Musk Enjoyed Taking Over The Oval Office; Now He Wants An Adjoining Office Shaped Like A Trapezoid

Texas MAGA freshman and former investment bankster Brandon Gill, Dinesh D’Souza’s son-in-law, is a lifelong hard core right wing psychopath. Yesterday, in an email to his crackpot supporters, he wrote “The time has come to arrest and deport Ilhan Omar. Sign my petition and let’s send her back to Somalia where she belongs.” (You might want to contribute to her campaign here instead.) Gill is a member of Marjorie Traitor Greene’s DOGE subcommittee. Yesterday they had their first public hearing.

Before it started, Mica Soellner noted that “Four years after being completely stripped of her committee assignments, Greene (R-GA) is spearheading one of the most high-profile subcommittees in Congress.The Georgia Republican, who chairs the House Oversight Committee’s DOGE subcommittee, argues Elon Musk’s idea for the Department of Government Efficiency is the top interest of not only Republicans in Washington but everyday Americans. ‘This has become the number one topic across the country,’ Greene told us. ‘It is the hottest topic and people are so engaged with us.’ Greene, who met with Musk at the White House earlier this week, said today’s hearing should be a topic that’s ‘easy to be bipartisan’ on and is timely ahead of when people begin filing taxes. Hill Democrats have a dramatically different view of DOGE after its efforts to dismantle federal agencies, including USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so bipartisanship will be hard to achieve. Greene said she’ll unveil an action plan in the days ahead with a series of legislative proposals to curtail government waste. She said the Republican Party’s full control of Washington gives it a chance to get results… Greene’s holding of the gavel is a remarkable turn of events from when she arrived in Congress four years ago. And it is emblematic of how much the GOP has come to fully embrace Trump’s MAGA movement and its most ardent promoters. But leading a high-profile subcommittee is also a test for Greene. Her congressional career has been marked by controversial comments and policy stances. ‘I came into Congress being vocally against everything happening here, and I’ve been proven right,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t say that I’ve changed. I would say it’s the House that’s changed and they figured out I am a person who takes [this] seriously because the people do and so does President Trump.’ … Robert Garcia (D-CA), who sits on the panel, told us he wants Democrats to match Greene’s bombastic energy when it comes to pushing back on DOGE. ‘We can’t go in and expect [Greene] to act proper and have decorum,’ he said. ‘That’s not going to work. She doesn’t work that way.’”

Some the best moments of the hearing came from Democrats. Robert Garcia (D-CA), referencing when Greene brought a Hunter Biden dick pic to a committee meeting, took a swipe at Musk, saying  “In the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed a dick pic in an Oversight congressional hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well.” It was just a random photo of Musk. “Now this, of course,” said Garcia, “we know, is President Elon Musk,” the congressman said… “We should in no way be cooperating with House Republicans who want to shut down the Department of Education and destroy Medicare and Medicaid, and should not stand by as the richest man on the planet gives himself and his companies huge tax cuts, while the American people can [do] absolutely nothing.” 

The ranking member, Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) demanded that the subcommittee call for Musk to testify under oath, noting that “While we’re sitting here, Trump and Musk are recklessly and illegally dismantling the federal government, shuttering federal agencies, firing federal workers, withholding funds vital to the safety and well-being of our communities and hacking our sensitive data systems.”

On Tuesday, Musk spent some time answering questions in the Oval Office with his 4 year old son and Trump as props. He claimed, dishonestly, that “he was providing maximum transparency in his government cost-cutting initiative, but offered no evidence for his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been corrupted by cheats and officials who had approved money for ‘fraudsters.’ Answering questions from the media for the first time since his arrival in Washington to run the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk stood next to the Resolute Desk and asserted that his work was in the interest of the public and democracy. President Trump sat behind the desk, chiming in with approval as he let the world’s richest man expound for roughly 30 minutes on the rationale for the drastic overhaul of the federal bureaucracy. The goal is to ‘restore democracy,’ Musk said. ‘If the bureaucracy’s in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?’ Among Musk’s claims, which he offered without providing evidence, was that some officials at the now-gutted U.S. Agency for International Development had been taking ‘kickbacks.’ He said that ‘quite a few people’ in the bureaucracy somehow had ‘managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position,’ without explaining how he had made that assessment. He later claimed that some recipients of Social Security checks were as old as 150.”

Illinois former Congresswoman Marie Newman called what he was doing a fairy tale oligarchs tell us. “Fairy Tale # 1 ‘We know how to root out corruption and fix government!’ What the fable-telling oligarchs and corporations are telling you …”

1. There is great waste at many Federal agencies

2. To correct this, we are going to dramatically reduce in size, cut budgets without analysis, fire huge portions of staff or simply eliminate federal agencies. Those on the chopping block so far:USAID, The Department of Education, NOAA, FAA, US Treasury, FBI and DOJ. Stay tuned, though, many more to come!

3. We will also fire anyone who has (lawfully and ethically) offended the current president in anyway, because they were simply doing their job lawfully and ethically.

4. We are smart businesspeople ranging in age from 19-24 yrs old with a great deal of experience.

What is actually happening in reality?

1. There may, in fact be some waste in government, but some critical questions:

a. Start finding waste where waste has been proven to be located, such as The Department of Defense (DOD). DOD has not passed an audit -let’s start there with waste cutting.

b. Why is the first step to eliminate full agencies? Why not do a formal fully executed analysis and then make recommendations for improvement a phased in approach for rehab? Perhaps cut areas that may be spending too much, but not the whole agency? Why the rash, ill-founded conclusions with no evidence?

c. Why not use management consultants and forensic accountants who actually have the necessary experience and credentials to do this work and are both objective as well as actually understand government and business analysis, instead of young people making it up as they go?

d. The Musk team does not have the legal security clearances to do any of this type of work. Why not have credentialed folks with clearances do the work?

2. Musk and his team broke multiple laws. He and his interns have broken privacy laws, committed actual data theft by accessing Social Security and Financial Data and placing it on private servers. This must be prosecuted.

3. Musk is firing anyone who Trump felt was not completely loyal to him, just like an oligarchy and monarchy operates. Why break labor laws and fire people without cause? Because Trump thinks he is a king.

4. The tweets Musk is sharing about alleged waste are taken completely out of context and/or are a result of misunderstanding how the agencies work. There has been no formal forensic or business process analysis or report provided. It is premature, unfounded and there are nonexistent sources cited.

In his searing post yesterday, Scenes From A Humiliation, Rick Wilson eviscerated both Trump and Musk. Referencing the photo above, he wrote that “If Michelangelo were around, this tableau would be on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel— commissioned by a Medici who wanted to show off his power over the Pope. Meanwhile, a slumped Donald Trump sat nearby, wearing the bored, empty stare of a man who wants nothing more than his afternoon pudding. You don’t need a body-language guru to see he’s thoroughly checked out: drooping shoulders, slack jaw, glazed eyes. His single moment of real engagement was with Musk’s kid, Glorbax_Rocketchild42069… Musk’s destructive spree across agencies and programs and his roving disregard for the law, Constitution, institutional knowledge, and history— everything but ‘shareholder value’— are Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality taken to its final, hellish conclusion. So there sat Trump, reduced to a prop in Elon’s alpha preening. It was a public notice to every White House staffer and every Trump factotum—Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, and the rest of the bootlicking coterie— that Musk is running the show. Speaking of Susie Wiles, she’s been leaking stories for weeks now that she’s got Elon on a leash, that she’s in control, and that the White House knows everything DOGE and Elon are doing. Her Chief of Staff chops were a comfort to many Wall Street types, and now its revealed that she too is one of the NPCs in Elon’s virtual insanity.”

President Musk’s biggest whopper of his Oval Office presser centered on the so-called Department of Gooners and Edgelords (DOGE):

“We’re trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X and the DOGE website. We’re maximally transparent. I don’t think there’s been— I don’t know of any organization more transparent than the DOGE organization.”

This is just industrial-grade, Trumpian gaslighting. The recent wave of court filings reveals only the tip of what could be the biggest data theft operation in American history and an illegal scheme to rewrite entire swaths of constitutional authority. As for DOGE’s alleged “transparency,” its online postings are a hot mess of MAGA rage-bait, slander, lies, and pure nonsense. It reeks of Musk’s modus operandi at Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX— mount the corporate operation like a parasitic wasp, engage in stochastic firings, reap government money, demand the world’s admiration, and see what sticks.

Musk also stiff-armed the most straightforward question in the world: does his massive government income from SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla present a conflict of interest? Even Trump showed a flicker of awareness on this point, being the king of conflicts of interest until Elon snatched the crown. His response was a verbal middle finger.

Let’s be clear: Elon Musk is not an engineer or a scientist. He’s a PayPal Mafia alumnus who got lucky, got rich, and has a ferocious hustle. He is not an auditor or a government expert. His superpower has always been a nose for acquisitions, but what you never see are the founders of the companies he took over. What you never see are the real engineers and coders behind the scenes unfucking his bad-idea factory.

…The stakes are America’s Constitution, our economy, our place in the world, and human lives… and Musk simply doesn’t care. He’s doing this because he is relentlessly bored and doesn’t understand or value humans. He believes every system is amenable to his brand of chaos and mania. He enjoys the attention and the fun of being an arsonist.

This is a man who openly owns Donald Trump.

Thanks to his fortune, his stake in Trump’s political fate, and his bottomless bankroll, Elon can ward off even the handful of Republicans who haven’t gone entirely over the cliff. The mere threat of Musk dropping $25 million into someone’s primary is enough to turn them into supplicants. In short, they’ll end up performing the same humiliating ritual Trump just went through and smiling as they eat the big fecal sandwich.

Bill Kristol also took a few swings at the Elon-Trump press conference, noting that “DOGE is in charge now,” although Kristol sensed Trump was growing increasingly irritated as Musk could clearly be seen as the more alpha of the two.

“Musk was asked to justify his minions’ wanton rampage through the ranks of our civil servants. He said: ‘We do find it sort of rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow manage to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth… The reality is they’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer’s expense. That’s the honest truth of it.’ Here’s a tip based on many years of watching politicians and, for that matter, of watching my fellow human beings: When someone says ‘that’s the honest truth of it,’ that person is probably not telling the honest truth. Especially if that person is someone like Musk. The truth is that Musk has no idea what the net wealth is of various government employees. Unless, that is, he’s had his apparatchiks take a look at those employees’ SF-86 security clearance questionnaires or their IRS records. Which would be illegal— an illegality for which we don’t, so far at least, have any evidence. So Musk is just making this up. But why should the world’s wealthiest man let the truth stand in the way of a casual slander of government employees if that can help his assault on our government?

Musk of course now works for that government as well. When asked about the secrecy surrounding his efforts, Musk claimed that, “All of our actions are maximally transparent. No one has been more transparent than DOGE.”

This is a ludicrous claim. DOGE posts painfully little about the savings it’s found. Musk has attacked journalists for seeking to discover who are the subordinates he’s employed. And he is also refusing to authorize the release of his own financial disclosure report, which he is required by law to submit to ethics officials to guard against conflicts of interest.

So no maximal transparency with regard to Musk, who actually does stand to accrue tens of billions of dollars in net worth, unlike the fellow employees he maligns. But what we do know is that on Monday, President Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics just months into his five year term.

Nothing to see here.