Elon Musk is a Disgusting Abomination ||| Wake Up and Smell the Corruption

The only way to NOT be ashamed of what the Trump Administration and the Republican Fascist Party are doing is to be a fascist oneself.

Corruption, graft, racism, ... It's profoundly shameful, so those who are not ashamed... are also shameful.

Elon Musk is a Disgusting Abomination
So is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But still.

On Tuesday, after Elon Musk blasted out the screed above, a friend texted me: “I guess the worm has turned. Oh, wait, I guess that’s RFK.” Indeed. We don’t know exactly what set off this tweet and the series of whines that followed, but it may have been the ketamine talking.

Anyway, Musk happens to be right: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act — its actual name ! — is indeed a disgusting abomination. But this is one of those cases where it takes one to know one. Few men have done as much damage out of sheer arrogance, ignorance and pettiness as Elon Musk. He has thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of deaths on his hands.

And even his parting blast is destructive, demonstrating that he has learned nothing from his abject failure as a policymaker. The OBBBA is terrible, but not at all for the reasons Musk claims.

There have been a number of articles about Musk’s departure that portray him as a “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” type, a well-intentioned naif thwarted by special interests. Gag me with a Cybertruck.

What actually happened was that a zillionaire who knew nothing about government marched in claiming that he could cut $2 trillion from the $6 trillion federal budget by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. This was obvious nonsense , but Musk has never showed any signs of being willing either to admit his mistakes or learn from them. The wild claims just kept coming, like his insistence that millions of dead people were getting Social Security.

Claims about budget savings by DOGE — the Musk-run not-actually-a-government department that has been running wild since Donald Trump took office — have rapidly shrunk over time. Still, DOGE has continued to put out “walls of receipts” purporting to document some of its achievements. Again and again, investigators going through these reports have found them full of ludicrous errors — the same canceled contract listed three times, an $8 million saving reported as $8 billion , and more.

Seriously, would any of Musk’s tech-bro friends have invested in a venture run by someone with such a record of making extravagant but completely unfilled promises, then following up with false claims of success?

Meanwhile, the Muskenjugend, the extremely young and utterly unqualified acolytes DOGE parachuted into government agencies, disrupted the federal government’s operations. In some cases they summarily fired crucial workers without making any effort to understand their jobs, while encouraging many others to take early retirement. Those workers who remained have found themselves devoting a lot of time and effort to justifying their existence rather than doing their jobs. And although it’s hard to quantify, the DOGE presumption that government workers are worthless unless proven otherwise must have done large damage to morale and efficiency. In the end, DOGE has almost surely increased the budget deficit.

The one area where DOGE really has managed to make big cuts is foreign aid, a very small part of the budget but one it has virtually shut down. The savings have been tiny, but the human impacts immense — as I said, thousands have died as a result of Musk’s actions, and many more will die in the future.

Aside from the special hostility Musk and co. seem to have toward helping the world’s poor, the big driver behind Musk’s whole role in Washington seems to have been the belief that the federal government is a bloated bureaucracy that wastes vast amounts of money. Yet Musk kept not being able to find all that waste. This is despite the fact that he had months to dig up the wasted billions, along with unprecedented, almost surely illegal, access to government data.

A better man might have said to himself, “Hmm. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the federal government is actually a pretty well-functioning organization, with many workers trying to do their jobs well.”

But Musk isn’t that kind of man. In denouncing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he calls it a “pork-filled Congressional spending bill.” Hey, Elon, where’s the beef pork? You’ve spent months trying to find it, with basically zero success. And the reason this bill will explode the deficit is that savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps aren’t enough to offset huge tax cuts for the rich.

In a follow-up tweet, Musk says this:

Um, what cost savings? And what personal risks are we talking about?

In the end, Musk’s legacy will be a damaged federal government that has lost many of its best people and will have a hard time replacing them. Oh, and a lot of dead children.

In a just world Elon Musk wouldn’t be heading back to run Tesla. He would, instead, be retreating to a remote monastery somewhere, to spend the rest of his life in poverty and penance.

Wake Up and Smell the Corruption
How far we've fallen, how fast

Musk. Or maybe Trump. Who could tell?

So, I have a fully written piece ready to post about the destruction of U.S. science. But who would read it today? It will hold, while I talk about Trump and Musk.

Now, Trump and Musk deserve whatever is coming, good and hard. But don’t let the schadenfreude of this psychodrama distract you from the fundamental point — America has fallen into a deep pit of corruption.

Musk believes that he delivered the presidency to Trump, and may well be right. He gave Trump and his allies a lot of money; he helped Trump regain confidence after his disastrous debate; he brought in the bro vote.

And Musk clearly believes that this entitles him to receive special favors from the White House — not policies he likes in general, but contracts and specific actions that benefit him personally. He even seems to have imagined that he was effectively co-president. That is, he simply assumed that U.S. policy was for sale, and thought he had bought it.

Trump, for his part, hasn’t responded by saying “How dare you suggest such a thing?” Instead, he has threatened retaliation — again, not in the form of general policies Musk won’t like but in the form of specific actions aimed to hurt Musk’s bottom line. Steve Bannon is even calling for Musk’s deportation.

The point is that both men start from the presumption that the U.S. government is an entirely corrupt enterprise, with the president in a position to hand out personal favors or engage in personal acts of vengeance.

And everyone takes it for granted that both men are right. Musk’s only mistake was in underestimating the depths of Trump’s lack of principles, imagining that he was the kind of corrupt politician who stays bought, as opposed to a guy who always breaks his promises the moment it seems expedient to do so.

In short, we no longer have rule of law, just rule by the Leader’s whims. We have abandoned everything America was supposed to stand for.

I don’t blame either Trump or Musk for America’s degeneration. I blame their enablers, who have refused, again and again, to enforce the Constitution or place any restraints on Trump’s abuses. And yes, this means Republicans. You don’t have to love the Democratic Party to recognize that it does, in fact, expel politicians who engage in egregious corruption.

Oh, and anyone suggesting that Democrats should reach out to Musk is a fool. Yes, he’s currently Trump’s enemy, but he’s evil, and his brand is toxic. Better to see if there is anyone left in the G.O.P. who is finally ready to take a stand on behalf of democracy and law. But don’t get your hopes up.