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White House Says We Were Out of the Loop—ON EVERYTHING

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January 30, 2025 12:06 p.m.
HALLE, GERMANY - JANUARY 25: Tech billionaire Elon Musk waves and speaks live via a video transmission during a speech by Alice Weidel, chancellor candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political pa... HALLE, GERMANY - JANUARY 25: Tech billionaire Elon Musk waves and speaks live via a video transmission during a speech by Alice Weidel, chancellor candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party, at the AfD election campaign launch rally on January 25, 2025 in Halle, Germany. Musk is an outspoken supporter of the AfD and is urging German voters to cast their ballots for the party. The AfD is currently in second place in polls ahead of federal parliamentary snap elections scheduled for February 23. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) MORE LESS
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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.

Here’s how the Journal captured that moment …

Toward the end of the November dinner, Trump raised the matter of the lawsuit, the people said. The president signaled that the litigation had to be resolved before Zuckerberg could be “brought into the tent,” one of the people said. 

This remains who Trump is and has always been. But along the way he has struck up common cause with a series of ideologues and chaos actors who advance Trump’s interests with ideological and business agendas he cares, in themselves, nothing about.

So the “resignations” gambit from the Office of Personal Management is from Team Musk, which appears to be running OPM, trying to “disrupt” the federal workforce with “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley values. The OMB memo is the work of Christian nationalist Russell Vought, who envisions an electoral presidential dictatorship which uses its power to enforce a top down re-traditionalizing of American society and culture.

Republicans in their hubris and Democrats in their disconsolation tell themselves that this is what the voters voted for. But that’s not and is never really true. It was no more true, in its analogous detail, when Joe Biden defeated Trump four-plus years ago than it was three months ago when Trump defeated Kamala Harris. Power is power. The most fractional victory unleashes a wave of legal authority. But the reality is that at most 40 percent of the electorate is firmly aligned with each parties’ ideological aims. The remaining 20 percent or more make consequential choices on the basis of a very limited engagement with electoral politics, reacting to evanescent moods, undulations in the national economy which may have little relation to the actions of elected officials and personal impressions of political leaders themselves. That makes their votes no less consequential. But what it means is that they may be as surprised as anyone else at what their “choices” actually meant or made possible. So what we see happening now is not only the consequence of the 2024 election but its continuation under different circumstances leading, of course, to another tally in 2026 and more limited assays of the public will in special elections over the coming months.

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