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Musk Is Trying to Salvage His Reputation on the Way Out

On Friday, Donald Trump conducted what must be the weirdest exit interview ever. It started with the boss praising departing employee Elon Musk without having a clue what, exactly, he did. Most of the praise was false. Trump also failed to mention that Musk functioned as an officer of the United States without Senate confirmation (despite that pesky constitutional requirement). He also didn't mention that Musk hired a bunch of 20-something hackers, who know nothing about government, to overrule duly nominated and confirmed cabinet officials and agency heads. For the benefit of those people who criticized Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit and tie in the Oval Office in February, neither did Musk, despite the entire world press corps playing close attention.

One thing that got a lot of attention was Musk's black eye:

Elon Musk's right eye is clearly black

Musk claims his son, X, playfully punched him in the eye. Maybe, but Shawn McCreech gave a longer list of suspects: some of the many women he impregnated; his 20-year-old trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, who hates him; all the people who have lit Teslas on fire, the entire federal bureaucracy, and his suburban Austin neighbors, who can't stand him. But the black eye is a good metaphor for his time in the government and departure from it. He promised to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget. An analysis by the BBC shows that his real savings was actually $32.5 billion, or about 1.6% of what he promised:

Elon Musk's planned and achieved savings

And even the $32.5 billion is probably an overestimate since it includes savings on things like not developing some vaccine, the cost of which is only an estimate until the research is concluded. The biggest actual savings is $2.9 billion for canceling a contract to house 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children in Texas (clearly an example of waste and fraud). Second biggest claim was a contract between IRS and an AI company called Centennial Technologies—at least if you ignore the fact that the contract was actually canceled at the end of the Biden administration. Number three was a $1.8 billion contract DoD gave to an IT services company called A1FEDIMPACT. None of the work was actually performed yet or paid for.

Furthermore, the net savings may be lower than the BBC calculation—and may well be negative—due to the government having to rehire critical workers he fired (or train new ones), lost productivity, defending lawsuits, lost tax collections due to cuts at IRS, and more. These may add up to as much as $135 billion. Also, another independent estimate puts the savings (excluding the extra cost of fixing the damage the DOGEys did) at only $16.3 billion. The conservative Manhattan Institute put the savings at less than 0.1% of the federal budget.

Although not directly related to Musk, the budget bill passed by the House is projected to add $4 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years. Compared to that, even $32.5 billion is small potatoes. If Trump really wants to reduce the deficit, he needs to threaten to veto the bill unless Congress decimates it.

So, what is Musk's legacy? His reputation as a genius is in tatters, his car company is in crisis with net income down 71% in Q1, his fortune is diminished by $122 billion, and millions, maybe billions, of people hate his guts, all while achieving virtually nothing of lasting value. Oh, and his ability to buy elections is probably over, what with the drubbing his candidate took in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April. Sounds like a metaphorical black eye to us.

So why did Musk leave? We don't know, but it could be a combination of some of the following:

All of this said, could everyone's take on the Musk era be wrong? Maybe. Many of the articles about Musk's rise and fall center on the idea that he thought taming the government would be easy, but he discovered the hard way that it wasn't and that everything in the budget had one or more champions in Congress who most definitely did not want it cut. However, a case can also be made that Musk didn't fail at all. If you see his real goal as gutting those parts of the government he didn't like (or Trump didn't like) like USAID, and couldn't get Congress to kill, he may have been successful in killing them. Various oversight agencies, the ones that keep an eye on companies like Tesla and on billionaire stock investors like Musk, have also been badly hobbled, and may take a long time to bounce back. He also scooped up a mass of government contracts for his own companies. In addition, he hoovered up a huge amount of data on American citizens for purposes only he knows.

The exit interview, and all the praise Trump heaped on Musk, plus carefully planted statements in some of the articles, might well be part of a well-orchestrated campaign to rehabilitate his public image. And it might work, if only the Democrats could figure out how to use him. Imagine the headline: "Trump's biggest donor, an electric car manufacturer, hates Trump's budget." Surely the Democrats could make some hay out of that if they tried hard, no matter how much they despise him. After all, he became famous for making electric cars popular. Democrats LIKE electric cars. They also like high-profile people dissing Trump's policies. Maybe they can somehow run with that.

Debra Kahn at Politico has a long article on why the Democrats should now cozy up to Musk on account of his opposition to Trump's efforts to kill off the clean-energy tax credits Joe Biden passed. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a leader of the House progressives, said: "Musk and I have had deep disagreements on his approach at DOGE, but on this issue [the tax credits] he is correct. Democrats should be able to recognize this." In other words, Democrats should try mightily to get Musk to work the Senate to remove those portions of the bill that kill the subsidies for green energy and electric cars. "Working" the Senate might include threatening Republican senators who support the House bill with well-funded primary opponents. Musk also has Trump's ear and what is left of eX-Twitter. On this one (important) issue, he is actually aligned with the Democrats, albeit for very different reasons (keeping his fortune intact). But support is support, wherever you can find it. As they say, politics makes strange bedfellows. (V)

Trump Eats Leopard Leo's Face

OK. It is really Leonard Leo, but close enough. Donald Trump is belatedly discovering that outsiders who recommend judges to him generally pick conservatives who believe in the rule of law. That's not what he wants. He wants judges who will rule in his favor, the law be damned. He finds guardrails, like having to obey the law, a nuisance and wants judges who will ignore the law when he finds the law inconvenient. In particular, one of the judges on the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade that gave a unanimous ruling that he has no authority to levy tariffs, Timothy Reif, was his own appointee. The other two were Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama appointees, respectively. Trump feels that Reif "owes him," and Reif didn't deliver. Neither did the conservative Reagan appointee, Jane Restani.

Trump expressed his discontent by lashing out at former long-time leader of the Federalist Society Leo. He called Leo, a devout Catholic, a "sleazebag" who "probably hates America." Leo had the grace not to fire back. He said: "I'm very grateful for President Trump transforming the Federal Courts, and it was a privilege being involved." With Trump, loyalty is a one-way street.

Leo is very conservative, and so is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but saying he hates America is nonsense. He picked three Supreme Court justices during Trump v1.0 that conservatives have loved. John Yoo, a conservative law professor at Berkeley who served in George W. Bush's administration and who wrote many far-right memos on executive power, wiretapping, and torture, said Trump's attacks on Leo are "outrageous." Yoo believes that the purpose of the conservative legal movement is to get presidents to stop treating judicial appointments as patronage and start picking them to advance movement goals (see: Miers, Harriet).

On the other hand, lapdog AG Pam Bondi agreed with Trump and said that future judicial nominees would not be required to fill out questionnaires or sit for interviews with the American Bar Association. This will make it easier for Trump to put nominees before the Senate whose only defining characteristic is total loyalty to Trump, even if they are otherwise completely unqualified to be a judge. As a starter, Trump just nominated his personal lawyer, Emil Bove III, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Bove has no judicial experience, even though circuit judges typically have experience as federal district judges or state judges. Bove recently forced out an interim U.S. attorney (Danielle Sassoon), who clerked for Antonin Scalia but was unwilling to make a corrupt bargain to pressure indicted NYC Mayor Eric Adams to help deport immigrants or face prison. If Bove is confirmed to the circuit court, he will likely be at the top of Trump's appointee list should either Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito retire this year or next. However, both Thomas and Alito are close to Leo and greatly respect him. They could potentially factor that in when deciding when to retire. They might be willing to wait and hope for a possible President Vance in 2029. (V)

Supreme Court Gives Trump a Win on Immigration

Donald Trump's nightmare scenario is that the Supreme Court makes an unambiguous ruling that one of his major XOs is blatantly unconstitutional, forcing him to either drop a key policy goal or accept the consequences of openly defying the Court and risking impeachment, either now or in 2027 if the Democrats win the House. So far, he has lucked out.

Joe Biden created a program to extend legal protection to hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants from Latin America, including thousands that J.D. Vance imagined were eating cats and dogs in Ohio. Biden based the program on the concept of humanitarian parole for people from brutal dictatorships. The program was actually started by President Eisenhower, but Biden expanded its reach for people with an American sponsor. Trump hated the program and sued to have the courts overturn it. The lower courts refused to kill the program so Trump appealed.

On Friday, the Supreme Court gave Trump what he wanted, overturning the lower courts' rulings and rescinding the immigrants' protection. The decision was 7-2, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. Interestingly enough, Justice Elena Kagan voted with the six Republican appointees. This doesn't mean Kagan is anti-immigrant, just that she believes no law gave Biden the authority to extend protection to the migrants, especially those coming from countries that are not brutal dictatorships.

Also at issue was whether the administration, specifically Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, has the authority to revoke the protected status of 530,000 people by signing one document or whether she has to sign 530,000 documents, each naming one migrant. This was the second time in May that the Court sided with Trump about revoking the protected status of a group of migrants.

In their scathing dissents, Sotomayor and Jackson wrote that the decision will create immense harm to the migrants and not allowing them to stay until the case is heard on its merits will not give the government any benefits. In contrast, Stephen Miller celebrated the decision.

The (unsigned) emergency decision is not final. The case will continue in the lower courts. However, meanwhile, the administration will try to deport as many of the 530,000 protected migrants as it can. That could take a while, since they have to be first rounded up and they may not cooperate. Also, if the administration uses planes that hold, say, 200 people, it will take 2,650 flights. That could take a while.

One Republican who doesn't like Trump's desire to kill the temporary protected status program is Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). She is incensed that he wants to deport Afghans who supported and helped the U.S. when it was fighting a war in Afghanistan. These people risked their lives helping the U.S. as translators and in other ways. If they are deported, the Taliban is virtually certain to torture them all to death. Murkowski believes this is no way to treat your friends. But Trump doesn't need Murkowski's vote, since the Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, so he is simply going to ignore her. (V)

Voters Don't Like Trump's Big, Beautiful Bill

Getting the votes in the House to pass Donald Trump's Big, Beautiful Bill was easy compared to selling it to the voters. Many Republican congresscritters are running into a buzzsaw of criticism from the voters back home at town halls and other gatherings.

The voters have various concerns. Some of them object to cuts in programs that benefit Americans across party lines, including Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps). Others object to putting an additional $4 trillion on the national credit card, saying that is unsustainable. Still others object to the idea of hurting ordinary Americans in numerous ways in order to give a big tax cut to millionaires and billionaires.

One Republican who got a flood of criticism from his constituents was Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE). When he tried to defend his vote for the bill, he was booed by his constituents. In one particularly painful moment, a voter asked about a provision in the bill that would make it difficult for a judge to hold a government official in contempt for violating a court order. The voter wanted to know how Flood could vote for a bill with that provision. Flood basically wondered how anyone could expect him to know what was in a 1,000-page bill he had no time to read. People in the audience yelled: "You voted for all of it."

When Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) told a town hall that she was proud to have voted for the bill, she got a chorus of boos from the audience. She got a similar outburst when she mentioned DOGE. On the other hand, the crowd burst into cheers when a constituent asked about the jet from Qatar: "Could you help me understand why you are silent about this corruption?" She evaded answering by saying she had proved she favors transparency by holding the town hall in the first place.

Another Republican, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), was asked about the cuts to Medicaid. The voter said they would cause people to die. Ernst gave a very, very tone-deaf response: "Well, we are all going to die."



That didn't go over well. She tried to recover by insisting that only people who are not eligible would be pushed off Medicaid. What she didn't mention is that the bill makes it harder to be eligible. In theory, if the bill made everyone ineligible, then indeed, only ineligible people would die, but that would be everyone. It took about a day for this T-shirt to go on sale:

We are all going to die T-shirt

Some Republicans took flak even outside town halls. Reps. Gabe Evans and Lauren Boebert, both of Colorado, were heckled when they spoke to a crowd on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol last week. Boebert said: "This is a victory for our values, for our communities and for our American way of life. It's about cutting wasteful spending—the waste, the fraud, the abuse, the illegal aliens who are receiving taxpayer benefits." But the crowd wasn't buying it. When Evans was asked how many of his constituents, about one-third of whom are enrolled in Medicaid, would lose coverage, he mumbled something about "categories of people who lose coverage." When a reporter asked for a number, Evans refused to provide one. (V)

Whither South Carolina?

Joe Biden upset the primary schedule in 2024 by trying to put South Carolina as the first primary state. Now that his reputation is tarnished, some Democrats are starting to think about the 2028 primary schedule and don't especially want South Carolina to go first. Biden wanted South Carolina to go first because Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) saved his bacon in 2020 and this was the repayment. But some Democrats want to go back to New Hampshire first. Strategy aside, changing the primary dates requires cooperation from the states and neither New Hampshire nor South Carolina is likely to cooperate in making South Carolina first.

The argument against New Hampshire is that it is basically an all-white state, which disadvantages Black candidates. The argument for New Hampshire is that it is basically an all-white state, which disadvantages Black candidates. The Democrats ran a Black candidate in 2024 and she lost. So, the thinking goes, maybe a white candidate next time would do better, especially if the Democrats seriously want to bring back working-class white men. Some progressives are arguing that a better choice to win back working-class white men is Nevada.

This past weekend, two potential 2028 candidates, Gov. Tim Walz (DFL-MN) and Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD), showed up in the Palmetto State to speak at Clyburn's famous Fish Fry and test the waters. Walz talked about needing to expand the map. He spent the entire campaign visiting the same seven swing states over and over. He said that if Democrats never show up anywhere else, they are not going to flip any new states. Moore focused on Donald Trump's Big, Beautiful Bill, which will push thousands of kids into poverty in order to enrich Trump's cronies.

If the DNC wants New Hampshire to hold the first primary, that will be easy. The state already has a law saying it must hold the first primary. All the DNC has to do is go with the flow. If it wants South Carolina or Nevada to go first, it will somehow have to get those states to change their dates, which will make New Hampshire move its date earlier. Former New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner once said he would schedule the primary on Halloween of the year before the election if he had to in order to go first. The current NH SoS is David Scanlan. He is a Republican and is not going to go out of his way to help the Democrats, that's for sure. The battle about the order has only begun, but it is sure to continue for months or years since it could have a major effect on who the Democratic nominee is in 2028.

One question no one is asking: Which state should go first if the goal were to win the 2028 election? Black Democrats want South Carolina to make the pick because it is likely to pick a Black Democrat. Progressives want Nevada because its many hotels and restaurants are full of union workers. In turn, each identity group wants one of its own to get the nomination, without thinking too much about how the party can optimize the chances of the strongest candidate being nominated. Maybe a state that best mirrors the country. Possibly Michigan or Wisconsin. (V)

Republican Legislatures Are Actively Trying to Thwart the Will of the Voters

The folks who wrote many of the state constitutions were apparently clairvoyant, and didn't have much faith in the state legislatures. Consequently, many states have a provision in their constitutions to allow the voters to make an end-run around the legislature and directly pass laws by popular vote or even amend the Constitution by popular vote. State legislators never really like this, but in recent years, the people have been using this power to pass laws or amendments that the legislators REALLY don't like. This has been most notable in states where right-wing Republicans control the legislature but the people keep voting for laws or amendments that the legislators hate. Abortion is one area of conflict, but it is not the only one.

Now the legislators are fighting back. Who do the people think they are? What do they know about laws? NOTHING! That's our job. We'd abolish the people and just go it alone except our state Constitution doesn't give us that power.

Here are some examples. In Missouri in 2024, the voters approved a measure making abortion legal and a second measure providing for employee sick leave. This made the Republicans in the legislature furious and they are working to undo the "damage." Legislators in Alaska and Nebraska are also working on rolling back sick-leave benefits passed by the voters. In Arizona, the voters approved protections for abortion last year, but the legislature is busy trying to undo them.

In Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah, the Republicans are tired of fighting the symptoms of democracy. They want to go after the cause and remove it, root and branch: the initiative process itself. In these states, the Republican-controlled legislatures are trying to restrict citizen initiatives in various ways, either by making it harder to get initiatives on the ballot or requiring supermajorities for them to pass. In many cases, the legislators say that they represent the will of the people better than the people do.

What is actually the case is that these legislatures are heavily gerrymandered so that conservative Republicans in rural areas have much more representation in the legislatures than their numbers should give them. Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which tracks ballot measures in D.C. and the 26 states that allow them, said of the Republicans: "They can't win fairly, so they're trying to rewrite the rules to get their way no matter what a majority of folks in their state wants."

In some states, the voters are counterattacking. In Missouri, a citizens group is trying to get an amendment initiative on the ballot in Nov. 2026 that would ban lawmakers from overturning the results of ballot initiatives.

Here is a map showing where initiatives are allowed:

Map showing states where citizen initiatives are allowed

As you can see, most of the states where initiatives are allowed are in the Midwest or West and most of them are controlled by the Republicans. That is where the battles are happening. (V)

MAHA Report Was Probably (Partly) Written by an AI Bot

Two weeks ago, the Dept. of HHS released a 71-page report on children's health, backed up by 522 citations to the scientific literature. It concludes that childhood health is negatively impacted by ultra-processed foods, environmental toxins, technology, medications and vaccines. Gee, exactly the things HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy opposes. Kennedy right, scientists wrong. How convenient. Case closed.

Until two young women interns at NOTUS actually looked at the report carefully and discovered that some of the papers cited don't exist. Fake citations to back up the conclusions. And some of the "authors" of papers cited in the study insist they never wrote any paper with the title given.

After the NOTUS article was published, four reporters at The Washington Post smelled a red herring and began digging on their own. They found substantial evidence that at least part of the report was written by an AI bot, not actual researchers with experience in children's health. AI bots are trained by having them scour the Internet. This means that the batsh**-crazy theories of all kinds found there go into the training and into the bot's knowledge base. Their article gives an annotated list of some of the fake references. For example, the report cites a paper by R.L. Findling entitled: "Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Psychotropic Medications for Youth: A Growing Concern." Findling is a professor of psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has published in the area of psychiatric medicine but when contacted, said he never wrote any article with that title. There are many more such imaginary references. Dr. Ivan Oransky, who teaches medical journalism at NYU, said that the errors are typical of work done by AI. Similar errors crop up all the time in legal briefs written by AI.

Since the NOTUS and WaPo articles were published, the administration has been scrambling to replace the fake citations with real ones. However, the damage has been done now. Needless to say, if the report was based on nonexistent published papers, its conclusions can't be taken very seriously, much as Kennedy would like them to be.

Nevertheless, some parts of the report are probably true, even with fake citations. It isn't a secret that American children eat far too much ultraprocessed food. But the conclusion that vaccines are harmful (Kennedy's hobbyhorse) is based entirely on fake sources, since there are no actual sources showing that. (V)

Three Democrats Are Vying for Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee

The House Oversight Committee has broad powers to investigate anything it wants to and subpoena anyone it wants to. Whoever chairs that committee has a powerful perch to expose wrongdoing and abuse of power. The current chairman is Rep. James Comer (R-KY). He doesn't have a lot of interest in investigating anyone in the administration now, though he used to be keenly interested in investigating Hunter Biden.

The ranking member has no power and it is a pretty useless position. But if the Democrats capture the House in 2026, the ranking member will be in a strong position to become chair. Consequently, a number of Democrats are competing for the position that was occupied by the late Gerry Connolly, who died on May 21. They are Reps. Robert Garcia (CA), Stephen Lynch (MA), and Kweisi Mfume (MD). They are 47, 70 and 76, respectively. This is certain to result in a battle about whether it is time for a new generation of leadership.

More candidates could yet enter the fray. In particular, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) has expressed interest, but her chances are low since the Black Caucus is supporting Mfume, who has more seniority than she does.

The procedure is for the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee to make a recommendation. Then the full caucus will vote on June 24. (V)


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