Sanewashing a coup

I mean, can we really say that an unelected CEO just taking over the appropriations and personnel powers of the federal government by fiat is even remotely as newsworthy as James Comey finding some immaterial emails?

The word "Musk" currently does not appear anywhere on the front page of NYTimes.com

[image or embed]— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 4:15 PM

there is however this headline portraying Trump as Bipartisan ideas Guy

[image or embed]— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 4:24 PM

The article that Jamison cites, in addition to legitimizing flagrant illegality, is some real old school Pain Caucus horseshit:

If that is the case, Mr. Trump will be continuing a mostly-failed effort by a long series of presidents and Congress. As measured by the numbers of people it employs, the federal bureaucracy increased by about 12 percent between 1984 (when Ronald Reagan was president) and 2020 (near the end of Mr. Trump’s first term), according to data compiled by the Brookings Institution. During that period, the population of the United States grew faster, by around 45 percent.

Uh, so what Elon is doing is actually kind of OK because the federal bureaucracy has…been getting much smaller relative to the population?

Then they dug up this very unpleasant blast from the past:

Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Mr. Trump’s memo appeared to be designed less to shrink government and more to “eliminate programs at odds with the Administration’s social and cultural values.” But she said that does not mean the underlying idea was a mistake.

“A similar exercise, however (minus the chaotic release, and including an assessment before changes were made rather than the other way around) would be immensely useful in controlling spending if the focus were on evaluating efficiency and effectiveness,” she said. “A granular exercise like this is desperately needed in as many tax expenditure and spending programs as possible.”

“Fascism could be good, actually, if it meant we could Finally Restore Fiscal Sanity [gut Social Security and Medicare.] I have this from a ‘bipartisan’ source, by which I mean ‘someone who speaks for no constituency at all except reporters who like the idea of other people being impoverished.'”

This is, of course, the essence of the politics of Peter Thiel and his cronies, who are now effectively in charge of the federal government — democracy is incompatible with decimating the federal welfare state, so democracy has to go. It’s always instructive what straight news reporters are allowed to editorialize about, and particularly so in this context.