Marianne Faithfull, who died last week at 78, had her first brush with death in her early 20s. It was 1969, and the English singer had just arrived in Sydney, Australia, with her then-boyfriend, Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger. Reeling from a recent miscarriage and the gilded chaos of being a muse to the World’s Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band, she ingested more than 100 sleeping pills and didn’t rise from her coma until six days later. The times ahead brought more trouble: She survived a decade and a half of heroin dependency, homelessness, legal battles over songs she’d helped write, the loss of her son in custody proceedings, and a lover who threw himself from an apartment window on the morning she broke up with him.
Life hadn’t always been so bleak for Faithfull, and it would brighten in the future. While still a teenager, she had spun her cover of the rueful Jagger-Richards ballad “As Tears Go By”—about an older person lamenting the passing years—into a modern standard. She would never be a bigger star than she was on the heels of this hit, as a youthful beauty, a songwriting inspiration, and a swingin’ London stalwart—but she only became a better artist with age.
Faithfull’s greatest comebacks were musical, beginning with the glittery sleaze of Broken English in 1979, an album that reintroduced the former starlet as a 32-year-old pop veteran with a croaky, drug-scorched voice. “I feel guilt,” she proclaimed in “Guilt,” though it sounded like I feel good. Faithfull might have had regrets, but she was not one for redemption narratives or performative apologias. Guilt was just another feeling—pointed, painful, and part of being alive.
After Broken English, Faithfull was always making some sort of comeback. The Stones continued to sell out stadiums as their own recorded output grew boring. Faithfull, rounding the bases of midlife in a superficial industry, was forced to repeatedly reclaim her sense of dignity in public. During the ’90s, she resurrected classics by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, ushering a cabaret element into her performances that matched her equally sophisticated and bawdy persona. In the 2007 film Irina Palm, she played a 60-year-old who turns to sex work and finds it liberating. These comebacks bore no taint of compromise, resignation, or shame. Her spirit was proud and transgressive; she retained a sharp edge as many of her male counterparts embarked on toothless adventures in decadence, advertising car insurance and enjoying the perks of knighthood. Faithfull appeared in fashion ads later in life—dancing and ad-libbing to the Staples Singers in a 2002 Gap TV spot, looking elegant and posh in a Saint Laurent print campaign—but these commercial opportunities were at least of a piece with her past reputation as trendsetter who left a mark on ’60s couture. As she grew older, Faithfull kept finding ways to be herself in front of the media and her audience.
Of all her late-career resurgences, Faithfull’s 2014 gem, Give My Love to London, might be the most lasting and unexpected. Made after a fight with cancer and debilitating back and hip problems, London captured a wistful air of retrospection in Faithfull’s voice that sounded rollicking, loose, and at times anxious. “The river’s running bloody / The Tower’s tumbling down,” she sang on the title track, responding with unease to an era marked by the tumultuous momentum of Brexit. “Sparrows Will Sing,” written by Roger Waters, imagined a future in which “the corridors of power will be / walked by thoughtful men,” but Faithfull took Waters’s Pollyannaish bent as a provocation: She once claimed that she chose to perform the track because its author had “a lot more hope than I do.” Throughout London, Faithfull sang with sorrow, but also fervency, and the balance felt wise. She might not have shared Waters’s apparently rosy outlook, but still she knew the social purpose of hope: not just a reaction elicited by good fortune, but a feeling that people tap into when prospects look rough.
Give My Love to London also reclaimed Faithfull’s biography, twisting her life into something theatrical and enigmatic. A stretch in the ’70s when she was unhoused and living in an abandoned lot seemed to reappear in the magnificent “Late Victorian Holocaust” as an image of a couple throwing up in a park, only to sleep sweetly in each other’s arms. The song was written by Nick Cave, another gifted songwriter who similarly surfaced from addiction with a more generous take on humanity. Faithfull could write wonderful lyrics, but she was unparalleled at filtering the words of others through her poignantly cracked voice, using a mixture of covers, collaborations, and originals as though to confuse any speculation about whether she was drawing from her life. In “Mother Wolf,” a collaboration with the songwriter and longtime Madonna associate Patrick Leonard, Faithfull sang about a canine with a cub in its mouth that isn’t hers, though still she must protect it from violence. The singer might have been thinking of her son, Nicholas, yet the point of this LP was not memoir. Faithfull seemed to be freeing her life story, shirking the songwriter’s prerogative toward confessionalism in order to find more clever ways of describing her experience.
One of her best covers came near the album’s end: a treatment of Leonard Cohen’s elegiac masterwork “Going Home,” which he had released just two years earlier. The song’s first line is “I love to speak with Leonard”—which, as sung by Cohen himself, was a bit of self-referential solipsism. Performed by Faithfull, the song instead addressed an elderly contemporary and their shared sense of mortality, while reversing the persistent notion that her greatest legacy was as an inspiration for talented men. “He does say what I tell him … like a sage, a man of vision,” she sang. It was an elegant example of how Faithfull could imbue her mythology with new energy, recovering her life from society’s gaze, and reminding us that she and these so-called rock gods were headed to the same place, separately: to the grave.
He was among the richest men in the world. He made his first fortune in heavy industry. He made his second as a media mogul. And in January 1933, in exchange for a political favor, Alfred Hugenberg provided the electoral capital that made possible Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Before Hugenberg sealed his pact with Hitler, a close associate had warned Hugenberg that this was a deal he would come to regret: “One night you will find yourself running through the ministry gardens in your underwear trying to escape arrest.”
In my recent book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, I chronicled the fraught relationship between the tyrant and the titan, but my story ended in January 1933, so I did not detail the subsequent impact on Hugenberg’s fortunes, let alone the catastrophic consequences that lay ahead for other corporate leaders, their companies, and their country.
In the ’20s and early ’30s, the Hitler “brand” was anathema to capitalists and corporate elites. His National Socialist German Worker’s Party was belligerently nationalistisch but also unapologetically sozialistisch—a true Arbeiter Partei, or “working man’s party.” Its 25-point political platform explicitly targeted bankers and financiers, calling for “breaking the bondage of interest,” as well as industrialists who profited from wartime production. Profits were to be confiscated by the state without compensation, and corporate executives charged with treason. Platform Point 13 was explicit: “We demand the nationalization of all existing corporate entities.”
Through the 1920s, businessmen preferred to place their political bets with conservative, centrist, business-friendly politicians, such as those in the Center Party or the Bavarian People’s Party or the right-wing but decidedly pro-business German Nationalists. Out of necessity, then, the National Socialists had to derive most of its financing via storm troopers standing on street corners begging for contributions and from admission fees to Hitler rallies. Among the exceptions to this were socialites—Viktoria von Dirksen, Helene Bechstein, Elsa Bruckmann—who were smitten with Hitler. But the most significant exception was Fritz Thyssen.
Thyssen, heir to one of Germany’s leading industrial fortunes, had been an early financier of the Nazi movement. He first met Hitler in the autumn of 1923 after attending a beer-hall rally. “It was then that I realised his oratorical gifts and his ability to lead the masses,” Thyssen recalled in his 1941 memoir, I Paid Hitler. “What impressed me most, however, was the order that reigned in his meetings, the almost military discipline of his followers.” Thyssen provided the party, by his own estimate, approximately 1 million reichsmarks—more than $5 million today—and also helped finance the acquisition and refurbishment of a Munich palace as the Nazi Party headquarters. Most important, Thyssen arranged for Hitler to speak to his fellow industrialists in Düsseldorf on January 27, 1932.
Hitler sits next to Hermann Göring at the Düsseldorf Industrieclub, while Fritz Thyssen, a wealthy industrialist who was one of Hitler’s early financial backers, speaks at the microphone, January 27, 1932. (Ullstein bild / Getty)
“The speech made a deep impression on the assembled industrialists,” Thyssen said, “and in consequence of this a number of large contributions flowed from the resources of heavy industry into the treasuries of the National Socialist party.” This financing, estimated at a still-cautious 2 million marks annually, was channeled through a trusted intermediary: Alfred Hugenberg.
Hugenberg had served as a director of Krupp A.G., the large steelmaker and arms manufacturer, during the Great War, and had subsequently founded the Telegraph Union, a conglomerate of 1,400 associated newspapers intended to provide a conservative bulwark against the liberal, pro-democracy press. Hugenberg also bought controlling shares in the country’s largest movie studio, enabling him to have film and the press work together to advance his right-wing, antidemocratic agenda. A reporter for Vossische Zeitung, a leading centrist daily newspaper, observed that Hugenberg was “the great disseminator of National Socialist ideas to an entire nation through newspapers, books, magazines and films.”
To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, “the politics of catastrophe,” by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen—entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse. As a right-wing delegate to the Reichstag, Hugenberg proposed a “freedom law” that called for the liberation of the German people from the shackles of democracy and from the onerous provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The law called for the treaty signatories to be tried and hanged for treason, along with government officials involved with implementing the treaty provisions. The French ambassador in Berlin called Hugenberg “one of the most evil geniuses of Germany.”
Though both Hitler and Hugenberg were fiercely anti-Communist, antidemocratic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic, their attempts at political partnership failed spectacularly and repeatedly. The problem lay not in ideological differences but in the similarity of their temperaments and their competing political aspirations. Like Hitler, Hugenberg was inflexible, stubborn, and self-righteous. When challenged, he doubled down. Hugenberg had spoken of a “third Reich” as early as 1919, well before Hitler was a force on the political scene, and he envisioned himself as the future Reichsverweser, or “regent of the Reich.” His followers greeted him with “Heil Hugenberg!” Joseph Goebbels noted that Hitler invariably emerged from his meetings with Hugenberg red-faced and “mad as shit.”
But by late January 1933, the two men’s fates were inextricably entangled. Hugenberg, who had leveraged his wealth into political power, had become the leader of the German National People’s Party, which had the votes in the Reichstag that Hitler needed to be appointed chancellor. Hitler had the potential to elevate Hugenberg to political power. As one Hitler associate explained the Hitler-Hugenberg dynamic: “Hugenberg had everything but the masses; Hitler had everything but the money.”
After cantankerous negotiation, a deal was reached: Hugenberg would deliver Hitler the chancellorship, in exchange for Hugenberg being given a cabinet post as head of a Superministerium that subsumed the ministries of economics, agriculture, and nutrition. Once in the cabinet, Hugenberg didn’t hesitate to meddle in foreign relations when it suited him. Reinhold Quaatz, a close Hugenberg associate, distilled Hugenberg’s calculus as follows: “Hitler will sit in the saddle but Hugenberg holds the whip.”
The New York Times expressed astonishment that Hugenberg, an “arch-capitalist” who stood “in strongest discord with economic doctrines of the Nazi movement,” was suddenly in charge of the country’s finances. Hitler’s “socialist mask” had fallen, the Communist daily Red Banner proclaimed, arguing that “Hugenberg is in charge, not Hitler!” The weekly journal Die Weltbühne dubbed the new government “Hitler, Hugenberg & Co.”
As self-proclaimed “economic dictator,” Hugenberg kept pace with Hitler in outraging political opponents and much of the public. He purged ministries. He dismantled workers’ rights. He lowered the wages of his own employees by 10 percent. “The real battle against unemployment lies singularly and alone in reestablishing profitability in economic life,” one of Hugenberg’s newspapers editorialized, arguing that the goal of economic policy should be to rescue “the professions, and those most negatively affected: the merchant middle class.” Hugenberg declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures, canceled debts, and placed tariffs on several widely produced agricultural goods, violating trade agreements and inflating the cost of living. “It just won’t do,” Hitler objected in one cabinet meeting, “that the financial burdens of these rescue measures fall only on the poorest.” Let them suffer awhile, Hugenberg argued. “Then it will be possible to even out the hardships.” The economy fell into chaos. The press dubbed Hugenberg the Konfusionsrat —the “consultant of confusion.”
Hugenberg didn’t care about bad press. He was accustomed to being one of the most unpopular personalities in the country. Vorwärts, the socialist newspaper, depicted him as a puffed-up frog with spectacles. Hitler called him a Wauwau, or “woof woof.” Even his close associates referred to him as “the Hamster.” But Hugenberg lived by the golden rule: He who had the gold ruled. Earlier, when disagreements had arisen over the rightward turn of the German National Party, Hugenberg simply expelled the dissenters and financed the party’s entire budget from his own resources. Hitler could aspire to be dictator of the Third Reich, but Hugenberg was already dictator of the economy.
In late June 1933, while Hitler was trying to assuage international concerns about the long-term intentions of his government, Hugenberg appeared in London at an international conference on economic development. To the surprise of everyone, including the other German-delegation members present, Hugenberg laid out an ambitious plan for economic growth through territorial expansion. “The first step would consist of Germany reclaiming its colonies in Africa,” Hugenberg explained. “The second would be that the ‘people without space’”—Volk ohne Raum—“would open areas in which our productive race would create living space.” The announcement made headlines around the world. “Reich Asks for Return of African Lands at London Parley,” read one New York Times headline. Below that, a subhead continued: “Also seeks other territory, presumably in Europe.”
Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s foreign minister, tried to walk back the Hugenberg statement, asserting that Hugenberg had expressed only a personal opinion, not government policy. Hugenberg dug in his heels, retorting that, as economic minister, when he said something, he was speaking for the entire government. Foreign policy was just an extension of economic policy. Confusion and embarrassment followed.
Back in Berlin, Neurath insisted in a cabinet meeting that “a single member cannot simply overlook the objections of the others” and that Hugenberg “either did not understand these objections, which were naturally clothed in polite form, or he did not want to understand them.” Hitler sought to mediate, saying that “what had already happened was no longer of any interest.” But Hugenberg wouldn’t back down: He wanted the issue resolved and on his terms. “It was a matter between Hitler and me as to who was going to seize the initiative,” Hugenberg later admitted. Hitler prevailed. On June 29, 1933, Hugenberg resigned his minister post.
By then Hitler no longer needed either Hugenberg’s corporate contacts or his Reichstag delegates. The bankers and industrialists who had once shunned the crass, divisive, right-wing extremist had gradually come to embrace him as a bulwark against the pro-union Social Democrats and the virulently anti-capitalist Communists. Six months earlier, three weeks before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the banker Kurt Baron von Schröder had met with Hitler at Schröder’s villa in a fashionable quarter of Cologne. The arrangements were cloak-and-dagger: Hitler made an unscheduled, early-morning exit from a train in Bonn, entered a hotel, ate a quick breakfast, then departed in a waiting car with curtained rear windows to be driven to the Schröder villa while a decoy vehicle drove in the opposite direction. Hitler walked out of the meeting with a 30 million reichsmark credit line that saved his political movement from bankruptcy.
Once Hitler was in power, there was no longer need for secrecy or subterfuge. On Monday, February 20, 1933, Hermann Göring, one of two Nazis ministers in the Hitler cabinet and the president of the Reichstag, hosted a fundraiser at his official residence for the Nazi Party in advance of upcoming elections. The event was presided over by Hjalmar Schacht, a respected banker and co-founder of a centrist political party who saw Hitler as the best bet against left-wing political forces and had lobbied President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor.
Among the two dozen industrialists, bankers, and businessmen in attendance, the most prominent was Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, known as “the cannon king” for his armament production. “I was astonished,” Schacht recalled, “because I knew that this same Krupp von Bohlen had refused an invitation from Fritz Thyssen to attend an event with the Rhine-Westfalen industrialists four weeks earlier.”
Gustav Krupp von Bohlen (at left) and Adolf Hitler during a visit to the Krupp Factory in Essen. Krupp, another wealthy Hitler backer, supplied armaments to the Third Reich. (DPA Picture Alliance / Alamy)
Perhaps equally surprising was the presence at this fundraiser of four directors from the board of the giant chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate I.G. Farben, which had to that point been staunchly pro-democracy, pro–Weimar Republic, and anti–National Socialist. (The Nazis derided the company, which employed many Jewish scientists, as “an international capitalist Jewish company.”)
Hitler himself stunned party attendees by showing up as the unannounced guest of honor. Clad in a suit and tie rather than a brown storm trooper’s uniform, Hitler addressed the assembled corporate elite, warning of the dangers of communism and trumpeting his appointment as chancellor as a “great victory” that he saw as a mandate for radical change. He outlined his plans to restore the power of the military, assert totalitarian control over the country, destroy the parliamentary system, and crush all political opponents by force. “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” Hitler told them.
After Hitler departed, Schacht spoke of the need for additional campaign financing in advance of the upcoming elections. Hermann Göring added that the election, scheduled for March 5, “will surely be the last one for the next 10 years, probably even for the next 100 years.” By day’s end, the fundraiser had generated 3 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of $15 million today.
The following three weeks delivered a series of blows to the Weimar Republic that resulted in its demise: the arson attack on the Reichstag on February 27, which saw the very symbol of parliamentarian democracy consumed in flame; the March 5 elections from which the Nazis emerged with a mandate for Hitler’s reforms; and the passing of an “enabling law,” on March 23, that established Hitler as unchallenged dictator. In a letter to Hitler, Gustav Krupp wrote, “The turn of political events is in line with the wishes which I myself and the board of directors have cherished for a long time.”
For the industrialists who helped finance and supply the Hitler government, an unexpected return on their investment was slave labor. By the early 1940s, the electronics giant Siemens AG was employing more than 80,000 slave laborers. (An official Siemens history explains that although the head of the firm, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was “a staunch advocate of democracy” who “detested the Nazi dictatorship,” he was also “responsible for ensuring the company’s well-being and continued existence.”)
By October 1942, I.G. Farben and its subsidiaries were using slave laborers in 23 locations. The life expectancy of inmates at an I.G. Farben facility at Auschwitz was less than four months; more than 25,000 people lost their lives on the construction site alone. As corporate practices adapted to evolving political realities, the company aligned its wide technological and human resources with government priorities. Jews were purged from the corporate ranks. The I.G. Farben pharmaceutical division, Bayer, supported Nazi medical experiments. A postwar affidavit alleges that Bayer paid 170 reichsmarks for 150 female Auschwitz prisoners. “The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition,” the affidavit reads. “However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments,” and “we would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.” Although recent investigations have questioned the veracity of this particular affidavit, Bayer’s involvement in medical experimentation on Auschwitz inmates is undisputed.
The I.G. Farben company Degussa owned a chemical subsidiary that produced a cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon B, used primarily for fumigating ships, warehouses, and trains—and, after 1942, as a homicidal agent at Nazi extermination facilities. Company logs confirm the delivery of an estimated 56 tons of Zyklon B from 1942 to 1944; more than 23.8 tons were sent to Auschwitz, where it served as the primary instrument of death for the more than 1 million Jewish people murdered there.
In August 1947, 24 senior I.G. Farben managers were placed on trial for their role in Nazi aggression and atrocity. In his opening statement before the court, the prosecutor Telford Taylor said of these executives, “They were the magicians who made the fantasies of Mein Kampf come true. They were the guardians of the military and state secrets.” The 15,638 pages of courtroom testimony, along with the 6,384 documents submitted as evidence—purchase orders, internal memos, board minutes—indicated that these Farben executives knew the exact number of airplane and truck ties, the running feet of tank tread, the amount of explosives, as well as the precise number of canisters of Zyklon B gas delivered to Auschwitz. The defense attorney for the chairman of I.G. Farben’s supervisory board argued that his client was “no robber, no plunderer, no slave dealer,” but rather just a 60-year-old senior executive doing what senior executives were paid to do—run the company with an eye to the bottom line. If he collaborated with the government, it was out of “a feeling of personal responsibility to the company.” Twenty-three I.G. Farben directors were eventually charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity; 13 of them were convicted and sentenced to prison.
At the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945, Gustav Krupp was indicted as a major war criminal alongside the likes of Göring and Hans Frank, but he was too ill to stand trial. Instead, his son was tried in 1947, in The United States of America v. Alfried Krupp, et al. The indictment charged the younger Krupp, alongside 11 Krupp corporate directors, with crimes against humanity and war crimes, for participating in “the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians.” Alfried Krupp reportedly never expressed remorse, at one point telling a war-crimes trial observer, “We Krupps never cared much about political ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.”
As for Alfred Hugenberg? Unlike other early private-sector Hitler enablers such as Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht—both of whom ended up in concentration camps after crossing Hitler—Hugenberg got off lightly. Hugenberg withdrew to his sprawling estate, Rohbraken, in the former feudal province of Lippe, where he lived as the local regent while his business empire was gradually whittled away.
The German Nationalist Party was disbanded as soon as Hugenberg stepped down from his cabinet post in June 1933. In December of that year, the Telegraph Union was taken over by the ministry of propaganda and absorbed into a newly created entity, the German News Office. In 1943, Hugenberg’s publishing house, Scherl Verlag, was acquired by the Nazi publisher, Eher Verlag. By war’s end, the defrocked cabinet minister and disenfranchised media mogul was diminished and dissipated but still defiant.
On September 28, 1946, Hugenberg was arrested by the British military police. He was detained for five months, and his assets were frozen. After a formal hearing, Hugenberg was deemed to be a “lesser evildoer”—officially, a “Mitläufer,” the lowest order of complicity in the Nazi regime—on the grounds that he had left his cabinet post in the first months of the Hitler regime and had never been a member of the Nazi Party. With undiminished temerity, Hugenberg balked at even that lesser charge. Having been stripped of most of his business empire, Hugenberg saw himself as a victim of, not a participant in, the Nazi regime. He appealed the hearing’s determination and won. He was declared “untainted,” which allowed him to lay claim to his frozen assets. Unrepentant to his dying day, Hugenberg refused to publicly countenance any suggestion of guilt or responsibility for Hitler’s excesses.
On the morning of Tuesday, January 31, 1933, less than 24 hours after enabling Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Hugenberg reportedly spoke with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, a fellow conservative and the mayor of Leipzig. “I’ve just committed the greatest stupidity of my life,” Hugenberg allegedly told Goerdeler. “I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in the history of the world.”
The institutions of the American government are under siege by the president of the United States. Donald Trump claims that he is fulfilling campaign promises to slash the bureaucracy and reduce waste. But what he is in fact doing is weakening potential obstacles—especially the federal civil service—that might stand in the way of his accumulation of wide and unaccountable power.
No one likes bureaucracies, even if they must acknowledge that modern states cannot function without them. But Trump’s contempt for government employees is not driven by some sort of noble, reformist instinct: He distrusts public service because he does not understand it. The president has a solipsistic and binary view of the world in which everything revolves around him, and other people either support him or oppose him. He is unable to comprehend the principle of an apolitical service that must obey the Constitution and the law over the wishes of Donald J. Trump.
In Trump’s world, service—including military service—is for suckers and losers. Only saps forgo personal benefit and miss out on a chunky payday in order to be part of something bigger than themselves. The president and his MAGA allies, accordingly, have portrayed diligent government employees as schemers who are part of some nefarious ideological project. In a titanic act of projection, Trump has convinced millions of Americans that their fellow citizens are scammers just out for themselves.
I retired from the federal workforce in 2022 with more than 25 years of service in the Defense Department and on the staff of the U.S. Senate. I agree that plenty of agencies and deadwood employees should go gently into that good night, and sooner rather than later. But folding up federal agencies and firing their employees is a complicated business, requiring a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. Only someone with profound hubris would be willing to make such changes in a matter of weeks (especially if they lack any experience in the public sector), which may explain why Trump tapped Elon Musk for the job.
Trump’s project began with an executive order empowering DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” This is stilted hooey, but in any case, the unelected, unconfirmed, and unaccountable Musk took up the cause with gusto, barging into government offices, attempting to access classified facilities, and seizing control of information assets such as the Treasury’s payments system.
Some of this is constitutionally sketchy and probably illegal, as my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday. Some government employees may, of course, one day prevail in civil lawsuits, but with Trump now in control of the Justice Department and immunized for “official acts” by the Supreme Court, no one in his administration is going to stop him or Musk at this point.
Musk’s role in Trump’s efforts creates significant conflicts of interest. (He is a government contractor, after all.) His motives are somewhat opaque but likely come from both practical and ideological interests, especially because these days he sounds like a late-night caller to a MAGA talk-radio program. (The U.S. Agency for International Development, he posted on X, was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”) And if Musk can seize control of the federal payments system—as he seems to be in the process of doing—perhaps he thinks he is a step closer to fulfilling his dream of replacing the national financial system with some galactic payment app that handles everything.
But, like Trump, Musk also appears to just detest people who work in public service. Both men resent government agencies for two important reasons: They do not own these public institutions, and the employees do not instantly obey their orders.
Federal employees answer to their departments and to the president, but within the constraints of the law and the Constitution. Trump’s supporters will argue that the machinery of the federal government should, in fact, answer directly and completely to the president, but they’re trying to revive a settled argument:America already had the debate over cronyism and the spoils system in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is why the United States has laws specifically meant to prevent the abuse of public institutions for personal or political gain, including the Pendleton Act of 1883, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, and various iterations of the Hatch Act.
Indeed, even this administration seems to realize that what it’s asking is completely alien to the modern American credo of professional and apolitical national service. Trump has resurrected an order he issued back in 2020 (which was immediately rescinded by Joe Biden) with some careful edits. But the new language about “accountability” does not change the fact that Trump’s order reclassifies many civil servants as functionally equivalent to political appointees, removing their civil-service protections and making them fireable at will by the president. In other words, Trump is redefining public servants as presidential servants.
Trump learned the hard way during his first term that bureaucrats and other federal employees, with their pesky insistence on outdated concepts such as “the rule of law,” could be a consistent obstacle to his various machinations. When Trump tried to strong-arm the Ukrainians into investigating Biden by withholding U.S. aid, for example, federal whistleblowers sounded the alarm. Other federal agencies and appointees—including leaders of the United States military—were impediments to Trump’s most dangerous and unconstitutional impulses.
The president appears to have learned his lesson. This time, he has prepared the ground for his attack on government institutions by demonizing the people who work in them at almost every level. He may not be able to disestablish entire organizations (although he might well try), but even short of that, he can make their employees so hated by the rest of the country that they can be terrorized into obedience or resignation. Trump’s campaign against the civil service, as one manager working in the federal government told NBC News, is “psychological warfare” on a daily basis.
Trump’s suspicion of the government he leads is also why he has sent shockingly unqualified nominees to head the Defense Department, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other agencies. Think of it as a kind of political pincer attack: At the top, Trump decapitates important organizations and removes their professional staff. He replaces them with people who do not know or care about what they’re doing other than carrying out Trump’s orders. At the bottom, Musk and the president’s new hires at the Office of Personnel Management ensure that whoever is left is either a loyalist who will support such orders or someone too scared to object to them.
President Trump regards people who take their constitutional oath seriously as, by definition, his political enemies. If he is going to rule as the autocrat he wishes to be, he knows he must replace career civil servants with flunkies and vassals who will serve him and his needs above all else. His attack on public service is not about reform; it’s a first strike against a key obstacle to authoritarianism.
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Some presidents spend their first few weeks in office trying to make good on their central campaign promise; Donald Trump has instead done everything he can to avoid having to follow through on his. A controversial campaign pledge to enact big, universal tariffs that would transform the global-trade system and usher in American prosperity has been whittled down to a set of hollow threats designed to extract mostly symbolic concessions from America’s neighbors. Trump is behaving like a man who has lost the appetite for aggressive tariffs—if he ever had it in the first place.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump vowed to enact the most sweeping trade restrictions since the Great Depression: a 10 to 20 percent tariff on all goods coming from foreign countries, plus a special 60 percent tariff on goods from China. Trump and his key trade advisers arguedthat the plan would revive American manufacturing, enrich the U.S. government, and keep America’s economy ahead of China’s.
Following Trump’s victory in November, however, some of his economic advisers began offering a pared-down proposal in an effort to assuage business leaders and investors who worried about tariffs’ inflationary consequences. Tariffs, they argued, were really a negotiating tool that would allow Trump to win economic and geopolitical concessions from America’s trading partners. Howard Lutnick, who is now Trump’s secretary of commerce, claimed that the mere threat of tariffs could be used as leverage to rewrite the rules of the international trading system in America’s favor. “We’ll make a bunch of money on the tariffs, but mostly everybody else is going to negotiate with us,” he said on CNBC. Scott Bessent, now Trump’s treasury secretary, argued that tariffs could have noneconomic benefits as well; they would, he said, be “a useful tool for achieving the president’s foreign-policy objectives.”
Upon taking office, Trump narrowed the logic of his proposed trade restrictions even further. The economic rationale disappeared entirely, and even the political goals tied to his tariff threats appeared oddly small-bore. In the first two weeks of his presidency, Trump threatened tariffs against Colombia for refusing to take in flights carrying deported migrants, against the European Union for running trade surpluses with the United States, and against Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (collectively referred to as “BRICS”) for considering the creation of a new reserve currency. Then, this past Friday, Trump announced his first official round of tariffs: a 10 percent levy on all goods from China and 25 percent on nearly all goods from Mexico and Canada. According to a document announcing the tariffs, their purpose would be to “hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.” “WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN?” Trump posted on Sunday on Truth Social. “YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!).”
Then, almost as quickly as Trump had announced the tariffs, he reversed course. Yesterday morning, he decided to pause the tariffs on Mexico after its president, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced that she would deploy 10,000 troops to the border to curb immigration and drug trafficking. Later that afternoon, the tariffs on Canada were also paused following two phone calls between Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who agreed to implement a $1.3 billion plan to reinforce America’s northern border, appoint a “Fentanyl Czar,” and launch a $200 million “intelligence directive” to crack down on organized crime and fentanyl. Trump took the opportunity to declare victory. “I am very pleased with this initial outcome,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social. “FAIRNESS FOR ALL!”
In reality, Trump’s tariff threats accomplished next to nothing beyond political theater. Canada’s $1.3 billion border plan sounds like a big concession—but it had already been announced before Trump took office. Moreover, last year, just 1.5 percent of illegal border crossings took place and just 0.2 percent of the fentanyl seized by U.S. border authorities was found at the Canadian border. Crossings at the southern border, meanwhile, have been plummeting since March and, by the end of last year, had reached a lower point than when Trump left office the first time. Fentanyl entering into the U.S. from Mexico remains a problem, but sending more Mexican troops to the border is unlikely to fix it; Mexico already sent 15,000 troops to the border in response to Trump’s tariff threats in 2019, and the scale of trafficking has only increased.
Maybe political theater was the point all along. The appeal of tariffs has as much to do with the signal they send as with their concrete benefits. In fact, a widely discussed economics paper published last year found that although Trump’s 2018–19 trade war with China failed to boost employment in areas that had been most undercut by Chinese exports, it still boosted vote share for Trump and other Republicans in those places. Trump seems to have intuited this dynamic on his own. By proposing a set of tariffs that he likely had no intention of following through on, Trump could appear tough on trade, declare a victory, and claim to have fulfilled a key campaign promise—all without having to risk political backlash over the higher prices that come with actual high tariffs. Of course, whether voters will view Trump’s actions in this way, rather than as a transparent charade, remains to be seen.
What is clear is that the averted tariffs had essentially nothing to do with economics. For years, Trump’s intellectual supporters, notably his former trade representative Robert Lighthizer and his current senior trade adviser, Peter Navarro, have promoted a heterodox economic theory in support of major tariffs. Enacting such restrictions, they argue, would turn America into a manufacturing powerhouse, ensure its lead in the crucial technologies of the future, and deliver prosperity to Middle America. Perhaps the most striking thing about the tariffs that Trump has threatened to impose so far is that they don’t even pretend to further that vision. Trump voters were promised a manufacturing revival, and what they got was a Canadian fentanyl czar.
The partial exception is the 10 percent tariff on China that went into effect this morning and, as of this writing, remains intact. There, the economic and geopolitical case for restrictions is far more coherent: Liberalized trade relations with China has been empirically linked to the decline of America’s manufacturing base, and depending on a great-power rival for crucial technologies poses national-security risks. Yet even here, Trump has not justified the tariff in those terms—and he implemented it at a level far below the 60 percent that he promised on the campaign trail.
Trump’s second term is still in its infancy. Perhaps draconian trade restrictions remain in the offing. The available evidence, however, suggests that Trump favors steep tariffs only so long as they are theoretical. Most experts have argued that Trump’s tariff plan would inflict severe economic pain domestically. The president’s most recent moves suggest that he has come to believe them.
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A recent target in Elon Musk’s long and eminently tweetable list of grievances: the existence of the world’s most famous encyclopedia. Musk’s latest attack—“Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!” he posted on X last month—coincided with an update to his own Wikipedia page, one that described the Sieg heil–ish arm movement he’d made during an Inauguration Day speech. “Musk twice extended his right arm towards the crowd in an upward angle,” the entry read at one point. “The gesture was compared to a Nazi salute or fascist salute. Musk denied any meaning behind the gesture.” There was little to be upset about; the Wikipedia page didn’t accuse Musk of making a Sieg heil salute. But that didn’t seem to matter to Musk. Wikipedia is “an extension of legacy media propaganda!” he posted.
Musk’s outburst was part of an ongoing crusade against the digital encyclopedia. In recent months, he has repeatedly attempted to delegitimize Wikipedia, suggesting on X that it is “controlled by far-left activists” and calling for his followers to “stop donating to Wokepedia.” Other prominent figures who share his politics have also set their sights on the platform. “Wikipedia has been ideologically captured for years,” Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, posted after Musk’s gesture last month. “Wikipedia lies,” Chamath Palihapitiya, another tech investor, wrote. Pirate Wires, a publication popular among the tech right, has published at least eight stories blasting Wikipedia since August.
Wikipedia is certainly not immune to bad information, disagreement, or political warfare, but its openness and transparency rules have made it a remarkably reliable platform in a decidedly unreliable age. Evidence that it’s an outright propaganda arm of the left, or of any political party, is thin. In fact, one of the most notable things about the site is how it has steered relatively clear of the profit-driven algorithmic mayhem that has flooded search engines and social-media platforms with bad or politically fraught information. If anything, the site, which is operated by a nonprofit and maintained by volunteers, has become more of a refuge in a fractured online landscape than an ideological prison—a “last bastion of shared reality,” as the writer Alexis Madrigal once called it. And that seems to be precisely why it’s under attack.
The extent to which Wikipedia’s entries could be politically slanted has been a subject of inquiry for a long time. (Accusations of liberal bias have persisted just as long: In 2006, the son of the famed conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly launched “Conservapedia” to combat it.) Sock puppets and deceptive editing practices have been problems on the site, as with the rest of the internet. And demographically speaking, it’s true that Wikipedia entries are written and edited by a skewed sliver of humanity: A 2020 survey by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, found that roughly 87 percent of the site’s contributors were male; more than half lived in Europe. In recent years, the foundation has put an increased emphasis on identifying and filling in these so-called knowledge gaps. Research has shown that diversity among Wikipedia’s editors makes information on the site less biased, a spokesperson pointed out to me. For the anti-Wikipedia contingent, however, such efforts are evidence that the site has been taken over by the left. As Pirate Wires has put it, Wikipedia has become a “top-down social activism and advocacy machine.”
In 2016, two researchers at Harvard Business School examined more than 70,000 Wikipedia articles related to U.S. politics and found that overall they were “mildly more slanted towards the Democratic ‘view’” than analogous Encyclopedia Britannica articles. Still, the finding was nuanced. Entries on civil rights had more of a Democratic slant; articles on immigration had more of a Republican slant. Any charge of “extreme left-leaning bias,” Shane Greenstein, an economist who co-authored the study, told me, “could not be supported by the data.” Things could have changed since then, Greenstein said, but he’s “very skeptical” that they have.
Attacks will continue regardless. In June, the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, published a report suggesting that Wikipedia articles about certain organizations and public figures aligned with the right tend to be associated with greater amounts of negative sentiment than similar groups and figures on the left. When asked about bias on the site, the Wikimedia spokesperson told me that “Wikipedia is not influenced by any one person or group” and that the site’s editors “don’t write to convince but to explain and inform.” (They certainly like to write: A debate over the spellingyogurt versus yoghurt was similar in length to The Odyssey. In the end, yogurt won, but three other spellings are listed in the article’s first sentence.)
The fact that Musk, in his most recent tirade against Wikipedia, didn’t point to any specific errors in the entry about his inauguration gesture is telling. As he gripes about injustice, the fundamental issue he and others in his circle have with Wikipedia seems to be more about control. With his acquisitional approach to global technology and platforms, Musk has gained influence over an astonishing portion of online life. He has turned X into his own personal megaphone, which he uses to spout his far-right political views. Through Starlink, his satellite-internet company, Musk quite literally governs some people’s access to the web. Even other tech platforms that Musk doesn’t own have aligned themselves with him. In early January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would back away from third-party fact-checking on its platforms, explicitly citing X as an inspiration. (Zuckerberg also announced that the company’s trust and safety teams would move from California to Texas, again borrowing from Musk.)
One thing Musk does not control is Wikipedia. Although the site is far from perfect, it remains a place where, unlike much of the internet, facts still matter. That the people who are constantly writing and rewriting Wikipedia entries are disaggregated volunteers—rather than bendable to one man’s ideological views—seems to be in the public interest. The site’s structure is a nuisance for anyone invested in controlling how information is disseminated. With that in mind, the campaign against Wikipedia may best be understood as the apotheosis of a view fashionable among the anti-“woke” tech milieu: Free speech, which the group claims to passionately defend, counts only so long as they like what you have to say. Attempts to increase the diversity of perspectives represented on the site—that is, attempts to bring about more speech—have been construed as “censorship.” This group is less interested in representing multiple truths, as Wikipedia attempts to do, than it is in a singular truth: its own. (Musk, Maguire, and Palihapitiya did not respond to requests for comment.)
Ironically, Wikipedia resembles the version of the internet that Musk and his peers speak most reverently of. Musk often touts X’s Community Notes feature, which encourages users to correct and contextualize misleading posts. That sounds a lot like the philosophy behind … Wikipedia. Indeed, in a recent interview, X’s vice president of product explained that Community Notes took direct inspiration from Wikipedia.
Strike hard enough and often enough, the Wikipedia-haters seem to believe, and the website might just fracture into digital smithereens. Just as Twitter’s user base splintered into X and Bluesky and Mastodon and Threads, one can imagine a sad swarm of rival Wikipedias, each proclaiming its own ideological supremacy. (Musk and others in his orbit have similarly accused Reddit of being “hard-captured by the far left.”) Musk can’t just buy Wikipedia like he did Twitter. In December 2022, months after he purchased the social platform, a New York Post reporter suggested that he do just that. “Not for sale,” Jimmy Wales, one of the site’s co-founders, responded. The following year, Musk mockingly offered to give the site $1 billion to change its name to “Dickipedia.”
Even if he can’t buy Wikipedia, by blasting his more than 215 million followers with screeds against the site and calls for its defunding, Musk may be able to slowly undermine its credibility. (The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual budget of $189 million. Meanwhile, Musk spent some $288 million backing Trump and other Republican candidates this election cycle.) Anyone who defends free speech and democracy should wish for Wikipedia to survive and remain independent. Against the backdrop of a degraded web, the improbable success of a volunteer-run website attempting to gather all the world’s knowledge is something to celebrate, not destroy. And it’s especially valuable when so many prominent tech figures are joining Musk in using their deep pockets to make their own political agendas clear. At Donald Trump’s inauguration, the CEOs of the companies who run the world’s six most popular websites sat alongside Trump’s family on the dais. There was no such representative for the next-most-popular site: Wikipedia.
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Over the first two weeks of the second Donald Trump presidency, the narrative has swung back and forth abruptly. A flurry of executive orders to start the term: proof of a newly disciplined, regimented administration. The quick retreat from a federal funding freeze: evidence of the same chaos that dogged Trump’s first stint as president. Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg against USAID: Who can even be sure?
The first Trump administration conditioned many people to discount the seriousness of any effort. No matter what Trump promised, he was too mercurial a president and ineffective a manager to make it happen. He really did want to repeal Obamacare and build a border wall, but he just didn’t have the attention span to execute, and his staff was too consumed with internecine feuds to be useful. The result was perpetual disorder and underachievement.
More recently, Trumpworld has cultivated an impression of greater control. Trump’s 2024 campaign co-manager Susie Wiles was credited with keeping him on track during the lead-up to the election (with some notableexceptions), and she’s now White House chief of staff. Project 2025, an outside effort led by past, current, and likely future White House staffers, also demonstrates careful thought about how to better execute during a second term. When Trump signed a series of executive orders along many fronts on January 20 and 21, it seemed to prove that something had changed, although sharp rebukes from federal judges and sloppy drafting errors have raised doubts since then.
But chaos versus strategy is a misleading and unhelpful binary for understanding this presidency. Chaos certainly helps Trump, because it makes coordinated resistance from Congress, outside advocates, or the public challenging. Many White House actions appear to be usurping legislative authority, but the speed of the moves has left members of Congress in both parties looking stunned and indecisive. His goal, however, is not simply to create confusion. Trump likes keeping his aides siloed—it allows him to play them off one another, and prevents any one faction from getting too strong. (His appreciation for checks and balances does not appear to extend to Congress and the courts.) Internal feuding isn’t a downside for Trump: It’s his way of settling disputes.
Moreover, the chaos does not evince a lack of strategy. As I wrote last week, the grant freeze by the Office of Management and Budget wasn’t some ad hoc move, but instead part of a long-running plan by conservative ideologues to challenge the law that prevents the president from withholding money that’s appropriated. That’s also why the White House’s retreat from the freeze is almost certainly only temporary.
Elon Musk’s moves, through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, appear to be more improvisational. Unlike the OMB wonks, Musk has little knowledge of how the federal government works and little interest in the risk of his actions; his team reportedly includes inexperienced aides as young as 19. Nonetheless, the transformation of Twitter into X serves as a good model for how this might play out. After Musk’s aggressive takeover, refugees from the company made dire warnings about it collapsing entirely. More than two years later, the site is overrun with racist trolls, but it is still functional and has become a powerful political weapon for Musk.
If Musk is left to his own devices, we might expect something similar from DOGE. He’s already gotten nearly 1 percent of the federal workforce to resign, almost single-handledly brought USAID to the verge of death, and reportedly acquired access to reams of government data. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote yesterday, “It is nothing short of an administrative coup.” A Muskified federal government might not serve the public very well, but it could become an effective political tool for Musk and his allies.
And that might not be the only administrative coup in action. New staffers are joining the administration every day, and many of them have ties to Project 2025, the scheme to overhaul the federal government. Russell Vought, the intellectual leading light of Project 2025, passed a procedural vote yesterday and could be confirmed to lead OMB this week. Adam Candeub, another Project 2025 contributor, was just named general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. This group is far more methodical than Musk, preferring a careful and quiet plan to his blunt, noisy tack.
What unites Musk and the ideologues is a commitment to do whatever they can, and see what they can get away with it. If that looks like chaos, so be it. They know what it is they’re trying to do.
China announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. gas, coal, and other products, which will go into effect next Monday. Chinese regulators also began an anti-monopoly investigation into Google.
Several FBI employees sued the Justice Department over its order for the bureau to turn over a list of names of employees who worked on investigations related to the January 6 insurrection.
Evening Read
Chronicle / Alamy
What’s Up With All the Sex Parties?
By Xochitl Gonzalez
In the course of my research, I did not—I would like to be clear here—participate in any sex parties. I think it’s wise not to get that close to your sources. I learned that “play parties” can take place in people’s homes, but many happen under the auspices of private clubs. I reached out to a number of prominent ones, wondering if the sex-club boom was real, and what actually goes on at them. One of my major findings: People, especially rich people, come up with extremely elaborate justifications for getting laid.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: csa-archive / Getty.
Debate. When people say they “don’t like” kids, they’re expressing way more than a preference, Stephanie H. Murray writes.
Read. The novelist Ali Smith scrambles plotlines, upends characters, and flouts chronology—while telling propulsively readable stories, Adam Begley writes.
I forgot one other thing I share with Tom: a love of cats. This is my irascible assistant and ombudscat, Mackerel (a.k.a. Mack, Mackintosh, Mackinac … or whatever my children come up with at any given moment). He’s almost a year old, and when he’s not hiding in a laundry hamper, harassing his big sister Nellie, or stealing food off the counter, he’s usually getting in my face or walking across my keyboard—so please direct any typo complaints his way.
Move over, Greenland. Donald Trump has his eyes on a new prize: Gaza. At a news conference with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, the president declared that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” “level it out,” and “create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.” These people would not all be Gazans, whom Trump suggested should be resettled elsewhere, at least temporarily. The president also expressed openness to deploying U.S. troops in order to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Trump’s Gaz-a-Lago plan has just one minor defect: It is a nonstarter with pretty much all of the parties required to make it work. Fresh off failed forays into Iraq and Afghanistan, many Americans will balk at inserting themselves into one of the Middle East’s most intractable conflicts. “I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the most hawkish lawmakers in Congress, told reporters. Trump named Jordan and Egypt as two Arab countries that could take in displaced Gazans during the territory’s reconstruction, but both regimes would rather swallow broken glass than grant citizenship or even a foothold to large numbers of Palestinians, whose cause they celebrate but whose people they routinely denigrate.
Trump’s scheme also conflicts with an essential component of the Israeli ethos. The country prides itself on “defending itself by itself,” as home to a formerly persecuted people no longer reliant on foreign powers for its security. This pose is something of a polite fiction—Israel very much relies on American weapons and diplomatic support—but it’s true to the extent that the country has always fought its own wars with its own fighters. Trump’s proposal would upend that doctrine and risk turning Israel into a liability for the United States, rather than a strategic asset. As for the Palestinians, many Gazans would readily seek a new life elsewhere if offered the opportunity to escape their horrific circumstances, but many others would not. If done at the point of a gun, such a transfer would constitute ethnic cleansing—a far-right Israeli dream into which Trump just breathed new life, whatever his intentions.
But as flawed as Trump’s proposed solution is, it does identify a real problem. The U.S., Arab states, the European Union, the United Nations, and countless human-rights organizations all claim to care about Gaza. In the decades since Israel withdrew its troops and settlements from the territory, however, the international community has participated in a perverse cycle: It shovels money and aid into Gaza; watches that money get appropriated by Hamas to bankroll its messianic war against Israel’s existence; relegates the military response to Hamas to ever more hawkish Israeli governments, elected by voters pushed to the right by rocket attacks; rebuilds Gaza with more soon-to-be-compromised aid after yet another ruinous conflict between Israel and Hamas; then proclaims itself shocked and appalled when the cycle repeats.
The latest war has been catastrophic for the Palestinian people, and that is the culmination of years of bankrupt international policy. “The Gaza thing has not worked; it’s never worked,” Trump told reporters yesterday. “It’s a pure demolition site. If we could find the right piece of land or numerous pieces of land and build them some really nice places … I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had just decades and decades of death.” As is often the case, Trump accurately diagnosed a fundamental failure of the reigning policy elites, but offered a half-baked solution to the problem.
With significant revisions, this proposal could contain a semblance of something workable. Temporarily housing Gazans in dignified conditions elsewhere while the devastated territory is rebuilt under the watchful eyes of America and its allies would provide the Gazan people with much-deserved relief while depriving Hamas of its source of power and income. The civilians would no longer be shields for Hamas to place between itself and Israel, and Hamas would no longer be able to skim funds from the population’s aid. Ultimately, the Gazan people could then return to a home no longer hostage to either Hamas or Israeli blockade. Should Trump’s Arab allies talk him into something like this, it would certainly be better than rerunning the old playbook and expecting a different result.
Trump’s proposal could be a negotiating tactic—a grandiose plan intended to be bargained down to something practical. It could be a flight of fancy that won’t survive contact with the regional players, or a vision he intends to push through with American might. No one honestly knows. More immediate questions also remain unanswered: Does Trump intend to ensure that the current Israel-Hamas cease-fire holds through its second phase, which is scheduled to begin in March, or will the war reignite? If the president is unable to strike a new accord with Iran, Hamas’s weakened patron, will he back Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites? Trump also dropped another surprise toward the end of his press conference, when he said that his administration would announce its policy on potential Israeli annexation of the West Bank—territory that Palestinians claim for their future state—in the next four weeks.
Whether Trump will follow through on any of the ideas he tossed like grenades into the discourse yesterday is anyone’s guess. What’s certain is this: The old rules of the Middle East no longer apply, and no one knows what the new ones are.
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Sometimes a constitutional crisis sneaks up on you, shrouded in darkness, revealing itself gradually. Other times it announces itself dramatically. Elon Musk, to whom Donald Trump has delegated the task of neutering the congressional spending authority laid out in Article I of the Constitution, could hardly be more obvious about his intentions if he rode into Washington on a horse trailed by Roman legions.
“This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people,” Musk wrote at 3:59 a.m. today on his social-media platform. “We’re never going to get another chance like this. It’s now or never. Your support is crucial to the success of the revolution of the people.” Here is Musk, as proxy for Trump, casting himself as a revolutionary force and embodiment of the popular will, demanding extraordinary powers to fight some unstated emergency.
Why, exactly, is eliminating these programs right this very instant so important? If, as Musk says, they are teeming with waste and fraud, presumably Congress could pass legislation to reduce or eliminate the problem, and if that were to fall short, it could try again later. Instead, Musk cites a vague crisis that requires suspending normal operations and concentrating power in his own hands. According to various reports, he is holed up in the Eisenhower Building with a small team of young engineers who possess neither government experience nor the authority to question his impulsive judgments, on the hunt for Marxist plots lurking within long-standing federal programs.
The situation exposes a well-known flaw in the design of the Constitution. The Founders, famously, failed to anticipate the rise of political parties. They assumed that each branch of government would jealously guard its own powers, and thus check the others. But political parties created a different incentive system, in which members of the legislative branch can see their role as essentially employees of the president. Trump, who has convinced the Republican base that his interests are indistinguishable from the party’s and transposed his overbearing Apprentice boss persona onto his relations with co-partisans in Congress, is exploiting these incentives more than any other president in history.
In theory, Congress ought to revolt against the prospect of Musk deciding which federal programs should live and which should die. In reality, its Republican members largely share Trump’s goals—and to the extent that they don’t, they correctly fear that opposing him would invite a primary challenge. What’s more, this particular constitutional crisis has an inherent partisan asymmetry. If Trump and Musk succeed in taking the power of the purse from Congress, they will effectively reset the rules of the game in favor of the right. Congress’s spending powers would be redefined as setting a ceiling on spending, but not a floor. A world in which the president could cut spending without exposing Congress to accountability would hand small-government conservatives the opportunity to carry out policies they’ve long desired but been too afraid to vote for.
And so, although a handful of conservative intellectuals, including the budget wonk Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute and the law professor and former Bush-administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith, have described Musk’s ambitions as unconstitutional, most of the establishment right has cheered him on or stayed quiet. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that Musk’s project might not be strictly constitutional, but nonetheless told the news site NOTUS that “nobody should bellyache about that.”
Making things even more disturbing is the chaotic legal gray area in which Musk is operating. Musk and his team are working in secret, without hearings or public debate. According to Wired, they gained access to the Treasury Department’s federal payment system, shoving aside the longtime staffer overseeing it and ignoring its safety protocols. Democrats suspect that Musk is breaching numerous federal laws, but without any oversight, it is hard to tell precisely what he is doing. In any case, Musk might not have much reason to care about following the law. Trump has already made plain, by issuing mass pardons and commutations for the January 6 insurrectionists, that he will protect illegal conduct on his behalf.
Meanwhile, Musk has adopted Trump’s habit of deeming opposition to his actions inherently criminal. He has called the United States Agency for International Development, a decades-old program with support in both parties, a “criminal organization.” After an X user posted the names of the young engineers working with Musk, previously reported by Wired, he responded, “You have committed a crime.” The X user’s account has since been suspended.
Reporting on the identities of powerful public officials is, in fact, not a crime—even, or especially, if those officials have assumed public powers without going through formal channels. Musk has nonetheless gotten backup for his threats from Edward R. Martin Jr., a former “Stop the Steal” organizer whom Trump installed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In a vague but menacing message posted (naturally) on X, Martin warned that “certain individuals and/or groups have committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.” Martin declined to identify either the individuals or the laws they’d allegedly broken, nor did he acknowledge that reporting about or criticizing Musk’s work constitutes First Amendment–protected activity. Whether Martin acts upon these threats remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, he is contributing to the atmosphere of menace surrounding Trump and Musk by delivering their threats with a legal sheen, like some kind of MAGA Tom Hagen.
The courts will have the final say over Trump’s audacious power grab. In all likelihood, they will affirm congressional authority to set spending levels authorized by the Constitution. But the Constitution ultimately means whatever five Supreme Court justices say it means. The Court’s more conservative justices often apply the most right-wing interpretation of the text they can plausibly defend, and occasionally one they can’t plausibly defend.
What’s more, Musk seems to have intuited that he can destroy programs and bureaucratic cultures faster than the system can restore them. Firing officials en masse, throwing the people and clients that rely on those programs into confusion and financial risk, and striking fear into the whole federal apparatus can break down the institutions and destroy their institutional knowledge. Rebuilding is painfully slow; destruction is rapid. This may be the dynamic Musk has in mind when he insists that his work must happen “now or never.”
Not even the most committed small-government-conservative lawmaker would design a process like the one now occurring: a handful of political novices, many of them drinking deep from the fetid waters of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, tearing through the federal budget, making haphazard decisions about what to scrap. And indeed, no elected body has designed this process. Trump and Musk have arrogated the power to themselves. The true urgent cause is to return that power to the legislature before the damage becomes irreversible.
As many as 400 million Hindu pilgrims are expected to visit Prayagraj, India, during this year’s 45-day Maha Kumbh Mela festival. Held every 12 years at one of four places in India, the Kumbh Mela is considered to be an especially auspicious time to bathe in the Triveni Sangam—the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and mythical Saraswati rivers—for purification from sin. Gathered below are images from the first days of this year’s Maha Kumbh Mela.
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