Editors’ Blog

A few thoughts on yesterday’s antics.

I imagine that in many parts of the world, yesterday’s Musk-Trump blow-up reminded people of the events of two years ago and the so-called Wagner Group Rebellion in which erstwhile oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin got increasingly cranky and finally started a military drive on Moscow before standing down at his moment of apparent but perhaps illusory strength. Two months later, Prigozhin died in a plane crash.

I wanted to flag your attention to this Dave Weigel piece in Semafor. It’s about an event (“WelcomeFest”) put on by a centrist PAC called WelcomePAC, which is presenting itself as a kind of latter-day Democratic Leadership Council or punchy and centrist group focused on picking fights with the party’s left wing. It’s a kind of set piece for a lot of stuff that’s going on among Democrats right now. The big push is to defang the power of “the groups” and then, on a secondary level, get the party away from various litmus tests and speech policing. Then there’s a secondary push for “abundance” politics. They brought together several centristy members of Congress — Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY), Rep. Jake Auchincloss (MA), Sen. Elissa Slotkin (MI) — and then commentator Matt Yglesias, data influencer David Schor and former Senate staffer Adam Jentleson, among others.

As Weigel reports, moments after Torres starts his remarks, this happens …

If you’ll remember, back in March we ran a number of stories on the DOGE takeover of the U.S. Institute for Peace. The USIP is a unique entity, publicly funded but not part of the government. Certainly not part of the executive branch. That contention was the centerpiece of the legal case that unfolded. DOGE tried to take it over on orders of the President. It was rebuffed. It eventually threatened the Institute’s private security contractor into switching sides, threatened criminal investigations out of Ed Martin’s corrupt rule of the DC U.S. Attorney’s office, and, on March 17th, succeeded in taking control of the Institute by force. This involved the still-not-fully-explained involvement of the DC police force, the MPD. So DOGE won.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Eventually, the expelled leadership of the USIP won in court. And it wasn’t one of these small-bore incremental wins we’ve seen so many of over the course of the Spring. They completely won — though their victory is still on appeal. But they fully won in the sense that a judge ruled the entire takeover was unlawful and undid all of it. They retook control of the Institute and the building it owns and what’s left of its budget. And they’re now in the process of trying, at various levels, to clean up the mess DOGE created, literal and figurative, and get the Institute back on its feet.

Yesterday, I talked to George Foote, longtime lawyer for the Institute and, as luck would have it, a longtime TPM Reader as well. He walked me through some of what has happened since all the fireworks earlier this spring.

Over the weekend, I made the point that all the reanalyzing Democrats are doing is really wasted time and they need to start doing stuff, succeeding at doing stuff in 2025. I want to reiterate another point. I truly cannot imagine a bigger opening than the Trump Republican Party is currently giving to Democrats. A recent CNN poll shows the numbers of Americans who think the government “should do more to solve our country’s problems” as opposed to leaving it to individuals and businesses is higher than it’s been in decades. (There’s probably no better explanation of the deep instability of contemporary American politics than the deep perception of the need for change and deep distrust for anyone’s ability to make that change.) Meanwhile, we are greeted with a daily spectacle of cuts to government programs to pay for handouts to the ultra-rich. And we have just daily pageants of the most predatory and brazen corruption.

Last night, I was reading this Evan Osnos piece in The New Yorker about the sheer openness of the turbocharged corruption which, I think we have to say, is wholly without precedent at any time in American history. Most of the details in the piece are things you’ve probably heard of or mostly heard of. But I recommend reading it. It’s powerful and almost beggars belief how much he’s able to catalogue and organize together from just this last spring.

A few days back, I got an email from TPM Reader JL asking me not to give in to the Luddite or reflexively anti-AI tendency he sensed I might have. It was a very interesting note and led to an interesting exchange, because JL is far from an AI maximalist or promoter and our views ended up not being that far apart. I explained at greater length that my general skepticism toward AI is based on four interrelated points.

The first is that even very positive technological revolutions (say, the Industrial Revolution) end up hurting a lot of people. Second, this revolution is coming to us under the guidance and ownership of tech billionaires who are increasingly wedded to and driven by predatory and illiberal ideologies. Both those facts make me think that we should approach every new AI development from a posture of skepticism, even if some or most may end up being positive. Trust but verify and all that. Point three is closely related to point two: AI is being built, even more than most of us realize, by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less “thought” than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns. And that’s to build products that will be privately owned and sold back to us. Again, predatory and illiberal … in important ways likely illegal.