Michael A. Cohen, publisher of the newsletter ‘Truth and Consequences,’ writes on MS NOW’s website, “Elon Musk is arguably the most powerful man in the world — and increasingly he is using that power in deeply dangerous ways.” As reported in The Wall Street Journal and other sources, we’ve learned that he ordered a slowdown of “a military-grade version” of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system called Starshield, upon which Ukraine relies to intercept incoming Russian missiles, or to fire its own drones against Russian targets. The Journal’s one sentence — “with a seeming flick of a switch, Musk has the power to alter the course of a deadly conflict,” which points dangerously to his “increasingly malign influence at home and foreign policy abroad.”

Russia has chosen to directly target civilians with its missiles and drones, killing and injuring thousands, and Musk’s actions are detrimental in Ukraine’s defense of its citizens. Historically, a single individual not involved in combat has not been able to exercise such extraordinary power in a major military confrontation. Musk has expressed concern that a satellite-based network could play such a prominent offensive role, nuclear conflict might result. The simple explanation for his current action is that he is working hand-in-hand with President Trump, both blaming President Zelenskyy for continuing the war with his country’s assailant. Trump blames Ukraine for increases in global energy costs with their attacks against Russian refineries, as he chooses to ignore his own Iran war folly.

The Trump administration has increased pressure on Zelenskyy to capitulate to Putin’s demands, making Musk’s Starlink slowdown consistent with their wishes to appear as peacemakers — too late for the show in boosting support in the midterm election, however. Both Trump and Musk were obsessed with the midterms candidates, with the most powerful man in the world spending a quarter of a billion dollars in support of the GOP, with $150 million alone going to Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race — a total obscenity that one individual can apply so much influence in an election. But, thanks to our Supreme Court for loosening the campaign rules, Musk’s excesses are allowed to boost Republicans, even as he reaches further to interfere with the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

Cohen asks, “Is America a true democracy when a single, unelected citizen can have such a big impact on an American election? Is it consistent with America’s founding ideals for one citizen, unelected and unaccountable, to have the power to influence the outcome of a foreign war in which vital U.S. national security interests are at stake? This isn’t the first time Musk has gotten involved in matters of state and left behind a trail of damage. After Trump won back the White House in 2024, he rewarded Musk by putting him in charge of the Orwellian-named Department of Government Efficiency.” In a short, calamitous occupancy, DOGE wreaked havoc within the federal government.

Hundreds of thousands of government employees were needlessly fired, the Social Security Administration was weakened, and decades of scientific research was undermined, all of which saved very little money in this aggravating undertaking. In Musk’s words, throwing the U.S. Agency for International Development into “the wood chipper” resulted in the deaths of as many as a million people globally. Musk’s defenders may point to his business success, but he isn’t content with merely being a successful entrepreneur — he wants to use his millions to exercise power that eclipses governments and politicians.

Should the House Democrats manage to flip that governmental body, Politico reports that multiple committees plan to scrutinize his business practices, his weighty government contracts and his control of the Starlink system. To make it more difficult for the obscenely wealthy to wield pressure over American elections and on American statecraft is another agenda item that should be a top priority because Musk is growing menace, and Trump won’t, or can’t, rein him in. Trump’s sprawling and disastrous pet project with DOGE dismantled important pieces of our government, illegally canceled billions of dollars in grants, all in the most chaotic, unhinged, and reckless manner.

With Musk spearheading the project, his own companies were winning billions of dollars in government contracts, massively enriching his already obscene wealth and creating glaring and severe conflicts of interest. His DOGE raiders were able to delve into the deepest files, exposing the most private and sensitive information of our population, citizens and non-citizens alike, to rank amateurs, a boon for Homeland Security and ICE as they moved against immigrants and people of color. Steve Schmidt calls Musk “the flimflam man, the bully with a grievance, the salesman who begins to believe that the people buying his story have acknowledged his right to rule them.”

Schmidt continues: “There are extraordinary engineers at Musk’s companies. There are people whose intelligence, discipline and labor have produced astonishing things. Their accomplishments are real. Musk has made himself the owner of their genius. The workers build great machines. The public helps finance the enterprise. He takes the applause. Then he explains why the rest of us must surrender more power to the only man who can save us. His greatest talent is shamelessness. He sees a colossus in the mirror. A savior. A god. An American king entitled to make decisions for people who have never consented to his authority. And increasingly, his decisions reach into questions of life and death.”

Mira Bhakta writes on The Hill, “SpaceX founder Elon Musk warned Democrats over a possible congressional probe, writing, ‘live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.'” The Democrats are reportedly looking to extend their probe beyond Musk’s business operations into his immense authority as a special federal employee at DOGE, about which Representative Gerry Connolly is accusing the White House of ‘obscuring the facts‘ of his role at that department.

DOGE reports that it saved $214 billion through asset sales, contract cancellations, fraud and improper payment deletion, programmatic changes and workforce reductions during the 130-day tenure. Supposedly, that amounted to $1,329 saved per taxpayer, reducing the national debt by 0.54 percent. However, an investigation by the environmental nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility claimed the Trump administration cost taxpayers an estimated $10 billion in 2025 through its deferred resignation program. In another report, the Government Accountability Office estimated the administration spent $6.7 billion on administrative leave after DOGE pushed for employee buyouts.

In his book ‘Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State,’ best-selling author Michael Lewis examines the early days of Trump Presidency II, DOGE, and Elon Musk, by profiling six specific federal employees who viewed their positions through a dedicated public-service calling rather than political alignment. DOGE labelled pejoratively, those career civil servants, holdovers, or anyone who resisted sweeping, fast-tracked, or illegal rollbacks of government operations, as ‘blockers.’ In Trump’s Washington it was the worst thing a federal employee could be called if they wanted to remain employed. Lewis, known for his thorough investigative work, familiarly in his book ‘Moneyball‘ which was made into a successful movie, details DOGE’s eighteen week push to slash budgets through mass buyouts and firings, which failed to deliver as it destabilized critical nonpartisan functions.

Reviewers praise Lewis for transforming the first two years of Trump II into a thriller about federal employees, while posing the question: “If these public servants can’t survive in government today, then what does it say about us?” Within the six profiled subjects were a security guard, one who kept sensitive tax data safe, another who made certain that politicians  and civil servants played by the rules, another who studied wildfires, and one who probed the mysteries of cystic fibrosis. As the Financial Times wrote, “For all its sound and fury, DOGE achieved no meaningful cuts. Taking its false economies into account, DOGE might even have added to the US deficit. Yet as Michael Lewis sets out in his commendable new book, the effects of DOGE’s storm will be felt for years to come, as a result of Musk’s arrogance and conceit.”

Sam Freedman writes in The Guardian, “Donald Trump’s catastrophic errors get so much attention that his systemic one can be easily missed. While the world looks on in dismay at his farcical war in Iran, the thuggery of ICE agents or clownish attacks on erstwhile allies like Canada and Denmark, the core functions of the American government are slowly disintegrating…It is harder to get people to focus on the machinery of the state because the effects are often slow and hard to pin down…The other problem is that bureaucracies are hard to make interesting. Their work is technical and complicated, and most officials are taught to avoid saying anything engaging in public. By the time a journalist has explained what an agency does and why it is important, the reader may well have clicked on to the next thing.”

Freedman comments on Lewis’s book, saying that the ‘blockers‘ didn’t do much blocking, since they all either end up resigning upon being asked to do something illegal, or are fired. Much of the book is taken up detailing the valuable work they accomplished before being turned out by Musk and his ‘muskrats‘ for being conscientious. Freedman says the ‘villains’ had varied motivations for participation in DOGE, ranging from young coders having limited social skills, to turncoat bureaucrats looking for an easy gig — to include health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his bizarre obsession with dead animal parts. Freedman accuses Musk of becoming bored after causing a satisfying degree of havoc, turning it over to Russell Vought, developer of Project 2025.

“Vought is the real deal, quietly and systematically deconstructing the state while keeping out of the spotlight and getting others to do his dirty work for him,” writes Freedman. One of Vought’s victims was scientist Francis Collins who had assisted in the discovery of a successful treatment for cystic fibrosis, giving longer life spans to those suffering under the condition. Under President Obama, Collins was head of NIH, continuing in the slot during Trump’s first term and into Biden’s tenure, before stepping down to manage a research lab. Collins was effectively forced out as part of Vought’s cost-cutting. “What makes this particularly remarkable is that Vought’s own daughter has cystic fibrosis. Ideology is a powerful drug,” declares Freedman.

“One of the most irritating aspects of DOGE’s brief existence was the stream of op-eds from people who really should have known better,” says Freedman, “that someone’s finally trying to enact reform, even if it was being done in a clumsy and aggressive manner. In reality, Musk’s overweening arrogance, glibness and total lack of preparation have seriously harmed the case for proper reform. Not just due to the mess he and the likes of Vought caused, but also because they brought the very idea of making the state more efficient into disrepute.” He concludes that agencies and departments should not have to rely on unsung heroes, battling failing systems, and doing 90-hour weeks for little money because of their intense devotion to public service. Effective government needs processes that work when used by a regular person doing a nine-to-five job, with embedding it into the fabric of our institutions.

Daily Dose of Democracy speaks of President Trump’s “seething disdain for the very people who propelled him to the White House,” which is jarring each time he flaunts it as he did recently in a campaign rally in Corpus Christi, Texas. He began his mocking by dangling the fake $5,000 bribe checks voters will never see, then laying down the caveat that the money must be spent in this country. Suggesting that the attendees use the money to splurge on a vacation to Mar-a-Lago1, he backpedaled immediately with the warning that the most they could afford there is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert — “I’m not even sure you could buy that. No don’t go there. That’s not a good place if you’re price conscious.” As in, “You can’t afford to dine with me, peasants.”

Lisa Needham on Daily Kos writes, “More like not a good place to go if you’re taste-conscious. Imagine what a burger cooked to Trump’s taste would be. You’d be paying five large for basically an overcooked Big Mac wrapped in gold foil with mandatory ketchup, right?” Texas Senate candidate James Talarico commented, “The reason poverty exists in the wealthiest country in human history is not because we can’t feed the poor. It’s because we can’t satisfy the rich.”

Gram Slattery and Jasper Ward of Reuters report that Trump finds it “unacceptable” that one of his former lawyers, Alina Habba Mildon, secured a $50 million contract for herself while working at the US Department of Justice. “I thought it was totally obnoxious and outrageous, and it’s not acceptable, not acceptable at all,” groused the president. Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera who was facing US felony bribery charges struck a plea deal in August 2025, guaranteeing Habba Mildon more than $50 million over four years, after she signed a contract on January 1 with his company, Concord Partners. She had already been disqualified from serving as US attorney, resigning on December 8, then being appointed senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi the same day.

Trump pardoned Herrera on January 15, 2026, but Habba Mildon said she was never paid for securing a pardon, never met with anyone at the White House or Justice Department about a pardon, and never did any work for a pardon for anyone. Incidentally, Herrera’s daughter who is a US citizen donated $3.5 million to a Trump-connected super PAC — hardly newsworthy, you think? Habba Mildon has declined to elaborate on what, if any, actual work she does at Concord, and the company has no public profile with its business remaining unclear even to some people associated with the Herreras. Daily Dose of Democracy reports that “an irate Trump is telling aides that his former attorney should fork over at least some of her quid pro quo dough to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity.” Selling pardons? Totally fine! Not cutting the Gaudyfather in on the deal? Unconscionable!

A delusional President Trump claimed in an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Byron York on Air Force One, that his approval rating is really about 60%, his belief drawing alarm among some notable conservatives. His RealClearPolitics average at the time was 38.8% with Trump calling it “fake — I’m not at 38.” York asked him if he meant he’d be at 60 if he were on the ballot himself, he answered, “I don’t believe I could be beaten by anybody. I think that if I needed it, which I don’t, I think 60. Yeah, I think I’d be in the 60s now,”  the subsequent X post spreading pretty quickly. York wrote that Trump “sometimes views his Republican base as if it is the electorate as a whole, which is why the low rating just doesn’t make any sense to him.”

Conservative senior fellow Henry Olsen at the Ethics and Public Policy Center responded, “Very problematic if the President actually believes his job approval is at 60 percent.” Rasmussen Reports founder, Scott Rasmussen, only contributed, “Wow, just wow.” Physician and conservative commentator Pradheep J. Shanker did a harder take: “He probably thinks he looks like a thirty-year old, too. Delusional people are delusional.” CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter thinks his belief in a higher rating explains a lot about his behavior, and anti-disinformation activist Jim Stewartson observes that his habit of inflating numbers is only getting worse. “He lives in a sealed alternate reality — “the hottest country in the world'”— and expects the rest of us to live in it with him,” says Stewartson.

Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski paints a darker picture, more pointedly after Election Day. “He is 100% going to try to steal this election after an historic blue tsunami. This country is in for a very, very rough stretch.” Frank and Ernest, the comic strip drawn by Bob Thaves, portrays four characters standing beneath a ‘Wonderland Campaign Consultants‘ sign, surrounded by stacks of poll data sheets. One character is introducing a potential client to Rumpelstiltskin, a media adviser who claims to “do a great job of spinning straw polls into gold for you.” Perhaps this is the alternate reality where Trump is gleaning his gold.

Alexander Willis writes on Raw Story that Trump is fuming over former President Obama’s Michigan crowd size, complaining at a Georgia rally that the media outlets never give his own crowds proper recognition. Obama had campaigned earlier for Abdul El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson in Detroit, leading Trump to whine, “Now, he’s making a speech for Mohamed in a massive crowd! A massive crowd has shown up? Where are they? They never talk about my crowd!” as he repeatedly hurled his middle name ‘Mohamed‘ as an epithet against El-Sayed. He had the gall to dredge up Bernie Sanders speaking to massive crowds — “they weren’t bad, but they were a tiny fraction, 900 to 1,000 people” insisting that his own draw pulled in 35,000 to 40,000, yet the press “gushed” over Sanders.

The Donald’s “beautiful aide” Margo Martin may have some ‘splainin’ to do after filming a Trump rally in Florida, resulting in videos of empty seats. The clip of the crowd chanting “USA! USA! USA!”  toward the podium as Trump took the stage, and a second clip of the president saluting a ‘patriot’ in the audience to strains of the disco hit ‘Y.M.C.A.’ drew satisfied smiles, but the sparsely attended venue shots that were posted were unimpressive to MAGA. One person responded, “Wow…very small crowd…there were more people at our bingo hall tonight…” and another declared, “The midterm game is over for Trump!” Others jumped on the bandwagon with, “Can you book a smaller place?..Can’t fill a junior college gym, hilarious.” Supporters wouldn’t back down with one calling Trump “best president of my lifetime.”

Barack Obama struck a few blows toward Trump as he spoke to a crowd in Cleveland, in the state that has received much attention in the lead-up to the midterms. The former president was in Ohio to campaign for Amy Acton’s gubernatorial candidacy, and Sherrod Brown’s Senate run, using his words to question where Trump’s attention has been directed in his presidency. “I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV.” Obama gave a rundown of the projects by naming the ballroom, the Rose Garden makeover, the new helipad, and particularly, Trump’s gold-finish-fetish. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” commented Obama.

After his White House appraisal, Obama took up Trump’s handling of Iran, blaming the war for pushing domestic costs higher — a war that “he decided to start that nobody asked for and nobody voted for.” He defended his own 2015 agreements with Iran, “a deal that everybody knows kept them from getting nukes,” by placing limits on their nuclear program while allowing international inspections and at the same time removing sanctions. Those inspectors reported that Iran was staying within the guidelines until Trump terminated the agreement in 2018 during his first term in office, causing Iran to push uranium enrichment beyond the limits of the Obama deal.

Obama added that the current administration was marked by “incompetence the likes of which we have not seen in modern times,” populated by unserious people. He accused Trump of excelling “so wildly at just straight-up grifting,” and framed the midterms as an “inflection point” to allow the electorate to say “enough!” Trump’s campaign promise to control costs were a smokescreen, the administration’s actions being directly responsible for rising costs, with Obama singling out tariffs and the Iran incursion. The former president tore into Vivek Ramaswamy for his campaign ad using Amy Acton’s estranged mother, saying that “the standards have gotten so low that somebody can run an ad like that,” adding that “There’s a decency that we should expect out of our public officials.”

Obama also went after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, pronouncing him as an unserious person who is “focused on important matters like the jawlines and testosterone levels of our male troops. And live streaming executions. How much time do you think this defense secretary spends looking at himself in the mirror in the morning? He’s working his hair because that’s how warriors look. These are not serious people, and the problem is, you end up having to pay the price for their lack of seriousness.” The latest from U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Mike Waltz, told the the Financial Times, the war could still be going 12 months from now, a bit different than Trump’s claims that it would last “four to five weeks” or some other random claim for a short duration. Unless of course, we end up “taking all the oil” by taking over “the whole country” as Trump threatens, but in his mind “the real question” is whether to “finish off Iran or let it wither on the vine,” or whether the stock market is up, down, or sideways, or perchance, Melania brokers another deal? So many decisions in this alternate reality!

The MAGA sycophants are still coming out of the woodwork with fake awards to ingratiate themselves to President Trump by stroking his insatiable ego. At an Iowa rally last week, House candidate Joe Mitchell presented the head narcissist with a cheap ‘Man of the Century‘ award, straight from a Hobby Lobby, price tag still intact in all probability. The Donald showed his Cheshire Cat grin with his best ‘Aw, shucks‘ expression, as Mitchell poured it on to “the greatest president we’ve ever had.” It’s gonna look just great in a fancy new gold frame back in D.C.

A new TMZ documentary describes a conversation between Jeffrey Epstein and William Mersey, fellow inmates at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, regarding an alleged remark made by Trump in an unusual glimpse of his view of himself. Mersey had asked Epstein for a story that was “emblematic of Donald Trump’s essence,” with the sex-trafficker delivering an anecdote involving Trump, a private jet flight from New York to Florida, a French woman, and Atlantic City. At the start of the flight, Trump proposed a stop in Atlantic City to show off his casino, but Epstein said, “I’m not landing in Atlantic City — it’s all white trash down there.” The French woman asked for a translation of ‘white trash,’ with Trump responding, “It’s me without money.”

In a campaign swing for Florida gubernatorial candidate David Jolly, former President Bill Clinton lobbed some pointed digs at Trump, hitting him for his overhaul of the White House Rose Garden. “I think Congress made a mistake not protesting turning the Rose Garden into what looks like the entrance to Liberace’s bathroom,” Clinton said to an amused crowd. ‘Fox & Friends Weekend‘ sniped at the comment, providing ammo to spread in even further online. One X user posted, “99 mph fastball on the outside corner,” with another posting, “Old Bubba got bangers,” but some questioned whether it was “wrong to smear the entertainer’s memory this way,” especially in light of his own controversial term in office — the Lewinsky cheating scandal being cited by many.

William Kristol writes on The Bulwark, about early-twentieth-century Marxist thinker and Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist government in 1926 until his death in 1937, who said, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” After reading about Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff, Kristol updates Gramsci’s formulation to: “Trumpism is dying, and a new liberalism struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” He notes that this famous line ascribed to Gramsci isn’t a literal translation from his Prison Notebook which reads “In questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati” which is translated by the late Professor Joseph Buttigieg (Pete’s father) as “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena occur.”

Kristol suggests ‘morbid phenomena’ may describe Trumpists more accurately than ‘monsters.’ “After all, monsters are in a way impressive. They can have a certain grandeur,” he says, very unlike Ramaswamy, Vance, Trump or Witkoff — conclusively, the ‘morbid phenomena’ of our day, “the visible detritus of a failing and flailing movement that’s, sadly, dominated or politics for the last decade — and that, of course, remains powerful today.” He decries Ramaswamy’s disgusting attack on his Ohio gubernatorial opponent, Amy Acton, by running an ad with Amy’s estranged mother calling her a “liar who lies about her past.” The mother lost custody of Amy and her brother, and fled with the stepfather accused of raping the 12-year-old Amy, staying with him until his death. Ramaswamy has only doubled down on his smear campaign, which is backed by a $4 million war chest.

JD Vance then showed his true colors later when he called Acton’s childhood sexual abuse survival a ‘lie’ and, “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” the vice president said. At a rally with Ramaswamy, he praised his fellow Republican for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is,” expressing his disgust toward “fellow Republicans across the country who are whining” about the ad. Kristol writes, “So there it is, the morbid phenomenon of late Trumpism on full display: smearing a survivor of child sexual abuse; running an ad featuring a primary enabler of the abuse; and complaining that some decent people in his party are offended by this.”

He continues: “But the Trumpists don’t just like enablers of child sexual abuse. They also love brutal and aggressive dictators,” referring to Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and his support for Russia and Vladimir Putin. And indeed, later that very day, Trump told reporters that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.” Kristol says, “Even Neville Chamberlain didn’t claim that Nazi Germany had been fine on Czechoslovakia. And Trump’s befuddled appeasement of Putin has continued full bore all week.” Andrew Egger, Kristol’s partner on The Bulwark, reported that U.S. special envoy, Steven Witkoff, joined the chorus, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” on releasing a 74-year-old American who was unjustly imprisoned for four years. “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff told Putin. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again, ” which evoked a fox-in-the-henhouse smile from the Russian dictator.

“Yet another morbid phenomena of Trumpism: sucking up to a murderous aggressor and brutal dictator. It’s all repulsive. And dangerous. But let me close by returning, across the aisle as it were, to Antonio Gramsci. I don’t endorse Gramsci’s politics, or much of his analysis, insofar as I understand it — though my sense is that some of it is quite brilliant. But I think Gramsci understood this: You can’t just wait for the morbid phenomenon bedeviling the world to collapse on its own. Yes, fascism has weaknesses. And yes, fascism in its various manifestations needs to be understood and argued against. But above all, fascism has to be confronted. And then defeated. That was true in the last century. It’s true today,” Kristol concludes.