Still Meddling

For many years now, former Trump adviser and longtime election conspiracy theorist Cleta Mitchell has managed to make herself relevant in the MAGA universe despite never officially joining the administration.  

Mitchell’s election denial claim to fame came about most prominently in the aftermath of the 2020 contest. 

She was at the forefront of President Trump’s effort to overturn 2020 election results in Georgia, and was even a participant in Trump’s now infamous January 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger from January 2021, in which Trump urged him to “find” enough votes to overturn President Biden’s victory in Georgia. 

And more recently, Mitchell has been behind efforts to perpetuate fears about the non-existent threat of noncitizen voting, as well as efforts to push through the SAVE America Act, a restrictive election bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. She also runs the Election Integrity Network, an election denial group that pushes election conspiracy theories, including myths about noncitizen voting and the safety and maintenance of state voting rolls. 

And unfortunately, Mitchell is still hard at work coming up with ways to interfere in our elections. This time it’s through financial ties to the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Heather Honey. 

According to a report from Democracy Docket, Mitchell granted Honey more than $72,000 last fiscal year. And in 2025, Mitchell reportedly granted Honey’s consulting firm, Verity Vote LLC, $121,284 for consulting services.

For some important context, Honey misrepresented 2020 election data by falsely claiming that Pennsylvania had more votes than the registered voters. These faulty findings were later cited by Trump during his Jan. 6, 2021 speech at the Ellipse.   

This isn’t the first time Honey and Mitchell have worked together, though. Honey is the founder of the Pennsylvania Fair Elections group, which is part of Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. 

The MBA Is A Failed Idea

It’s time we get rid of MBAs. I’m not saying we take people who have MBAs and deport them, although….maybe. No, what I’m saying is we should abolish the Master’s in Business Administration. It’s a monstrous, grotesque relic of a bygone age that we never needed in the first place. It is a symbol of the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous style of capitalism that reigns supreme in the United States, dictating that the point of a firm is not to provide a good or a service to a customer, but to make as much money as legally possible.

As many or maybe even all of us sit around and ask questions like, “Why does it seem like everything is getting worse? How are some people making more money than God when others can’t afford to feed their families despite working two or three jobs?” We can look to this cohort of “leaders” and identify at least a portion of the problem. They are a group of people who are trained to extract wealth and give it to the wealthy. 

When I was getting started in the news business, digital news was emerging and newspapers were dying. This was the big thing. Could print survive? It was existential but less comprehensive than the question we ask today: can the news survive? It seemed to me at the time that one of the problems in journalism was that when I scanned the landscape, most media organizations had a CEO who was not a former journalist or newspaper worker. This struck me as pretty insane. A newspaper is a unique kind of thing and the news is a unique kind of business. Ultimately, when I decided to come work at TPM, the fact it was run by Josh Marshall who was himself a journalist was a huge factor.

I was concerned with the world of journalism because I wanted to be a journalist. I understood the news. My reasoning was that journalism is kind of like a trade. Managing a newspaper is kind of like a trade. You need specific skills and knowledge to do it well. So when you bring in “business people” who run the companies to maximize profits, of course the product and service will suffer. But my scope was far too narrow. I think this applies to just about all industries. That’s why we should abolish the MBA.

In 1908, Harvard Business School launched the world’s first MBA program. The curriculum was based on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories on scientific management. So-called “Taylorism” was a rigorous approach to management that aimed to maximize efficiency by creating a system of clearly defined rules and processes for workers to follow. These rules and processes were arrived at via rigorous testing, analysis and measurement. Taylor thought this sort of thing could be applied to everything in life. 

One of the ironies of Taylorism is the gap between what Taylor seems to have intended if taken at face value and how his theories played out in practice. Here’s the first sentence of his book, “The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.” Compare that to this line from a 2017 Guardian column: “Taylorism became synonymous with the evils of extracting maximum value from workers while treating them as programmable cogs in machines.”

Taylor didn’t subscribe to what we’d today call a “Shareholder Theory of Value.” In 1970, Milton Friedman wrote a New York Times essay titled The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits in which he argued that the executive of a given company is acting as an agent for the investors, and therefore the ultimate responsibility is to increase returns for said investors: “That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.” Friedman goes on to say that, of course, not all owners are the same. Someone might start a school or a hospital and in that case, the rendering of the service will be most important, not profit. It seems even Friedman couldn’t anticipate the private equity take over of hospitals.

If we take a version of Taylorism and give it Friedman’s ethics you begin to see the situation we’re in now: a bunch of highly-trained managers who go  all-out to maximize profits at all costs for their investors. Obviously, the prosperity of the employee, which was important to Taylor, is gone. Prosperity for the employee is only good if it somehow benefits the investors. Also gone: making sure the product or service itself is good. As long as you are maximizing profits for the investors, that is good, and that doesn’t require a good product or service, necessarily. You can lobby for a monopoly or lay some people off. The airlines keep making money. When was the last time you thought an airline improved?

Both Taylor and Friedman are contemptuous of other human beings and that prevents them from seeing their own errors. Taylor was operating under the assumption people were lazy. Friedman assumes they are selfish. Neither is true, and when neither is true, you don’t need a class of oversseers to make sure the plebs get their work done.

So why abolish the MBA? We need to begin to shift society away from being organized according to profit. This won’t happen overnight and it might not happen ever. But it’s an objective we need to establish. We should get rid of the pathway to a life dictated by profit and wealth extraction, which is what an MBA is. Yes, we need people who understand bookkeeping and accounting and the basics of business. But we don’t need technocrats who reduce everything to financial data.

Abolishing the MBA is not a vanity project or an exercise in some kind of jealous retribution. It’s not good for society to have “leaders” who see their life’s work as enriching investors. A well-organized society wouldn’t even have this option on the table. Especially at a time when we face a worker shortage.  

“We have pumped so many young people into business and finance,” Robert Hetrick, an economist at labor market data company Lightcast recently told The Hechinger Report, despite the acute demand for graduates in other fields. “It’s like a factory producing these workers like widgets, even though society is saying, ‘We really don’t need them.’ And the factory just keeps pumping them out.”

As a thought experiment, think of starting a society from scratch. You are going to need a lot of things. You’re never going to need anyone with an MBA because they are a kind of societal distortion. The true purpose of a firm is not to enrich its owners, it’s to provide a good or service to society. This isn’t some novel or insane idea only advocated by leftists. Management theorist Peter Drucker wrote that the concept of the profit motive is dangerous. Drucker wrote that both private and public organizations are parts of society that “do not exist for their own sake, but to fulfill a specific social purpose and to satisfy a specific need of a society, community, or individuals.” 

The MBA is a failed idea. It may have had lofty ambitions to create great managers who manage great companies to make society better. But that’s no longer the case, and it’s not certain it ever was.

Past Its Prime

“It’s not a big deal right now. The moon has clearly seen better days,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on rockets crashing into the moon.

 How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Why did the House Ethics Committee recommend the full House censure Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC)?
2. What was in the large white box U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro hauled to the White House this week for her meeting with President Trump?
3. By how much did Abdul El-Sayed win over Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary: 1%, 3% or 5%? 
4. Which popular program for low-income kids is the Trump administration moving to dismantle? 

Answers below

2020 Is the Year That Never Ends

Republicans just can’t quit 2020. Floundering for a coherent midterms message amid rising inflation and a president who is more interested in treating D.C. like his personal SimCity than addressing affordability, the GOP keeps returning to the conspiracy well of 2020. Mike Rothschild’s latest Rough Edges column examines how Republicans are “repackaging and reus[ing] the conspiracy theories that got us here,” from the “genetically engineered” COVID pandemic to the Big Lie that Trump actually crushed it in that year’s presidential race. 

The Stunning Hubris of Alleged Abuser (and Congressman) Max Miller

There’s run-of-the-mill scummy congressman behavior, and then there’s allegations of pouring boiling water on your then-spouse and fracturing your toddler’s collar bone. Republican Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) is accused of the latter. And yes, the former senior Trump adviser still thinks he’d be a great candidate for reelection, actually. 

Miller has resisted pressure from his party to drop his reelection bid, instead going on a spree of ill-considered press appearances that make him sound every bit the creep he is alleged to be. He told CNN that it’s been “several years” since he last used illegal drugs, that he’s taking testosterone, and that the allegations against him — if true — would be “incredibly troubling.” On Newsmax, he blamed his ex, Emily Moreno (daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno [R-OH]), for “projection” and made detailed claims about her alleged mental health history. 

The House Ethics Committee is investigating the abuse allegations against Miller, and the likes of House Majority Leader Mike Johnson (R-LA) are playing the Let’s Let Things Play Out card. But the GOP only has until Monday to replace Miller on the November ballot if he withdraws. Miller, for his part, insists he’s not going anywhere, telling Newsmax, “There’s no chance that I’m removing myself from this race,” even if Trump himself asks him to do so. 

Trump’s Literally Unbelievable Ability to Win Club Championships

Last weekend, Trump claimed to have won the senior (and super senior) club championship at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey. With an alleged score of two under par 70 on a course that has hosted multiple professional events, Trump bettered his age by 10 strokes and beat the next closest golfer by seven shots (imagine the golf world thinking it was a big deal when Jack Nicklaus shot a 71 to beat his age by a mere six strokes). This is apparently the 43rd club championship Trump has claimed, a feat sportswriter Rick Reilly has deemed without parallel. Taken together, Trump’s alleged results would seem to rank among the all-time accomplishments in amateur sport — not bad for an 80 year old guy who has only played golf 125 times since being back in office. 

Naysayers will of course cry foul. They’ll mention how caddies at Winged Foot Golf Club nicknamed Trump Pelé because of how often he kicked his ball out of the rough. They’ll wonder why he has never won a club championship at a course he doesn’t own. They’ll suggest that his alleged practice of being the first to play a course when it opens and then immediately declaring himself champion isn’t “legit.” They might even take issue with the time he allegedly didn’t even play the tournament but still ordered that the champion’s name hanging on the wall be replaced with his own when he recognized it as someone he thought he could beat. In other words, they will quibble.

Trump, for his part, demonstrated his legitimacy by posting a video of “the winning shot” accompanied by trash talk insulting the talentless losers at his own club. To ask why that shot — an approach from roughly 40 yards that lands about 5 feet from the hole — was the winning shot and not the putt — especially when the margin of victory was seven — would just be more quibbling. It was obviously a gimme.

Trivia answers: 1) For making romantic advances on two of his female staffers, buying them lavish gifts (like pink and blue handguns and a designer purse). 2) Evidence showing that damage to the Reflecting Pool was the result of contractor errors rather than deliberate vandalism 3) 1%, or roughly 15,000 votes 4) Head Start