Trump v. Musk

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

CBO estimates that debt-service costs under H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, would total $551 billion over the 2025–2034 period—increasing the bill's cumulative effect on the deficit to $3.0 trillion.

AP:

President Donald Trump said Thursday he’s “disappointed” with Elon Musk after his former backer and advisor lambasted the president’s signature bill.

Trump suggested the world’s richest man misses being in the White House and has “Trump derangement syndrome.”

The Republican president reflected on his breakup with Musk in front of reporters in the Oval Office as Musk continued a storm of social media posts attacking Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and warning it will increase the federal deficit.

“I’m very disappointed in Elon,” Trump said. “I’ve helped Elon a lot.”

Musk has called Trump’s big tax break bill a “disgusting abomination.”

Annie Karni and Theodore Schleifer:

House Republicans suddenly find themselves scrambling to mollify Elon Musk, who has been venting his rage at them for voting for a Trump-backed domestic policy bill he calls a “disgusting abomination.”

After Mr. Musk threatened to “fire all politicians who betrayed the American people,” Republicans from Speaker Mike Johnson on down are trying to manage an unmanageable tech billionaire who has become one of the most powerful figures in Republican politics.

Even as Mr. Johnson insisted at a news conference on Wednesday that “policy differences are not personal,” he admitted that Mr. Musk’s hard turn against the bill had come as a surprise given the “happy texts” they had shared 24 hours earlier. Mr. Johnson said he had tried again to talk to Mr. Musk but could not get through.

“I called Elon last night, and he didn’t answer, but, uh, hope to talk to him today,” he said.

Such ingratitude

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2025

Russia, Russia, Russia

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Benedict Smith at The Telegraph:

A senior official who dismantled the US government’s Russian disinformation unit is married to a Russian woman with links to the Kremlin, The Telegraph can reveal.

Darren Beattie has provoked alarm within the State Department since being appointed in February for his ardent pro-Russian views and focus on destroying the agency tasked with tackling Kremlin propaganda.

Mr Beattie, the acting under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, is married to a woman whose uncle has taken several roles in Russian politics and once received a personal “thank you” message from Vladimir Putin.

In the years before joining the government, Mr Beattie wrote social media posts suggesting Western institutions should be “infiltrated” by Putin, while he also attacked what he described as the “globalist American empire”.

Donald Trump is under pressure from many in his party, particularly senators, to take a tougher stance on the Russian leader while he continues to refuse to sign a ceasefire deal as the war in Ukraine drags on.

Many of Mr Beattie’s social media posts also concern China, repeatedly calling on the US to surrender Taiwan to Beijing, and labelling Britain a “poor and pathetic kingdom” that would be “far better off under Chinese dominion”.

Trump referred to Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a "genius" move.  Silence on an actual genius move: Ukraine's amazing drone attack deep into Russian territory.

Michael Luciano at Mediaite:

Leavitt took questions outside the White House on Monday, where she reiterated Trump’s position that Putin and Zelensky should speak directly with each other. One reporter brought up Ukraine’s shocking drone attack on Russian warplanes deep inside Russian territory.

“What was the president’s reaction to that Ukrainian drone attack – stunning drone attack – on Russian airbases?” he asked. “What’s his reaction?”

“Well, look,” Leavitt replied. “The reaction is this war needs to come to an end. And this war has been brutal from both sides. Too many people have died, and the president wants this war to end at the negotiating table. And he’s made that clear to both leaders, both publicly and privately.”

 

TACO Tuesday and Taxes

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.

Dan Merica and Matthew Choi at WP:

TACO — or “Trump Always Chickens Out” — is a Wall Street acronym that suggests that the president often talks tough on tariffs but ultimately backs down. The term, coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong, highlights how Wall Street, which Trump has long seen as a leading market indicator, has learned to ignore the president’s talk and focus on his actions after the president paused his harshest tariffs following the stock market’s plummet in April.

“He does check the score board, and the score board is the stock market,” said Michael Batnick, a managing partner at Ritholtz Wealth Management and one of the hosts of “The Compound,” a YouTube show and podcast on business and investing. He noted that Trump’s announcement Friday that he would double U.S. tariffs on European steel to 50 percent corresponded with a markedly quiet day of trading. “He ran out of juice,” Batnick told us. “He made that announcement and nobody cared, like it was a child having a tantrum and people said, ‘Leave him in the corner, he will stop crying.’

...

It’s hard to campaign on what a party didn’t do. But that’s essentially what Republicans have to do in selling their extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in their mega bill.

Here’s the test for Republicans: If they extend the tax bill, most taxpayers won’t see a difference on Tax Day and can enjoy current tax rates. But if they fail, taxes will pop back up under a fully Republican-led government and the GOP will get the blame. In terms of political messaging, it could wind up a draw or a loss since it’s hard to campaign on a counterfactual.

Trump's War on Knowledge

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic:

The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
...
By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.

Petula Dvorak at WP:

Huge volumes, bound in the timeless, red buckram linen of legacy books, are historians’ gold — and crucial to the nation’s understanding of how U.S. foreign policy is made.

There is a dispatch from Japan to President Abraham Lincoln’s administration describing the “bloody affair” of July 1861, the “daring and murderous attacks” by samurai warriors on British diplomats stationed in Edo, now known as Tokyo.

There is the top-secret report that pushed President Harry S. Truman to authorize covert actions in peacetime in 1947 to counter the “vicious psychological efforts” by the Soviet Union.

And then there’s the telegram handed over at 12:15 p.m. on April 18, 1961, from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy hours after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, warning that the action endangers peace “for the whole world. … It is a secret to no one that the armed bands invading this country were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.”

An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history — especially classified and covert actions — remains unbiased, transparent and thorough.

President Donald Trump just fired all of the members of the committee.

These advisers help oversee the exhaustive publication series called the Foreign Relations of the United States — or the FRUS, as insiders call it — and lawmakers rely on it daily. It is available to the public in major libraries and online.

The volume began in 1861, when Congress demanded a full account of Lincoln’s foreign policy during the Civil War. More than 450 volumes have been printed since

Musk Leaves a Trail

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Neal Rothschild at Axios:

The big picture: Elon Musk claims that his DOGE team saved $175 billion in taxpayer spending, though an outside analysis estimates the verified savings are closer to $16 billion.The "One Big, Beautiful Bill," which passed the House last week, is projected to add $3 trillion to 5 trillion to budget deficits over the next 10 years. Even using Musk's most generous estimate, those DOGE savings would amount to just 6% of the projected increase to the deficit from the bill.

Coral Davenport and Stacy Cowley at NYT:

DOGE promotes the purported savings on an “Agency Deregulation Leaderboard,” posted this month, where it claims that the Trump administration has saved Americans $29.4 billion as a result of reversing regulations in health insurance, bank fees, appliance efficiency standards and other areas.

But many of those regulatory reversals will actually pile more costs on to individual Americans in the form of higher bank fees, electric and water bills, and health insurance payments, according to experts and government analyses. The New York Times examined 10 of the largest claims on the leaderboard and concluded that several did not show evidence of savings to households.

Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey at NYT:

As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.

It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.

Trump v. Conservatism

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  It explains how Trump has exploited conservatism without believing in it.

Patrick Svitek at POLITICO:

President Donald Trump lashed out at the conservative legal movement and one of its prominent leaders, Leonard Leo, on Thursday night, blaming them for the federal court ruling that blocked most of his tariffs this week.

In doing so, Trump deepened a schism with an influential community that was crucial to shaping his first term but has increasingly fallen out of favor with the president as he ramps up attacks on the judiciary.

In a lengthy social media post, Trump called Leo a “real ‘sleazebag’ ” and suggested that the Federalist Society led him astray on judicial nominations during his first term.

One of the judges involved in the ruling on tariffs was appointed by Trump. And in recent months, Trump and Leo have been at odds over the wisdom of Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs: A group with ties to Leo is among those that have sued the administration, arguing that the president overstepped his authority in issuing them.

Charlie Savage at NYT:

Hours earlier Thursday, the Justice Department severely undercut the traditional role of the American Bar Association in vetting judicial nominees. A day before, Mr. Trump picked a loyalist who has no deep ties to the conservative legal movement for a life-tenured appeals court seat, explaining that his pick could be counted on to rule in ways aligned with his agenda.

Together, the moves suggest that Mr. Trump may be pivoting toward greater personal involvement and a more idiosyncratic process for selecting future nominees. Such a shift would fit with his second-term pattern of steamrolling the guardrails that sometimes constrained how he exercised power during his first presidency.

But it could also give pause to judges who may be weighing taking senior status, giving Mr. Trump an opportunity to fill their seats. Conservatives have been eyeing in particular the seats of the Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, who will turn 77 next month, and Samuel A. Alito, 75.

...'

And Professor Yoo, who wrote memos advancing sweeping theories of presidential power as a Bush administration lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Leo were “outrageous.”

“Calling for the impeachment of judges, attacking Leonard Leo personally and basically calling him as traitor as far as I can tell — Trump is basically turning his back on one of his biggest achievements of his first term,” he added, referring to the reshaping of the federal judiciary.

Joni Ernst Gaffe

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) might have a competitive reelection race next year.  Yesterday's gaffe will not help.  Alexander Bolton at The Hill

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst (R) pushed back against constituents who shouted out at her recent town hall meeting that cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would cause people to die, responding, “Well, we’re all going to die.”


The awkward moment came at a town hall meeting on Friday in Butler, Iowa, while Ernst defended the spending reforms in a House-passed budget reconciliation package that are intended to stop people who crossed into the country illegally from receiving federal benefits.

JUNE 1 UPDATE: Then she made it worse with a sarcastic video.

 

Absolutely bonkers — Joni Ernst doubles down on her “we are all gonna die” defense of Medicaid cuts while walking through a cemetery pic.twitter.com/tZrhtvODeK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 31, 2025

Maybe the reference to Jesus was an effort to shore up her evangelical base after this:

#ICYMI: The Air Force revealed earlier this year that a general who oversaw its lobbying before Congress had inappropriate relationships with five women.

Sources say one of the women whose relationship with him was scrutinized was Sen. Joni Ernst.https://t.co/97qos9S9hC

— ProPublica (@propublica) June 1, 2025