A Review of the Worst Fucking Things Those Fucking Guys Did Just in This Past Fucking Week

By total volume, the defense department’s newly-announced budgeted $400 million for armored Tesla vehicles doesn’t really rate when compared to the “$13 billion in federal contracts over the past five years” that Musk gets from SpaceX and other companies (and is probably less important than things like eviscerating the SEC so as to kill, for example, the “SEC lawsuit pressing Mr. Musk to pay the federal government perhaps as much as $150 million, accusing him of having violated federal securities law”), but, still: there is a kind of old-fashioned neatness to buy-for-a-nickel-sell-for-a-quarter ratios with which, as the Times notes “Mr. Musk spent more than $250 million to help elect Mr. Trump, who then appointed him as the leader of a cost-cutting initiative that’s been called the Department of Government Efficiency” and it results in this. Bonus points, however, for the incredibly stupid clumsiness with which they attempted to hide it. (7/10)

Yes, on its face, it looked bad when they ordered the charges against Eric Adams to be dropped–without reference to the specifics of the charges or evidence–because, explicitly, hurting undocumented people, and even the re-election campaign of a person hurting undocumented people, has to take priority over the law. It’s not awesome that Adams has sold his city to Trump for personal gain. And yes, it’s not great that they “filed the request on Friday night to withdraw the charges against Adams that included bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions” after “seven prosecutors – including the acting US attorney in southern district of New York, the head of the criminal division and the head of the public integrity section – resigned in protest rather than dismiss the case for political reasons.” Also, “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me” doesn’t make it all seem on the up and up. But I ask you to consider: is not Eric Adams the Democratic Mayor of New York City, and is this not good for him? Whatever happened to “Back the Blue”? (6/10)

Related: bribery is just generally back, now. US companies can bribe foreign officials again, thank god. (3/10)

I’ll be honest, I don’t give a shit that Elon Musk is not actually saving money, as the Economist does. (“Since Donald Trump took office a little more than three weeks ago, outlays have averaged $30bn a day. Compare that with the same period last year under Joe Biden: federal spending back then came to about $26bn a day. Outflows from the Treasury have actually risen since January 28th, when Mr Musk first claimed his “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, was saving the federal government $1bn a day.”) But it is a useful data point for remembering that saving money is a ludicrously thin and fake warrant for what he’s actually doing. In fact, even to pretend that “saving money” is what this is about (to the point of being all “actually he’s NOT saving money!”) would be to buy exactly the line he’s selling. And yet, you know, good to notice that he’s not actually saving money, just so that we do not accidentally Have to Hand It To Him. (5/10)

Related: the code geniuses fucking around in the guts of the US payment system are wildly incompetent. Just postin’ classified data. (4/10)

Another bad thing is the specific and targeted way they’re trying to make more queer people die of AIDS, by making PrEP available “only to pregnant and breastfeeding women,” so that more queer people will die of AIDS. The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition called it “a death sentence for thousands of people at risk of HIV globally.” (8/10)

The USAID freeze is just, you know, really bad! Lotta stuff like this: “A major Norwegian aid group that specialises in demining operations, said it would let go 1,700 workers in 12 countries following a US decision to freeze foreign aid payments.” The fact that DOGE is producing the actual waste of government resources (“Almost $500 million in food aid is at risk of spoilage as it sits in ports, ships and warehouses after funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, was paused by the Trump administration”) is slightly ironic, but it’s not great that a scornful “what, you’re mad that we’re starving African children?” is the official line. There is some real “threaten me with a good time” in all of it, though. (8/10)

This shit is just sort of annoying tbh. (1/10)

The “Gulf of America” bullshit isn’t, in the grand scheme of things, the most substantively damaging thing this fucking guy is doing, and not only because “America” isn’t a word as owned by the United States as its citizens have convinced themselves it is (the Americas encompassing the entirety of these two continents, after all). “Gulf of America” wouldn’t be a terrible name, in that sense. Then again, it’s not in that sense, is it? And the way quisling-ass companies immediately started pushing it gives a good sense of what this is really about: a loyalty test, running bullshit up the flag so you can see who salutes it (and punish those who don’t). A related point about removing “transgender” from parks stuff, which is vile, but also more of a signalling, symbolic gesture than the kind of concrete harms they’re doing to actual trans people. (4/10)

I guess they said bad things and were bad and I hate these fucking fuckers, but during this shitshow, my brain just keeps yelling WHY IS HIS KID THERE. (5/10)

I don’t know if this is the right way to group it, but there’s so many different versions of “DOGE firing a bunch of people that are doing actually something really important you didn’t really think about” that I’m just gonna group it here. Firing 300 staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration “tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile” (“the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons.”) is a good example. (apparently they’re reeling this one back.) “Half of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — a group known as the CDC’s “disease detectives” — were among the cuts made Friday by the Trump administration” is another. 330 employees fired at the National Cancer Institute. The “The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my fucking firing. I make $50k a year and work to keep drinking water safe” megathread is worth perusing. (9/10)

Nothing is less surprising than that the CFPB–AKA the people tasked to prevent banks from fucking us all, and the economy, again, the way they did in 2008–is on the chopping block. “The agency enforces existing laws and protects consumers from mistreatment by banks, credit card companies, payday lenders, and others who would scam, defraud, or exploit them. Republicans don’t like that, and they never have.” Clearing way for Musk to fuck people with a digital wallet is new, though. (9/10)

On the other hand, one job was saved: “Elon Musk announced Friday that the Department of Government Efficiency employee who quit for a range of racist social media posts [writing that he couldn’t be paid to “marry outside [his] ethnicity,” and that people should “normalize Indian hate.”] will be reinstated.” (5/10)

Bad to fire “the government ethics guy,” but also, like, that dude was never not gonna fired, so. (3/10)

On some level, the worst thing he’s doing is a thing Biden was doing a version of, and Harris would also be doing a version of, but that fact doesn’t make it NOT the worst thing Trump is doing. It still is. That thing is this: deporting people, breaking families and ruining people’s lives just because (and doing it in some of the most sadistic ways possible, like dumping people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam in Panama, just because it’s cheaper). Is it worse because they are “dedicated family members and employees, their lives deeply woven into their communities” and that “None appeared to pose the risks to national security or public safety Trump promised he’d target during his campaign.” I mean, sure, I guess, kinda. But also, what kind of fucking rube do you have to be to think Democrats only deport fentanyl-smuggling rapists? (a racist one, is the answer). Related: “Damon Hininger, CEO of private prison giant Core Civic, just told investors: ‘ I’ve worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career … we’re anticipating .. the most significant growth in our company’s history.’” (10/10)

Also the worst thing he’s doing–because it’s the worst thing the US is doing–is the ongoing destruction of Gaza, which, Trump is doing it differently than Biden Harris, but he’s also, you know, doing genocide, albeit in less predictable and less competent ways. (10/10)

Imagine getting subtweeted by the pope. (-2/10)

It is bad that the Education Department is no longer investigating and suing schools to make them respect the civil rights of disabled students. It is also bad that they’re killing the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) which “is responsible for gathering and disseminating data on a wide range of topics, including research-backed teaching practices and the state of U.S. student achievement.” Other individual things in the Department of Education, that are good, are no doubt also being killed. Non-white and non-male students are frowned on, if not actually illegal. But, like, they’re going to kill the entire Department of Education, right? I guess I can’t list that as a past-tense thing he’s done, but it does sort of feel like it’s still the preface. (6/10)

We’re gonna have so many fires, man. “Trump’s spending freeze halts key California wildfire work: ‘We can’t even buy the rakes’” In Florida, funding freezes, for example, “forced the National Park Service to cancel a massive prescribed burn scheduled for January and February in Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve… [which] help prevent catastrophic wildfires by clearing vegetation that serves as fuel, and the meticulously planned 151,434-acre Florida fire — to cover more than six times the land area of nearby Miami — was also meant to protect a Native American reservation and improve ecological biodiversity.” (7/10)

Red White and Blueland is so stupid it kind of rules. (-10/-10)