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Against the backdrop of a month of chaos and destruction, something began to shift more or less in the middle of this week. I don’t want to overstate what it portends in the short term. Elon Musk remains firmly in the saddle. And even as many of Trump’s advisors grow concerned about the impact of Musk’s rampage, Donald Trump himself appears to be maintaining his support. The moment was captured yesterday at what are now the more or less constant CPACs where Steve Bannon tossed off a Nazi salute and Musk appeared in a “Dark MAGA” baseball cap sporting a chainsaw and basking in the adulation of the MAGA/CPAC faithful awash in the joy a certain kind of individual derives from destruction and pain. The picture itself is a key signpost in the story. Make a note of it. Musk himself posted it to Twitter, labeled with “The DogeFather” and flexing with the text: “This is a real picture.”
But there’s something else going on — not so much the tide turning as a certain battle being joined. Beginning this week, local TV stations around the country have begun running human interest stories about veterans, members of military families or Trump supporters getting fired as part of Elon’s purge. Meanwhile, we can see a growing cleavage between what congressional Republicans are saying in Washington and what they’re saying back in their districts.
The tenor of the moment first registered in a series of polls which came out midweek showing the first signs of Trump’s approval rating dipping into negative territory. I don’t think we should make too much of those poll numbers either way. Trump’s aggregate approval numbers had already dropped about five points just over the last month. And some of that is simply the inauguration support subsiding. What the polls did was puncture the impression within the mainstream media that political gravity has been suspended or canceled along with all the government contracts DOGE has left in its wake. Meanwhile, you’re seeing House Republicans in all but the most MAGA districts get nervous about what this titanic battle was always going to come down to: your health care coverage for Elon’s tax cuts.
A constituent who’d been fired in Alaska confronted freshman Rep. Nick Begich (R-AK) about losing their job, inspiring Begich to lamely reply that he was only in Congress and couldn’t do anything about budget cuts. Two-term Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) got grilled about the massive round of firings at CDC in Atlanta and awkwardly responded that “a lot of the work they do is duplicitous with AI,” which led to a new round of boos from the crowd. Rep. Troy Balderson (R) from Ohio said simply that the wave of executive orders and mass terminations were “out of control.”
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), who somehow still gets billed as a “moderate” notwithstanding her hard MAGA turn, is out there throwing up red flags about cuts to Medicaid which will float the big tax cuts and calling out the Freedom Caucus as running the show, despite the the size of their caucus. Remember that Republicans can only lose literally a couple votes to pass anything through this House. That reminds you of the instability of this juggernaut and the power in Democrats’ hands. If the likes of Malliotakis are getting spooked, she’s far from the only one. Hard MAGA districts are among the most reliant on Medicaid and Obamacare. And not just non-MAGA people in those districts but the MAGAs themselves.
What is key to focus on here is that Republican representatives are getting cold feet about budget cuts in the legal budgetary process that are substantially less than what Elon Musk claims he is in the process of doing outside the law and constraints of the Constitution. These two trains are on a collision course. And most of the impact of what’s already happened hasn’t hit yet. But it will. It’s like a person who jumps off a skyscraper and they’re halfway to the ground.
I was talking to a person overseeing millions of dollars of research at a major university today. The word he’s heard so far is that the current grants which keep everyone employed are secure. But in that case the university is floating the budget in the hopes that the federal spigot is about the restart. It almost certainly won’t.
I want to state again what I’ve been saying since November: your health care coverage for Elon’s tax cuts. That is the fundamental fulcrum on which the next two years of American history — and quite possibly many years into the future — will turn. This has always been and will remain fundamentally a battle for public opinion. The issue is not “kitchen table issues” versus democracy. The two are fundamentally conjoined. Any effective politics to confront the current moment must join the two together. Because they are joined together. To the extent that “democracy” has no tangible impact on anyone’s lived experience, it hardly matters. But of course it does impact everyone’s lived experience in tangible and graphic ways.
As all of this is happening, Musk himself is getting higher and higher on the destruction. The stunt at CPAC is just the latest example. Drugs, mania … whatever it is, it’s got him. And that unfurls just as he gets less and less popular with the general public.
2025 might be the first time in human history where we have a genuine supervillain walking among us. Humanity has spawned numerous monsters, of course: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. But I’m talking about the supervillain on the Gotham/Metropolis model. The glad-handing, fantastically rich, this-dial-goes-to-11 over-the-top weirdo with his raucous bevy of cheerleaders who is in fact evil and has a cartoonishly stupid but yet very real plan to take over the world. Look at that picture again. You can easily imagine running it over every 2025 political ad about the chaos and immiseration he unleashed on the country.