The second news story I saw this morning said that the Trump Administration is threatening to shut down Social Security if Elon Musk’s Lost Boys are not allowed access to our personal information. This is from Bloomberg:
The Trump administration is threatening to all but shut down the Social Security Administration in response to a judge’s ruling blocking activities by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — an action that could delay payments to millions of beneficiaries caught in the middle of the legal battle.
Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek said the temporary restraining order issued Thursday is so broad in blocking access to data by “DOGE affiliates” that it could apply to any Social Security employee.
Weirdly, though, the Bloomberg headline makes it sound as if it’s the judge’s ruling that threatens Social Security, not the Trump Administration. The only media source I’ve seen with a headline that flatly states the Trump Administration is threatening Social Security is Rolling Stone. Which reports,
“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” said Lee Dudek, acting Social Security Administration (SSA) commissioner, arguing the order was too broad, according to Bloomberg News. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems,” he said, adding: “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency.”
Dudek’s threat to block SSA employees from using the agency’s IT systems — a move that could halt Social Security payments — came in response to a judge’s temporary restraining order in a case brought by the AFL-CIO labor union. The order bars Social Security Administration officials from allowing DOGE, including Musk, and the SSA’s DOGE team to access personally identifiable information. It also directs Musk and DOGE to delete from their possession all non-anonymized personal data, and bars them from having access to SSA computers or code.
If he really did shut down Social Security, that would certainly get the nation’s attention. But I don’t think the blowback would be all that helpful to the Trump Administration, or to Republicans in general.
The first news story I saw this morning, from the New York Times, said that Elon Musk is scheduled today to be briefed by the Pentagon on a potential war with China.
The Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Another official said the briefing would be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.
Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York Times, Pentagon officials and President Trump denied that the session would be about military plans involving China. “China will not even be mentioned or discussed,” Mr. Trump said in a late-night social media post.
It was not clear if the briefing for Mr. Musk would go ahead as originally planned. But providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to Mr. Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.
Oopsie. The new story is that the Wrath of Musk will fall on the Pentagon leakers.
Donald Trump’s top adviser Elon Musk has openly threatened Pentagon employees who may have leaked information that the tech billionaire was due to get a briefing on a potential American war with China.
The story, published by the New York Times on Thursday evening U.S. time, said that — according to anonymous American officials — the Pentagon planned to brief Musk on Friday about the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China.
After the story went live, the planned meeting was confirmed by Pentagon officials and President Trump — but both denied that the session would discuss military plans involving China.
Musk doesn’t have any business being briefed by the Pentagon about anything, as far as I’m concerned. And he bleeping does business with bleeping China.
According to Forbes, Musk’s current disapproval rating is at 51 percent, which tells me a lot of voters are still not paying attention. It would be a lot higher, if they were. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported this morning that Musk is telling Tesla employees to hang on to their stock after Tesla shares plunged more than 50 percent in just three months. Musk points out to his employees that Tesla makes “the best-selling car on earth,” the Model Y. And it was the best-selling car on earth in 2023 and probably in 2024, but it’s hard to see it repeating that distinction in 2025.
See also Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue.
And then yesterday the Financial Times reported that Tesla appears to have an accounting problem.
As Tesla’s car sales and share price plummet in response to Elon Musk’s political and physical stances, we would like to draw readers’ attention to something puzzling in the group’s accounts. Compare Tesla’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that money was spent on, and $1.4bn appears to have gone astray. The sum is big enough to matter even at Tesla, and comes at a moment when attention is returning to the group’s underlying numbers, now that its fully diluted stock market valuation has crashed from $1.7tn to below $800bn.
The Financial Times is not saying that anything shady is going on, but does call this a “red flag.”
Musk currently is dumping a lot of money into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping to fill a seat being opened by a retiring liberal judge with a MAGAt. The election will be held April 1. The candidates are Susan Crawford, known to be liberal, and Musk’s candidate, Brad Schimel. Musk is repeating his 2024 tricks, running deceptive ads and offering $100 to people who will sign a petition to “oppose activist judges.” Petition signers are not being asked to vote for Schimel, but those who sign the petition are giving Musk personal information that will allow his people to contact them again. He did something very similar in Pennsylvania in 2024.
I would think all it would take is to let Wisconsin voters know that Schimel is backed by Elon Musk to have them stampeding to vote for Crawford. But we’ll see. If Crawford does win — and I understand she is still ahead in polls — this might tell us something about whether Musk still has any value to Republicans, or to Trump.
Never have I seen mistrust of government and politicians so high. Never before have I heard so many of them have their opinions face summary rejections by those they are supposed to represent. Personally, I see them more as pawns for Putin or Netanyahu than their own constituents. As for Musk, his character, motives, and behavior radiate an aura of deception and mistrust. It is like watching a ten-year old child operating a massive bulldozer on both a six pack of beer and Red Bull. It is beyond madness.
Agree. I hope you all have read this:
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/26/from-maga-to-monarchy-how-tech-billionaires-are-engineering-american-autocracy/
So, we swap DEI for Opus Dei on hallucinogens and steroids. The second coming of Francisco Franko and the cult of the Catholic Mafia with a techno bent.
From Slate:
Most Americans, if they have heard of the organization Opus Dei, know it because of the Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code, a 2003 thriller in which the primary villain is an Opus Dei assassin, an albino monk who kills to protect his cult. But Opus Dei is an actual Catholic group still active today, and while it has no albino monks (actually, no monks at all), its real history contains enough dark deeds—as detailed in a newly published exposé by the British journalist Gareth Gore—that it needs no help from fiction to be fit for outlandish conspiracy theories.
Gore’s book Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, which was published in the U.S. on Oct. 1, contains a shocking number of sinister allegations about the organization, which emerged from fascist Spain through a close alliance with the Franco regime. Gore describes financial crimes, sexual abuse, the grooming and coercion of recruits, the drugging of members, human trafficking, and even slavery.
What a link.
"It is like watching a ten-year old child operating a massive bulldozer on both a six pack of beer and Red Bull"
Not like, is, more accurately it IS a 10-year-old man-child only he's high on fucking ketamine!
Wow. You kept us in suspense about who you meant until the very last word, "ketamine!" Great going!
(I mean, if you'd changed the last word to "Adderall," and, Trump does like big vehicles….)
Why would Musk be given a briefing about top secret war plans with China, as someone who is supposedly only an efficiency advisor, there to find "fraud, waste and abuse" in government? That's the question that needs to be asked, especially since he has business interests, namely Tesla, in China.
I suspect this is a tell on the arrangement Trump has with Musk. Trump doesn't have the patience to sit through a detailed briefing like that, and he certainly lacks the intellect to understand it. So he sends Musk, who'll come back and tell him for laughs, then brief Putin on the details, something that Putin likely prefers because he knows Trump is too stupid to rely the details.
Rather than "musky odor", I'd substitute, "foul stench."
I suspect (as CSM observed) that Musk and a few others are go-betweens, selected to sit through serious meetings to report to Trump complex issues at a fourth-grade level in five-minute presentations. God forbid anything might interfere with golf. If so, this is actually a reality-show presidency.
Regarding Social Security, which I rely on, it looks like Musk wants access to the private info. The judge (correctly) has observed that Musk only needs the high-level summarized info, like how many people over 140 years old are receiving benefits? How many over 120? How about 110? Build your case for fraud from that.
I think Trump knows that an interruption of Social Security benefits will generate outrage he's not prepared t deal with. At the moment, the length of the leash seems to be serious cuts in personal and impediments to signing up for benefits. Which says somebody decided it's a mistake to cut off benefits. But some SS toadie threatened to do exactly that unless Muskovites have unfettered access – read/write- copy. But it's an empty threat – Trump would get the blame, not the judge.
I read the article (thanks, borderD) but I'm reminded of a cartoon, a professor with a complex equation on the blackboard and in the center in brackets the statement, "Here a Great Miracle Ocurrs."
I agree that a lot of ultral-rich people are living in la-la land. They want to be able to rule without the inconvenience of the rule of law and elections. I agree that Vance is fully invested, as is Musk to some deluded degree. Trump wants to be able to dip into the Treasury without facing another criminal charge. He also wants to go down in history as "the Great." Mostly, Trump wants vengeance and the Justice Department is a tool sent by God Himself to Trump for that purpose.
I don't see how the dynasty of the tech-bros happens, the Constitution and elections washed away, and a legal standard that indemnifies some class of aristocrats as totally immune. Congress and the US Supreme Court are not going to roll over. (Yes, there are members in the legislative and judicial branches that will go for it, but a majority willing to make themselves obsolete?
The dynamics I anticipate are very much against a successful takeover – coup, if you like. Trump intends to use tariffs to break smaller countries economies to make them dependent satellites of the US. Canada, Trump intends to completely absorb through tariffs. I see signs that Wall Street will pull back, unemployment will rise and if Trump does not back off from tariffs in days (like the first week of April) inflation will kick in and stay in. Why? Consumer anxiety tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Buyers will start to hoard money, not spend it. Foreign countries will pursue boycotts and sanctions against the US, especially if the US bankrolls genocide in Gaza. (Likely) Where we have pulled back, (USAID) China will move in, with the power that "soft diplomacy" buys. Putting the economic hit on the US may be the demand China makes in exchange for lifesaving food and medicine.
Bottom line: as the "Misery Index" rises, Trump's popularity will fall. And popularity is the force that gives Trump power – his grip on the GOP in Congress will weaken and if things get really bad, the GOP will conspire to put all the blame on Trump and they will remove him from office to try to save their own asses in the next election. (2027 – 28)
The JCS are Trump loyalists but every officer in every branch understands their loyalty is supposed to be to uphold the Constitution. Yes, a bunch of them will eagerly break the oath for the pleasure of using military muscle to vanquish libs in the streets. But not a lot – and the others (National Guard) might eagerly accept orders from the Governor(s) to defend the Constitution. Trump and Musk imagine that control of the Joint Chiefs means the army is at their disposal within the US to impose martial law (against the decision of the USSC)
With Doug's insights in mind, the misery index must be the inverse of the happiness index. The recent high turnouts for Bernie Sanders and AOC do confirm that the misery index is on the rise. That they are getting huge crowds (35,000 which converts to at least a 100,000 in MAGA-speak) is about the only news that improves what little happiness and hope I personally have of late.
Not all are sharing in the misery. There are, of course, haters, masochists, misogynists, and other zealots and the somewhat normal basketball fans who are in an annual state of overindulgence.
The Lakers are a pro team, but they do rhyme with takers which completes this segway in a way. The Salon link had the takers and the tooken which tookened me to try to type it and irritated the spell checker. The tooken-class is a great substitute for MAGA and I was a bit taken with it. I do not know what might rhyme with tooken but nothing shouts MAGA like poor grammar.
Just an afterthought, If you went with the takers and the tucked the spell checker would not resist, and we know what rhymes with tucked. Still tooken does have a better ring to it.
The judge in the Social Security case wrote a very strong three paragraph statement to the effect of "you know damn well who DOGE is, give Social Security employees proper access. Rather than risk pissing me off, the government would do well to schedule an immediate hearing if they have *any* questions regarding what I would consider obedience to this order."
I also unfairly maligned the judge – I thought he'd ordered merely PII – Personally Identifiable Information – to be deleted, and that's stupid. They can reconstruct PII from public databases, with very little effort. Ah, but the judge explicitly ruled against that, too: "no PII, nothing that allows you to construct PII."
I like this judge. (Though I've seen people say "the federal courts are learning that this is how you have to handle Trump," which still doesn't dilute my admiration.)