“… We’re getting clearer indications now that the effort to bamboozle, frighten and entice federal workers into resigning their positions in exchange for non-existent “buy outs” was very much a product of the Elon Musk/DOGE cabal now wilding through and embedding itself within the federal government.
We don’t need a lot of confirmation: they left a slew of meme Easter eggs scattered through the process more or less announcing it.
What’s notable is that the White House is
now going out of its way to tell reporters that it definitely wasn’t them. They were, in that well-worn phrase, out of the loop, etc.
I suspect this is true, as far as it goes. But that understates — straight up ignores, really — the degree to which Donald Trump and his top advisors have, entirely by design and intentionally, spun up a series of independent fiefdoms, with Musk’s being the largest, to move fast and break things and push every boundary in the interest of a number of overlapping but distinct ideological agendas. In other words, they probably did “bypass key Trump officials.”
But that’s pretty much the idea when you wind up guys like Elon Musk and Russell Vought with “let’s be legends” gusto and give them the keys.
…
The news, linked above, that the resignation emails were Team Elon’s idea and didn’t have the okay of the White House comes from a Washington Post article. But we get pretty much the same story in
an Ashley Parker article published overnight in The Atlantic, only this time about the across-the-board federal spending freeze and the “memo” that kicked it off Monday. That one was Vought’s team — if not Vought himself, who has yet to be confirmed — at OMB. White House officials told Parker that the memo “was released without going through the usual White House approval processes.”
So the White House is saying they were out of the loop, caught as off guard as everyone else, by the two big conflagrations that have roiled the federal government over the course of this week and led to what is now universally conceded to be a fairly epic face plant little more than a week into the administration. It’s not exonerating.
It’s by design.
But I suspect that in this narrow sense it’s true. Because that’s how these folks operate. Trump remains entirely a transactional creature. Ideology, in any articulate sense, is entirely alien to him.
He wants to be loved, which in his mind means total power and total subservience. Amidst the raging bureaucratic storm and planes tumbling out of the sky after two decades-plus of near-perfect safety in U.S. airspace,
we learned yesterday afternoon that Trump told Mark Zuckerberg last November that the price of being “brought into the [Trump] tent” was arranging a $25 million bribe in the form of settling a meritless lawsuit from 2020 which had no hope of success. …”
We’re getting clearer indications now that the effort to bamboozle, frighten and...
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