are fundamentally conjoined. Any effective politics to confront the current moment must join the two together. Because they are joined together. To the extent that “democracy” has no tangible impact on anyone’s lived experience, it hardly matters. But of course it does impact everyone’s lived experience in tangible and graphic ways.
As all of this is happening, Musk himself is getting higher and higher on the destruction. The stunt at CPAC is just the latest example. Drugs, mania … whatever it is, it’s got him. And that unfurls just as he gets less and less popular with the general public.
2025 might be the first time in human history where we have a genuine supervillain walking among us. Humanity has spawned numerous monsters, of course: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. But I’m talking about the supervillain on the Gotham/Metropolis model. The glad-handing, fantastically rich, this-dial-goes-to-11 over-the-top weirdo with his raucous bevy of cheerleaders who is in fact evil and has a cartoonishly stupid but yet very real plan to take over the world. Look at that picture again. You can easily imagine running it over every 2025 political ad about the chaos and immiseration he unleashed on the country.
Last night’s Friday Night News Dump was a doozy: Trump has purged the country’s military leadership. He has fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.” As soon as he took office, Trump fired U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, giving her just three hours to vacate her home on base. Last night, Trump also fired the Air Force vice chief of staff, General James Slife.
In place of Brown, Trump has said he will nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin”—as in “Razin Caine”—to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is the body of the eight most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense. It advises the president, the secretary of defense, the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council on military matters.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces and is the principal military advisor to the president, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, and the secretary of defense.
Caine has held none of the assignments that are required for elevation to this position. His military biography says he was a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard. Before he retired, he was the associate director for military affairs at the CIA. The law prohibits the elevation of someone at his level to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless the president waives the law because “such action is necessary in the national interest.”
Marshall notes that Trump is “reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisor to the President…but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military.” In Trump’s telling, his support for Caine comes from the military officer’s support for him. “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir,” Trump claims Caine said to him. Trump went on to claim that Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat, despite rules against political messaging on the clothing of active-duty troops.
Trump appears to be purging military officers with the intent of replacing them with loyalists while intimidating others to bow to his demands. It seems worth recalling here that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) stalled the nominations of 451 senior military officers for close to a year in 2023. On February 10, Trump purged the advisory bodies of the military academies for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, saying: “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years…. We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”
The purge of military leaders wasn’t the only news last night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. “Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not,” Talking Points Memo’s Marshall pointed out. “If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.” “Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI,” military specialist Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, “the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government.”
National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan organization of people who served in senior leadership positions in all six military branches, elected federal and state offices, and various government departments and agencies, strongly condemned the firings, and urged “policymakers, elected officials, and the American public to reject efforts to politicize our military.”
Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Observers note that during his first term, Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” apparently unaware that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him and instead imagining they were all fiercely loyal. They also note that authoritarian leader Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union purged his officer corps to make sure it was commanded by those loyal to him.
While the pattern is universal, this is a homegrown version of that universal pattern.
In order to undermine the liberal consensus that supported government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights, reactionaries in the 1950s began to insist that such a government was socialism. A true American, they claimed, was an individual man who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for himself and his family.
In contrast to what they believed was the “socialism” of the government, they took as their symbol the mythologized version of the western American cowboy. In the mid-1950s, Americans tuned in to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger to see hardworking white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government. In 1959 there were twenty-six westerns on TV, and in a single week in March 1959, eight of the top shows were westerns.
When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, in his white cowboy hat, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, the cowboy image became entwined with the reactionary faction in the party, and Ronald Reagan quite deliberately nurtured that image. Under Reagan, Republicans emphasized that an individual man should run his life however he wished, had a right to use a gun to defend his way of life, and that his way of life was under attack by Black Americans, people of color, and women.
It was an image that fit well with American popular culture, but their cowboy was always a myth: it didn’t reflect the reality that one third of cowboys were Black or men of color, or that cowboys were low-wage workers whose lives mirrored those of eastern factory workers. The real West was a network of family ties and communities, where women won the right to vote significantly before eastern women did, in large part because of their importance to the economy and the education that western people prized.
In the 1990s that individualist cowboy image spurred the militia movement, and over the past forty years it has become tightly bound to the reactionary Republican project to get rid of the government Americans constructed after 1933 to serve the public good. Now it is driving both the purge of women, people of color, and Black Americans from public life and the growing idea that leadership means domination. Trump and Hegseth’s concept of “warfighters” in an American military that doesn’t answer to the law but simply asserts power is the American cowboy hideously warped into fascism.
In a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, on February 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can't shoot values. You can't shoot flags and you can't shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power. As much as we may not want to like the world we live in, in some cases, there's nothing like hard power.”
That statement came after a troubling exchange between Hegseth and Senator Angus King (I-ME) during Hegseth’s nomination hearings. King noted that in one of his books, Hegseth had said that soldiers—he referred to them as “our boys”—"should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago." King noted that Hegseth was referring to “the Geneva Conventions,” a set of international rules that try to contain the barbarity of war and outlawed torture, and he wanted Hegseth to explain what he meant when he wrote: "America should fight by its own rules, and we should fight to win or not go in at all."
Hegseth explained that “there are the rules we swear an oath to defend, which are incredibly important, and…then there are those echelons above reality from, you know, corps to division to brigade, to battalion. And by the time it trickles down to a company or a platoon or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement that nobody recognizes.” “So you are saying that the Geneva Convention should not be observed?” King asked. “We follow rules,” Hegseth said. “But we don't need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars. And that's what President Trump understands.”
Hegseth refused to say he would abide by the Geneva Conventions. He refused to condemn torture.
This idea that modern warfare requires torture shines a harsh light on Trump’s January 29 order to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-bed detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain migrants Trump called "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Rather than simply deporting them, he said, “Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.”
Now it appears the White House is moving even beyond turning the military into cowboys with unlimited powers. On Thursday the White House posted on X a 40-second video that purported to be of migrants, in shackles and chains, faceless as the chains clank, with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” As Andrew Egger explained in The Bulwark, ASMR videos use video cues to create feelings of relaxation and euphoria, or “tingles.”
No longer is the cruelty of utter domination a necessity for safety, it appears. Now it is a form of sensual pleasure for its own sake. As Jeff Sharlet wrote in Scenes from a Slow Civil War: “Listen to this, the White House is saying. This will make you feel good.” It is, he points out, “a bondage video” in which “[t]he sound of other people’s pain is the intended pleasure.”
Elon Musk posted over the video: “Haha wow,” with an emoji of a troll and a gold medal.
While MAGA seems to have turned an American icon into the basis for a fascist fantasy, President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, had actually worked as a cowboy and deliberately applied what he believed to be the values of the American West to the country as a whole. He insisted that all Americans must have a “Square Deal”—the equal protection of the laws—that the government must clean up the cities, protect the environment, provide education and healthcare, and stop the wealthy from controlling the government.
And, when Roosevelt learned that American soldiers had engaged in torture in the Philippines, he deplored those acts. He promised that “determined and unswerving effort” was “being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.”
Depressing as it might seem, misanthropy does register a fundamental truth about humankind as it has come to be.
A person can have misanthropic attitudes and moods without being a full-blooded, card-carrying misanthrope.
