Elon Musk Was Donald Trump’s Useful Idiot
It’s looking increasingly likely that the world’s richest man got played.
As Musk now pares back his government work to focus on his companies, particularly the troubled Tesla, the questions that dogged his turbulent tenure continue to swirl. Did he really believe he could slice $1 trillion out of the federal budget, or was he just trying to use his insider position to win contracts, gain intel on competitors, and shoulder pesky regulators out of his companies’ way? Was he hoping to use artificial intelligence to revolutionize government processes or merely to purge “wokeness”? Was his real aim with DOGE to create a superpowered surveillance state by consolidating government data across dozens of agencies?
All of the above can be true at once. But the abject failure of DOGE as a cost-cutting exercise is starting to make Musk look like a tool for other people’s agendas—in particular, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), one of the most powerful behind-the-throne positions in the Trump administration.
Nina Golgowski/HuffPost:
Latinas For Trump Co-Founder Rips Trump Immigration Policies As ‘Unacceptable And Inhumane’
“This is not what we voted for," said Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia (R), while accusing Trump of undermining “the sense of fairness and justice.”
Garcia, whose district of Miami-Dade County is overwhelmingly Hispanic or Latino and voted for Trump during the last election, said she sides with Trump’s efforts to target immigrants who are criminals, but said his targeting of those seeking lawful citizenship is unjust.
“This undermines the sense of fairness and justice that the American people value,” she wrote, while expressing support for fellow Miami Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar, who similarly condemned Trump’s actions on Friday.
Matthew Yglesias/Slow Boring:
Blue state Republicans are the problem
When it comes to housing reform in the Northeast, right-NIMBYs are quiet online but loud in state legislatures.
This question — the attitudes of blue state Republicans — is in my view the underrated dark matter of American housing politics.
Republicans have led several major pushes for housing reform in red states. These efforts are inevitably GOP-led because these states have GOP-controlled legislatures, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them have met with uniform GOP opposition. But in New York and Maryland, we’ve seen divided Democrats unable to push through housing reforms supported by Democratic governors in the face of relentless GOP hostility.
You may hear “blue state problems” and think “problems with Democrats,” but outside of Hawaii, what the Republicans in blue states do really matters.
G Elliott Morris/Strength in Numbers:
Why the LA protests might be bad for Trump
Polls show voters don't support the protesters, but are even more opposed to sending in the military
I was not going to write about the protests and federal law enforcement's response in Los Angeles because frankly, the issue isn't in my lane. There are a lot of good takes out there and I don't want this newsletter to try to cover everything, and end up covering a lot of it poorly.
But this morning, we got the first batch of polling data on how people are feeling about the LA situation, and I think it's worth covering. Despite apparent conventional wisdom that the events would help Trump (and he is clearly looking for a fight, so probably agrees), the data show voters do not initially approve of his response, even if they don't approve of the protestors, either.
The point is: The default assumption that the LA protests help Trump seems thinly evidenced at this point. They may very well end up hurting him.
G Elliott Morris/Strength in Numbers:
The economic vibes are very bad for Republicans
Why economic pessimism and social immobility may create a new era of anti-incumbent elections
In today’s newsletter, I push the data back to 2008 and look at how economic sentiment is persistently sharply negative along multiple dimensions, not just the usual questions, and how people feel the system is rigged against them. This is still true today in 2025.
My theory: In today’s political climate, incumbency isn’t an advantage; it’s a curse. Voters don’t reward stability because the status quo is bad for them. Instead, they punish whoever’s in charge.
As we saw in 2024, that dynamic can single-handedly doom incumbents.
After two decades of bad economic evaluations, are parties doomed to serving single terms as president? Is the 2026/2028 cake already cooked?
Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice:
ABC is too cowed to state the obvious about Stephen Miller
![[now deleted] post from suspended journalist Terry Moran](https://cdn.prod.dailykos.com/images/1442752/large/asdfgh.jpg?1749603119 "[now deleted] post from suspended journalist Terry Moran")
The road to fascism is paved with "objectivity" and "civility."
Mainstream media has a duty to inform its audience that those policies are in fact hateful. But it rarely does so. [Terry] Moran is to be commended for speaking truth to power. Speaking truth to power is, after all, what journalists are supposed to do.
Unfortunately, ABC News, like much of corporate media, does not want to speak truth to power, or, it seems, to anyone. Trump and Miller were offended by Moran’s (accurate) description, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration reached out to ABC on Sunday morning demanding action.
“Hopefully this journalist will either be suspended or terminated,” Leavitt huffed to Maria Bartiromo.
Will Sommer/The Bulwark:
The Vicious MAGA Feedback Loop Feeding Trump’s L.A. Crackdown
Who’s really calling the shots—the government or the anonymous internet trolls?
Three months into the Trump administration, Chaya Raichik, the social-media entrepreneur behind Libs of TikTok, donned a bulletproof vest and an ICE badge and joined Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on immigration raids in Phoenix.
For Raichik, the April raid represented a golden opportunity to get not just original content for her feeds but the type of content her followers would love: tough crackdowns on illegal migrants.
And it did go viral, but not in the way she was hoping for. Megyn Kelly complained that Raichik was doing “cosplay.” Other right-wing personalities on social media griped that Noem was too focused on photo-ops with MAGA influencers and not enough on ratcheting up DHS’s deportation stats.
Perhaps worst of all, the propaganda coming from the Noem-Raichik collab wasn’t even that satisfying for the anti-immigrant crowd. Raichik got a few videos of Noem hectoring undocumented immigrants whom Raichik claimed were also criminals, with the secretary leaning into squad cars to tell the men in the back to turn their lives around. One man successfully avoided Raichik’s camera by blocking it with a Croc.
David Shuster on shooting reporters and other things:
