In a latest interview, the previous Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an offhanded remark that related just a few dots for me. Ramaswamy was speaking with Ezra Klein concerning the potential for tens of 1000’s of presidency staff to lose their job ought to Donald Trump be reelected. This may be a wholesome growth, he argued. It might occur, he stated, by reinstituting the Trump government order Schedule F—which stripped sure civil servants of their job protections, permitting them to be fired extra simply—and putting in a government-efficiency fee to be led by Elon Musk. Ramaswamy stated Trump ought to eliminate 75 p.c of federal-government staff “on day one.” Up for debate, he argued, is whether or not a few of these folks would finally be rehired. “That’s not the character of, definitely, what Elon did at Twitter, and I don’t suppose it’s going to be the character of what crucial a part of that mission really seems to be like, which is shaving down and thinning down the paperwork.”
Ramaswamy’s invocation of Twitter is significant. In 2022, after buying the social community, Musk infamously purged Twitter’s ranks and fired 80 p.c of its staff within the first six months, after which made a collection of administration selections that finally threw the corporate into additional monetary disarray. Listening to Ramaswamy communicate and listening to the respect in his voice as he cited the centibillionaire’s tenure, it turned clear that he sees a blueprint for the Trump administration. Ought to Musk be appointed as a federal firing czar, it should seemingly not be due to his electrical automobiles or rockets or internet-beaming satellites: It is going to be as a result of he acted out the dream of draining the swamp, albeit on a smaller scale. Musk’s buy of Twitter isn’t just a Republican success story; it’s the template for the MAGA federal authorities. Even Musk’s mother stated as a lot in a latest interview with Fox Information: “He’s going to simply eliminate people who find themselves not working, or don’t have a job, or not doing a job nicely, similar to he did on Twitter … He can do it for the federal government, too.”
Musk’s argument for gutting Twitter was that the corporate was so overstaffed that it was working out of cash and had solely “4 months to reside.” Musk lower so near the bone that there have been real considerations amongst staff I spoke with on the time that the location may crash throughout huge information occasions, or fall right into a state of disrepair. “I’m totally satisfied that if Musk does what he’s saying he’ll do, will probably be an absolute shitshow,” a trust-and-safety engineer at a unique tech firm advised me in 2022. Musk did fireplace many of the trust-and-safety staff, in addition to these in control of curation and “human rights,” and the Machine Studying Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability group. The purge of those folks specifically delighted some right-wing commentators, who noticed Musk’s dismissals as a long-overdue excision of the woke paperwork inside the corporate. “Nothing of worth was misplaced,” one MAGA account tweeted on the information of the firings.
Twitter didn’t self-destruct as my sources feared it will (although elements of it have, maybe most memorably when Musk tried to host Areas occasions with Trump and with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, just for them to glitch out). Small-scale disruptions apart, the location has largely functioned throughout elections, World Cups, Tremendous Bowls, and world-historic information occasions. However Musk’s cuts haven’t spared the platform from deep monetary hardship. His chaotic managerial technique for Twitter has been to rebrand the location as X, alienate a lot of its most vital advertisers, institute a doubtful paid subscription program, and dabble in AI options within the hopes of sometime turning the platform into an “the whole lot app.” The top outcome has been calamitous for the corporate’s backside line. Quickly after taking on, advert revenues plummeted 40 p.c, and the bleeding hasn’t stopped. In line with estimates, final yr, X misplaced about 52 p.c of its U.S. promoting income. A latest Constancy report recommended that the corporate could have misplaced practically 80 p.c of its worth since Musk purchased it (for arguably far more than it was value). If this retains up, some have speculated that Musk could should promote a few of his Tesla inventory to maintain the corporate afloat. Musk’s financiers have additionally been left with large loans on their steadiness sheets in what The Wall Road Journal has referred to as “the worst buyout for banks for the reason that monetary disaster.”
Trump and Ramaswamy don’t appear to care about any of this. What issues is that Musk has turned X right into a political weapon in service of the MAGA motion. X, as I wrote final week, has grow to be a formidable vector for amplifying far-right accounts and speaking factors; it’s poisoning the knowledge setting with unverified rumors and conspiracy theories about election fraud. The far-right devoted don’t care that his platform has often labeled professional–Kamala Harris accounts as spam, quickly banned journalists, restricted accounts which have tweeted the phrase cisgender, and complied with foreign-government requests to censor speech. Nor do Republican lawmakers appear to care that Musk is wielding his platform to get Trump elected, even after they spent the higher a part of a decade outraged that tech platforms have been supposedly biased towards conservatives. Their silence on Musk’s clear bias coupled with their admiration for his activism counsel that what they actually worth is the way in which that Musk was in a position to seize a well-liked communication platform and switch it into one thing that they will management and wield towards their political enemies.
This concept just isn’t dissimilar from the imaginative and prescient articulated by the Heritage Basis’s Undertaking 2025, the conservative coverage proposal to reshape the federal authorities in a second Trump administration. Undertaking 2025 is a dense, usually radical, and unpopular set of coverage proposals that, as my colleague David A. Graham notes, “would dissolve the Schooling Division and the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, slash Medicare and Medicaid, ban pornography, set up federal abortion restrictions, repeal some child-labor protections, and allow the president to put off tens of 1000’s of federal profession staff and exchange them with political appointees.” Put one other method: If Trump have been elected and determined to make Undertaking 2025 a actuality, his administration would take an current piece of bureaucratic infrastructure, strip it of a lot of those that can examine its energy, after which wield that energy to ideological ends and towards their political enemies.
The parallels between this factor of Undertaking 2025 and Musk’s Twitter are stark. They need to even be alarming. The federal authorities just isn’t a software program firm, nor ought to it’s run like one. Maybe there’s bloat in our departments and companies, however civil servants labor over every day technical issues which might be essential to a functioning nation—corresponding to census taking, storm monitoring, and getting ready for pandemics. To easily lower these folks with abandon (and exchange others with political appointees) might have extreme penalties, corresponding to stifling catastrophe response and growing the probability of corruption.
Take into account additionally the monetary dynamic. Final week in a digital city corridor, Musk stated that the Trump administration’s second-term agenda—which incorporates tax cuts, slashing the federal finances, and tariffs on imports, “essentially includes some short-term hardship,” however would finally lead to longer-term prosperity. “We’ve got to cut back spending to reside inside our means,” Musk added. The road is just like his justification for the layoffs at Twitter, which on the time he referred to as “painful” and crucial in order that Twitter might steadiness its finances. However Musk purchased the platform with no concept of methods to flip it right into a worthwhile enterprise. His main curiosity appears to be prioritizing shitposting and trolling quite than discovering advertisers or making good on his concepts to show X right into a WeChat-style industrial app. Musk has by no means appeared enthusiastic about understanding the mechanics of a social community or the complexities of content material moderation and even the specifics of the First Modification. His incuriousness concerning the factor he ended up in control of has been exceeded solely by his want to make use of it as a private playground and political weapon.
Earlier than Musk formally took over Twitter, the tech oligarch no less than feigned an curiosity in working the corporate with a watch towards precise governance. “For Twitter to deserve public belief, it should be politically impartial, which successfully means upsetting the far proper and the far left equally,” he tweeted in 2022. Trump, nonetheless, has made no effort to disguise the vindictive targets of his subsequent administration and the way he plans, within the phrases of the New York Instances columnist Jamelle Bouie, to “merge the workplace of the presidency with himself” and “rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his pals and towards his enemies.” In different phrases, he plans to run the Elon Musk Twitter playbook on the whole nation.
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