For years, Donald Trump’s critics have accused him of behaving like a crooked used-car salesman. Yesterday afternoon, he did it for real on the White House South Lawn.

Squinting in the sun with Elon Musk, Trump stood next to five Tesla vehicles, holding a piece of paper with handwritten notes about their features and costs. Trump said he would purchase a car himself at full price. Then Trump and Musk got into one of the cars. Musk explained that the electric vehicle was “like a golf cart that goes really fast.” Trump offered his own praise to the camera: “Wow. That’s beautiful. This is a different panel than I’ve—everything’s computer!”

This was a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency. But you ought not to overlook just how embarrassing the spectacle was for Musk. The subtext of the event—during which Trump also declared that the White House would label any acts of violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism—was the ongoing countrywide protests against Tesla, due to Musk’s role in the Trump administration. In some cities, protesters have defaced or damaged Tesla vehicles and set fire to the company’s charging stations. Tesla’s stock price has fallen sharply—almost 50 percent since its mid-December, postelection peak—on the back of terrible sales numbers in Europe. The hastily assembled White House press event was presented as a show of solidarity, but the optics were quite clear: Musk needed Trump to come in and fix his mess for him.

And Tesla isn’t the only Musk venture that’s struggling. SpaceX’s massive new Starship rocket has exploded twice this year during test flights. And Ontario, Canada, has canceled its contract with his Starlink internet company to provide service to remote communities, citing Trump’s tariffs. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Musk is $148 billion poorer than he was on Inauguration Day (he is currently worth $333.1 billion).

Just 17 days after wielding a chain saw and dancing triumphantly onstage at CPAC, the billionaire looked like he was about to cry on the Fox Business channel earlier this week. He confessed that he was having “great difficulty” running his many businesses, and let out a long, dismal sigh and shrugged when asked if he might go back to his businesses after he’s done in the administration.

The world’s richest man can be cringe, stilted, and manic in public appearances, but rarely have I seen him appear as defeated as he has of late, not two months into his role as a presidential adviser. In the past few weeks, he’s been chastised by some of Trump’s agency heads for overstepping his bounds as an adviser (Trump sided with the agency heads). Reports suggest that some Republican lawmakers are frustrated with Musk’s bluster and that the DOGE approach to slashing the federal bureaucracy is angering constituents and making lawmakers less popular in their districts. DOGE has produced few concrete “wins” for the Trump administration and has instead alienated many Americans who see Musk as presiding over a cruel operation that is haphazardly firing and rehiring people and taking away benefits. Numerous national polls in recent weeks indicate that a majority of respondents disapprove of Musk’s role and actions in the government.

Musk’s deep sighs on cable TV and emergency Tesla junkets on the White House lawn are hints that he may be beginning to understand the precariousness of his situation. He is well known for his high risk tolerance, overleveraging, and seemingly wild business bets. But his role at DOGE represents the biggest reputational and, consequently, financial gamble of his career. Musk is playing a dangerous game, and he looks to be losing control of the narrative.

And the narrative is everything. Elon Musk is many things—the richest man in the world, an internet-addled conspiracy theorist, the controller of six companies, perhaps even the shadow president of the United States—but most importantly, he is an idea. The value of Musk may be tied more to his image than his actual performance. He’s a human meme stock.

A CNN clip from late October captures this notion. In it, a reporter is standing outside one of Musk’s America PAC rallies in Pennsylvania, interviewing the CEO’s superfans, most of whom are unequivocal that Musk is “the smartest man in the world.” He has an engineer’s mindset, one attendee claims, meaning he sees the world differently. Two other men in the clip say that Musk got them to pay attention to politics (and to Trump, specifically). These people had fallen hard for a cultivated image of  Musk as a Thomas Edison or Tony Stark type, a great man of history who is single-handedly pushing the bounds of progress. Musk has had great success popularizing electric vehicles and building new rockets (though many still debate his direct involvement in the engineering). These supporters might have been fans of his companies, but they seem to have also fallen for the myth of his genius, a story born out of years of hagiographic books, news articles reporting his hyperbolic claims, and Musk’s own ability to command attention.

[Read: Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius]

The image of Musk as a true visionary has proved surprisingly durable. In the early to mid-2010s, Musk took advantage of a different era of technology coverage—one that was more gadget-focused and largely uncritical—to hype his ideas for the future of transportation and interplanetary exploration. At that time, Tesla, his signature project, was coded as progressive and marketed as being in line with climate-change goals. The cultural dynamic of these ideas has changed, but the fundamental product being sold by Musk has not: one man with a singular ability to brute force his way to the future.

Musk’s trajectory changed after Trump was first elected president. It was during this period that Musk—already an incessant poster—realized how Twitter could be used to command an unbelievable amount of attention. Even when that attention was negative, the process of repeatedly making himself the main character on the platform elevated Musk’s profile. He became more polarizing (for chastising journalists, behaving erratically, making a supposed weed joke on Twitter that got him in trouble with the SEC, and getting sued for defamation for calling somebody a “pedo guy”), yet this somehow only added to Musk’s lore.

For years, valid criticisms of the Tesla executive came with an asterisk: He’s erratic, crude, even a little unstable, but that’s all part of the larger visionary package. Kara Swisher showcased this dynamic well in a 2018 New York Times column titled “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech.” “I find the hagiography around him tiresome and even toxic,” she wrote. But also, “Mr. Musk’s mind and ideas are big ones.” As Swisher noted, Musk’s attention-seeking at the time had a secondary effect of alienating him from some of his peers and fans. But tweet by tweet, Musk found a different audience, one eager to embrace his visionary image, provided he took up their crusade against “wokeism.”

During the pandemic, Musk’s posting frequency intensified considerably as he began to stake out more reactionary territory. He called the COVID-19 panic in March 2020 “dumb” and later that year tweeted that “pronouns suck.” Musk endeared himself to the right wing by positioning himself as a free-speech warrior, a posture that ultimately led him to purchase Twitter. Right-wing influencers and the MAGA faithful saw Musk’s turn as proof of their movement’s ascendance, but what has happened since Musk turned Twitter into X is nothing short of audience capture: Musk has fully become the person his right-wing fanboys want him to be, pushing far beyond a mere  dalliance with conspiracy theories and “Great Replacement” rhetoric. It is hardly controversial to suggest based on Musk's posts and blatant political activism that the centibillionaire has been further radicalized by his platform, which he then turned into a political weapon to help elect Trump.

Musk’s X and MAGA bets mostly paid off, at least in the near term. Before Musk bought Twitter, I highlighted a comment from Lily Francus, then the director of quant research at Moody’s Analytics, who noted, “I do think fundamentally that a significant fraction of Tesla’s value is due to the fact that Elon can command this attention continuously.” Francus doesn’t go as far as to say that Tesla behaves like a meme stock—which can surge in price after going viral as a result of coordinated efforts online—but that Musk himself has this quality. Musk’s Twitter purchase was a bad deal financially and has been detrimental to X’s bottom line, but his ownership of the platform helped boost his cultural and political relevance by keeping him in the center of the news cycle. Similarly, Musk going all in on Donald Trump, becoming a megadonor to Republicans, and ultimately getting the DOGE gig all resulted in Tesla stock soaring—up until a point.

You can argue that there’s a flywheel effect to all of this. Musk’s polarizing, upsetting, attention-seeking behavior has made him unavoidable and increased his political influence, which, in turn, has increased his net worth overall. This has only improved Musk’s standing with Trump, who both respects great wealth and appears flattered by the notion that the richest man in the world wants to spend his time shadowing him around Washington and Mar-a-Lago.

Musk is used to being leveraged, trading on his reputation or his illiquid assets to keep the flywheel spinning. To his credit, he tends to make it work. He’s flouted the law when that has been advantageous to his business interests and taken advantage of a culture of elite impunity. He’s long been unafraid to get sued or reprimanded by a government agency. But two important things are different in his current situation. The first is the stakes of his reputational bet—rather than alienating himself from progressives or the media, Musk is threatening to meddle with essential government services, such as Social Security, that millions of Americans rely on. Indeed, Musk floated the idea of cutting Social Security benefits in his Fox Business interview on Monday. Whether he’s in charge of cuts or not, as DOGE’s figurehead, Musk risks infuriating countless people who object to the federal firings. Breaking the government is orders of magnitude different than buying a niche but influential microblogging platform.

[Read: There are no more red lines]

The second difference is the man he’s tied his reputation to: Trump. Musk’s attention-seeking and fondness for organizational chaos are usually unmatched, giving him an advantage in most of his dealings. This is not the case with Trump, whose shamelessness and penchant for discarding close confidants when they become liabilities are well documented. Musk is rich and powerful, but he is not the durable, singular political figure that Trump is. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where this ends poorly for Musk. The flywheel could reverse: Musk could become universally reviled, causing the protests to increase and his net worth to shrink. The richest man in the world is valuable to Trump, as is the myth of Musk as the modern Edison. But mere billionaires? They are fungible tokens and easily interchangeable dais members in Trump’s eyes—just ask Mark Zuckerberg.

It would be foolish to suggest with any certainty that Musk is cooked. Historically, he’s managed to wriggle out of trouble. Perhaps the most hopeful outcome for Musk is that Trump has too much of his own presidency tied to Musk to throw him under the bus. It’s too early to say.

Yesterday’s White House stunt had all the hallmarks of Trump corruption, but there was something else, too—an air of desperation. It was a tacit admission that the protests are working and that Musk and Trump are rattled enough by current sentiment that they’re willing to turn the South Lawn into a showroom. Watching Musk clam up on Fox Business or quietly idle next to Trump in front of the White House, it’s even easier than normal to see past Musk’s trademark bullshitting and bluster. These moments make clear that this time, Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back—the very myth he created for himself.

Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did.

From 1912 to 1951, Barnes amassed one of the world’s greatest private collections of modern European artwork—more Cézannes (69) and Renoirs (an absurd 181) than any other museum; Matisse’s game-changing The Joy of Life ; Seurat’s extraordinary Models ; the list goes on and on. The Barnes Foundation was officially an educational institution, but was effectively America’s first museum of modern art. (The New York organization that put capital letters on those words is four years younger.) But if Barnes’s collection is a model to emulate, the saga of his organization is a lesson in founder’s-syndrome perils.

Coinciding with the centennial of the Barnes’s opening, we have Blake Gopnik’s breezy new biography of the man, The Maverick’s Museum, and Neil L. Rudenstine’s reissued history of the institution, The House of Barnes, first published in 2012, when its legal struggles were above-the-fold news. The two deserve to be read together, because the slippage of identity between the man, the art, and the institution provides both the melodrama and the farce of the tale.

Born into ungenteel poverty in 1872, Barnes was smart enough to gain admission to Philadelphia’s selective Central High School and the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Realizing, perhaps, that he lacked something in the bedside-manner department, he went into chemical research, and in 1902 he and his partner commercially released the antiseptic Argyrol, which became standard in American maternity wards for the prevention of perinatal infections. As a chemist, Barnes was a one-hit wonder, but Argyrol made him a fortune.

At first he used his new money in predictable ways. He built a mansion on the Main Line and named it “Lauraston” for his wife. He bought fast cars (a passion that would be the death of him) and joined the local fox hunt. He also did less clichéd things, such as studying philosophy, reading Sigmund Freud, and supporting civil rights. A fan of the pragmatist thinkers William James and John Dewey, Barnes believed that a theory’s worth was measured not by its elegance but by its consequences in the world, and he treated his Argyrol factory as a laboratory for social experimentation. He hired Black and white workers, men and women. Contra then-flourishing notions of top-down, rigidly mandated workplace “efficiency,” Barnes boasted that in his factory, “each participant had evolved his or her own method of doing a particular job.” The “her” in that sentence alone is noteworthy.

At the same time, Barnes was a crank of operatic grandiosity—thin-skinned, bellicose, distrustful, fickle, and vindictive. Ezra Pound described him as living in “a state of high-tension hysteria, at war with mankind.” His bile could be witty, but more often traded on playground scatology, ethnic slurs, and sexual taunts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was “a house of artistic and educational prostitution”; when a newspaper critic took offense at “the fevered passion for unclean things!” (naked people) in Barnes’s collection, he sent a letter impugning her “well-recognized sexual vagaries.”

Curious about art, he enlisted the advice of a high-school friend, the Ashcan School painter William Glackens, and in 1912 sent Glackens to Paris with a wish list and $20,000 (about $650,000 today). Finding that the Impressionists Barnes sought were costlier than anticipated, Glackens skewed modern. In the course of two weeks, he bought 33 works, including a Picasso, a Cézanne, and the first Van Gogh to enter an American collection, his spellbinding The Postman. When Barnes made his own trip to Paris a few months later, he spent three times the money in half the time and lived up to every stereotype the French had about American millionaires. “He did literally wave his chequebook in the air,” Gertrude Stein wrote to a friend.

Modernism held attraction for someone who considered himself a pugnaciously original thinker. Collecting old art was posh and respectable, but in an America still scandalized by the sight of breasts, collecting modern art was outrageous. Within 10 years, Barnes had acquired some 700 paintings. But art to him was more than a proxy for cultural sophistication and a fat bank account. It made him feel things—intense and important things—and he would spend the rest of his life trying to map precisely how it did so.

If his obsession with Renoir’s late, big-bottomed, pinheaded nudes seems “idiosyncratic in the extreme,” as Rudenstine writes, it was shared by Picasso and Matisse, who prized radical departures in form. Barnes was a turbulent person and Renoir was his happy place, full of pretty colors and willing flesh. Cézanne appealed for different reasons. Barnes found heroism in the artist’s “social strangeness,” and saw it mirrored in the art: “His deformations of naturalistic appearances are akin to the brusque remarks … which, when sociability is the rule, project new interpretations upon conventionally accepted ideas.”

Barnes’s eye wasn’t perfect—he passed on Van Gogh’s Starry Night—but his instincts were remarkably good. He began buying African sculpture in 1922 and amassed an important collection. He bought old masters whose agitation or distortions recalled the moderns he loved. He bought Egyptian and Greco-Roman antiquities. He bought Native American serapes and jewelry. He bought American folk art and—repudiating the distinction between “art” and “craft”—acquired quantities of handwrought hinges, keyhole plates, and door knockers, which he hung alongside the paintings. To Kenneth Clark, then the head of the National Gallery in London, he wrote that he saw “no essential esthetic difference between the forms of the great painters or sculptors, and those of the iron-workers.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Landscape With Figures, Near Cagnes (circa 1910) is one of the Barnes Foundation’s 181 works by the artist. (Sepia Times / Getty)

None of this was quite as extraordinary as Barnes liked to pretend. The connection among folk art, handcrafts, and modernism was made by a number of curators and collectors at the time. Concerning the avant-garde, John Quinn, the visionary behind the 1913 Armory Show, was more adventurous, leaning into Cubism and Duchamp’s radical experiments where Barnes balked. (Their rivalry was such that Barnes, tiring of his usual name-calling, hired private detectives to dig up dirt on Quinn.) Others were not far behind. MoMA’s 2024 book Inventing the Modern celebrates the museum’s female founders—Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—and the energetic idealism required to get these efforts off the ground in an often hostile culture.

Barnes exaggerated his temerity in the face of philistines partly because he longed to be recognized as more than just a world-class shopper. Applying his chemist’s brain to locating the “scientific” principles behind his aesthetic experience, he concluded that what mattered in art was form—line, color, space, movement. Contextual data such as biographies and subject matter just distracted from the real act of looking. These formalist ideas had been articulated by various critics and art historians before Barnes, though, as usual, he took them to extremes. His 530-page “statement of principles,” The Art in Painting (1925), includes no titles for works reproduced in the book, lest readers be led astray by subject matter.

Much more original was his application of this formalism to John Dewey’s theories of experimental education and social reform. He could cite Dewey’s 1916 book Democracy and Education “almost chapter and verse,” Gopnik tells us. Barnes was convinced that “plain people of average intelligence” could be brought to the kind of art apotheosis he had experienced, just by knowing how to look. He derided art history as a discipline and art scholars individually, but he couldn’t abandon the idea that he himself had expertise other people needed.

Like many people who get a lot out of looking, Barnes was annoyed at the casual attitudes of museum visitors. When the Barnes Foundation opened its doors in 1925—in a purpose-built neoclassical building within a 12-acre arboretum adjacent to Barnes’s home—its indenture permitted no posh parties and no unvetted visitors. The art would not travel or be reproduced in color. To see it, you applied to take classes in the Barnes method. It was not a museum; it was a school.

Inside, he arranged (and regularly rearranged) the collection in “ensembles” that mixed objects of different ages, origins, and functions. Most people do this at home, but Barnes’s stridently symmetrical arrangements—big artworks in the middle, smaller ones to either side, formal echoes bouncing around the room—were emphatically pedagogical. In Room 15, for example, Matisse’s Red Madras Headdress (1907) is flanked by (among other things) a pair of watery landscapes, a pair of fans, a pair of soup ladles, and a pair of pictures, each showing a woman and a dog (one of them from the hand of William Glackens’s daughter, age 9). The effect is of an art-history curriculum designed by Wes Anderson.

Admission was doled out on the basis of whim and choler. Having prior expertise or impressive connections was usually a black mark: T. S. Eliot, Le Corbusier, Barnett Newman, and the heads of both MoMA and the Whitney were among the rejected. Student behavior was monitored. Questioning the method or viewing in the wrong way could get you bounced. Rumor was that Barnes and his second in command, Violette de Mazia, lurked incognito or listened through microphones for heretical conversation. Such ritualistic protocols can actually enhance the experience of viewing: Perceiving the specialness of the opportunity, people will give heightened attention. So while some Barnes students rebelled, others became acolytes.

Dewey, one of Barnes’s very few lasting friends, wrote in his book Art as Experience that the educational work of the collection was of “a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not excepted.” Considering that the science of that generation had produced antibiotics and the theory of relativity, that’s quite a claim.

Albert C. Barnes, 1872–1951 (Keystone-France / Getty)

Fifty-three and childless when the foundation opened its doors, Barnes was not oblivious to the need to arrange its future beyond his lifetime. But his vision for it was inflexible. He unsuccessfully floated prospective partnerships to the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Sarah Lawrence College, whose exasperated president finally wrote: “You can stuff your money, your pictures, your iron work, your antiques, and the whole goddamn thing right up the Schuylkill River.” Barnes then trained an affectionate eye on nearby Lincoln University—the second-oldest historically Black university in the nation, alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall.

His relationship with Black culture and Black leaders was characteristically complex. He considered spirituals “America’s only great music,” and his admiration for African sculpture was deep. But this appreciation was often tinged with condescension. The only Black painter in his collection was not one of those artists who had been to Paris and absorbed the lessons of modernism, but the self-taught “primitive” Horace Pippin. (Similarly, the women in his collection tended toward the doe-eyed and decorative. He returned the Georgia O’Keeffes he’d bought, but kept his Marie Laurencins.)

Still, he forged a relationship with Lincoln’s president, Horace Mann Bond, and in October 1950 altered the terms of succession so that Lincoln would eventually assume control of the foundation’s board. This relationship, too, might well have gone south, but in July 1951 Barnes sped through a stop sign in his Packard convertible and collided with a tractor trailer.

For the next 37 years, Violette de Mazia carried the Barnes torch and guarded the Barnes gates. Admission became harder, the dogma stricter, the students fewer but more ardent. When the state forced the tax-exempt foundation to open to the public two days a week, Barnes students picketed. In 1987, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto described the sorry state of affairs—the “stunning works” imprisoned in “the sullen museum, with its musty smells and impassive custodians.”

[Read: The controversy over moving the world’s best art collection you haven’t heard of]

De Mazia’s death, in 1988, snapped the foundation out of its torpor. That it had been careening toward insolvency now became clear, and the only paths to income—admission fees, loan shows, event rentals—were blocked by Barnes’s indenture. The new Lincoln-appointed board fought to break the terms; former Barnes students fought to preserve them. The state fought to increase access; neighbors fought to restrict it. Accusations of racism and corruption bounced around. Eventually the board proposed moving the whole collection to a new location near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. YouTube comments below the 2009 anti-move film The Art of the Steal convey the ensuing outrage: “My soul cries for this loss,” “Shame!!!,” “I Truly hope The Philadelphia Of Art [sic] Burns to the ground … art and all.” If this fury seems disproportionate to the situation—a nonprofit institution in need of funds finds a way to preserve its core assets while increasing public access—it was certainly very Barnesian.

The Barnes Foundation has now been on Philadelphia’s Museum Mile for more than a decade. The art is all there—Cézanne’s great The Card Players, the many pink ladies in search of their clothes, the Wes Anderson ensembles. From ceiling vaults to baseboards, every room has been replicated as it appeared when Barnes died. But they sit in a different building, under a different set of rules.

Entry is no longer an achievement on par with getting past the bouncer at Berghain. All you have to do is cough up $30. Inside, you can interrupt your viewing with a cup of coffee in the café or a visit to the gift shop, where you can buy a Van Gogh Postman mug or socks adorned with Horace Pippin’s African American family at prayer (a strange choice for footwear, but maybe the logical outcome of pure formalist thought—the colors and shapes look fine on an ankle).

[Read: Are fine art museums the next Starbucks?]

In other words, outside the re-created rooms, you get the standard, bustling, consumer-oriented museum experience, not arboreal serenity, and inside the rooms, you have to put up with the presence of other people, not all of them models of rectitude. But there is nothing like it. The absence of wall texts can be a welcome relief from current museum practice. And if the ensembles depend more on visual rhyming than on ideas, they really do get you to look. If you want, you can even take classes in the Barnes method, without passing some capricious test of merit.

Arthur Danto was right, though: Barnes is still remembered “for the spectacular collection of early modern art that bears his name, for the enthusiasm with which he kept people from viewing it and for the terrible temper he expended on behalf of these two projects. He was a gifted but an extremely tiresome man.” Barnes’s obvious intelligence, Gopnik observes, is “overshadowed, even eclipsed, by his real emotional and social stupidity.”

And yet, there is something gripping about his struggle, year after year, to solve the riddle of art. By all accounts, Barnes was a man with no theory of mind: Lacking any insight into the subjective worlds of other people, he found their behavior relentlessly inexplicable and infuriating. It must have been exhausting. In an essay soon after he started collecting, he wrote: “Good paintings are more satisfying companions than the best of books and infinitely more so than most very nice people.”

In art, he believed he saw the subjective experience of others—Renoir, El Greco, a Fang craftsperson—made concrete and visible, even measurable. It sat still for examination. His arguments circle endlessly (Rudenstine rightly calls them tautological), seeking the mechanism whereby this subjectivity was transferred from one person to another via form. Each work of art, he wrote, “records a discovery and that discovery can be verified, the artist’s experience can be shared, [but] only by one who has himself learned to see.”

Like mercury, however, the objective mechanism he sought for this intuitive process always wriggled away from his touch. Look at Cézanne’s The Card Players or Renoir’s Henriot Family and you see shifting edges, unstable spaces, fragmentation, dissolution, impermanence. But in life, Rudenstine observes, Barnes found “ambiguity, irresolution, incompletion, obscurity … impossible for him to tolerate.” His need to lock things down nearly killed the foundation that was his great life’s work. The tragedy of Barnes was that the things he could understand least held the key to what he loved most.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Cranky Visionary.”

On December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century.

Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.

DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”

More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.

Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.

[Read: The diseases are coming]

The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.

Donald Trump made the same mistake in his first term. In September 2019, his administration quietly eliminated an initiative that it saw as government waste: a $200 million program that tracked novel coronaviruses around the world. Three months later, COVID-19 infected its first victim in Wuhan. The U.S. government spent an estimated $4.6 trillion in response to the pandemic that emerged from that virus—roughly 23,000 times the budget for the preparedness program that could have helped mitigate its effects.

Complex systems—say, health care, or government, or industrial supply chains—without any built-in slack or redundancy are efficient but fragile. The effects of any disruption quickly cascade, and the potential for catastrophic risk grows. In 2021, a gust of wind turned a boat sideways in the Suez Canal—and upended the global economy, inflicting tens of billions of dollars in economic damage. Last year’s CrowdStrike outage is another example of an avalanche created by a minor problem within a system that was not resilient.

DOGE is courting these kinds of risks by automatically assuming that programs with no immediately obvious function—or at least none that Musk and his minions can discern—are wasteful. Some of its cost cutting may be eliminating genuine waste; no government spends its money perfectly. But DOGE’s campaign is riddled with errors, at the level of both understanding and execution. The agency’s strategy is akin to a climber replacing sturdy rope with low-cost string: We may not realize the full danger until it snaps.

Musk developed DOGE’s playbook when he took over Twitter, where resilience matters much less than it does in government. Gutting the social-media platform may have resulted in more harmful content and some outages, including one this week, but the stakes were low compared with the crucial government services that Musk is currently cutting. When X fails, memes go unposted. When the government fails, people can die.

The risks are not only to Americans but also to humanity, as technology and climate change have linked the destinies of far-flung people more closely and increased the likelihood of extinction-level calamities. It is not reassuring in this regard that Trump controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and that DOGE accidentally fired key people who manage it, that Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and is having Musk slash seemingly every agency designed to mitigate it, and that Musk summarized his view of AI risk by telling Joe Rogan that it presents “only a 20 percent chance of annihilation.” The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction—an organization that DOGE would certainly eliminate if it could—came up with a more sophisticated figure in 2023: By its estimate, there is a 2 to 14 percent chance of an extinction-level event in the 21st century. This is not a world in which the government should be running itself on a just-in-time basis.

Musk may flippantly acknowledge the risk in interviews, but DOGE’s fundamental ethos—Silicon Valley will fix what the government cannot—almost entirely ignores it.

[Read: The dictatorship of the engineer]

Americans can’t rely on Meta, Google, and Apple to build tsunami-early-warning systems, mitigate climate change, or responsibly regulate artificial intelligence. Preventing catastrophic risk doesn’t increase shareholder value. The market will not save us.

As DOGE hollows out the Federal Aviation Administration, fires extreme-weather forecasters, and implodes the National Institutes of Health, Americans are left to wonder: What happens when another plane crashes, or a hurricane hits Florida without sufficient warning, or the next pandemic takes America by surprise? Many people may die avoidable deaths for the rest of us to learn that one billionaire’s “waste” is really a country’s strength.

The past few weeks have felt like a Cold War thriller in which an enemy agent somehow infiltrates the top of the United States government. Soldiers fighting for democracy have been abandoned to die in the field. The U.S. president vows to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Long-established alliances are suddenly teetering. Economic bungling has pushed the country toward recession. The only beneficiaries of this bizarre series of MAGA outrages have been America’s geopolitical enemies.

Those of us who have reported for any length of time on the pro-Trump movement are called upon again and again to explain what is happening and why. We attend conferences, join television programs, and meet foreign reporters. And when we do, we find ourselves confronted with what I call the opioid dispenser.

[J. D. Vance: Opioid of the masses]

The opioid dispenser might be a politician, a business leader, or an academic. Whatever their basis of authority, the opioid dispenser offers a message of reassurance:

Yes, these recent actions are very provocative. But they are driven by serious strategic purposes. [Insert an imagined rationale here.] We should focus on the signal, not the noise. It’s a wake-up call, not the end of the world. We must take Trump seriously, but not literally. [Multiply clichés until the allotted time is exhausted.]

I compare these bromides to opioids because they soothe immediate pain, but only at the risk of severe long-term harm. Chemical opioids work by blocking pain receptors in the individual brain. Similarly, these calming messages about Donald Trump work by dulling the collective mind.

At a conference on European security, the opioid dispenser may tell you that Trump is hostile to the European allies because they do not spend enough on defense.

If that were true, then you’d think that increasing defense spending would allay Trump’s hostility. Instead, the administration’s de facto chief operating officer, Elon Musk, publicly insulted Poland, America’s European ally with the most robust defense program on the continent, now funded to the level of almost 5 percent of GDP. A few days earlier, Trump’s vice president gave a television interview in which he mocked “random” countries that “have not fought a war in 30 to 40 years”—widely seen as a slighting reference to France and Britain (though he denied it). This came days after the United Kingdom announced the biggest, most sustained rise in defense spending since the end of the Cold War. (France had already committed, in 2023, to a near doubling of its defense spending over the subsequent seven years.) Shortly before his jibe, the vice president gave a speech in Munich in which he championed Europe’s pro-Russian parties of the far right and far left. Whatever’s going on here, it is not about a wish for more allied defense spending.

Justifying Trump’s abject support of Russia, another opioid dispenser will explain the pro-Russia tilt as actually a grand strategy to counter China.

That sounds lofty. But the claim unravels upon contact with reality. For sure, an American president who wanted to counter the world’s second-largest economy would want to mobilize strong allies. But Trump has aggressively alienated allies, starting with America’s two immediate neighbors and its historical partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim. It’s not just that Trump wants Russia as an ally; he seems to want nobody else—except maybe Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is not actually standing up to China at all forcefully. During his latest campaign, Trump dismissed Taiwan as undeserving of U.S. protection because it “doesn’t give us anything.” Trump’s ravaging of U.S. foreign-aid programs concedes major influence to China, especially in Africa. Musk is significantly vulnerable to Chinese economic pressure on his large business in that country. Trump himself has taken a huge sum from a Chinese investor for his crypto operations.

Trump’s enthusiasm for Russian President Vladimir Putin—and avidity for Russian money—dates back 20 years. At a time of economic desperation, Trump earned $54 million on the flip of a Palm Beach property. His former lawyer Michael Cohen told MSNBC that Trump regarded the profit to be the result of Putin’s personal influence. Whatever explains the Trump-Putin bond, acclaiming it as a brilliant, Kissinger-like diplomatic pivot doesn’t pass the laugh test.

[David Frum: At least now we know the truth]

An opioid dispenser may try to explain Trump’s anti-Canada economic warfare as an anti-drug policy, a response to the flow of fentanyl south across the Canadian border.

Yet the fentanyl claim was almost immediately exposed as fiction. And if stopping a narcotics flow was the goal, why would the president demand annexation of Canada or parts of Canada? Trump aides have spoken of ejecting Canada from intelligence-sharing agreements, which again is not what you’d do if your goal were to improve cross-border drug enforcement. Maybe Trump’s 51st-state talk is not to be taken literally, but if taken seriously, as the opioid dispensers advise, the message is unmistakable: These are expressions motivated by animus against Canadian sovereignty, not a wish for improved U.S.-Canada cooperation.

To survive a dangerous environment requires accurate assessments of the predators on the prowl.

Inventing an alternative Trump—one more rational and less malignant than the actual Trump—may assuage anxiety. But only temporarily. The invention soon collapses under the burden of its own untruth, wasting time in which the victims of its fiction could have taken more effective action to protect themselves.

With every passing day, it is harder to remember that Elon Musk was not always a political firebrand. The old Musk advocated for his business interests and professed to care deeply about climate change, but he largely stayed out of partisan politics. As a result, he was much more popular. He hosted Saturday Night Live and walked the Met Gala’s red carpet. He also received substantive honors, including election to one of the oldest and grandest institutions of science, the Royal Society. The fellowship put Musk in elevated company: In 2018, he traveled to London to add his signature to the society’s charter, alongside those of Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton.

Thousands of scientists are now calling for Musk’s name to be blotted out from that charter’s fine vellum pages. The effort kicked off last summer, when 74 fellows (out of roughly 1,600) sent a letter to the Royal Society’s leadership, reportedly out of concern that Musk’s X posts were fomenting racial violence in the United Kingdom and could therefore bring the institution into disrepute. In November, one of the signatories, the neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop, resigned from the Royal Society in protest of what she saw as inaction; her statement cited Musk’s derogatory posts about Anthony Fauci and the billionaire’s promotion of misinformation about vaccines. Then, last month, Stephen Curry, a biologist who is not himself a Royal Society fellow—or a guard on the Golden State Warriors—wrote an open letter calling for Musk’s expulsion, for many of these same reasons. It has since been signed by more than 3,400 scientists, including more than 60 actual fellows.

The society has not taken any disciplinary action in response to these entreaties. Musk himself made no comment on the campaign to oust him until March 2, when Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI” (and a member of the Royal Society Class of 1998), lent his voice to the cause. In a reply to Hinton on X, Musk said that only “craven, insecure fools” care about awards and memberships. Despite this I’m-not-mad bravado, Musk seemed stung. He did not respond to emailed questions, but on X, he did accuse Hinton of cruelty. The following evening, the Royal Society convened a meeting to discuss the matter. It took place behind closed doors, and what transpired is still not entirely clear. (In an email to The Atlantic, the society said that all matters relating to individual fellows are dealt with in strict confidence.) According to one report, the society now plans to send a letter to Musk, though what it intends to write was undecided as of last week. At least for now, Musk’s fellowship seems to be safe.

This roiling at the Royal Society comes at a tricky time for scientific institutions, especially universities. Having perhaps waded too far into political disputes in recent years, the leaders of these institutions are now trying to stay out of politics at the precise moment when politicians are trying to damage them. Musk may have been spared, so far, by an understandable desire among the Royal Society’s leadership to stay neutral. Scientific organizations that succumbed to political orthodoxies, or enforced them, have often come to regret it. During the Cold War, some scientists in the United States faced professional penalties or outright ostracization because they were suspected of being Communists. In the Soviet Union, dissenting biologists were shipped to the gulag. At the peak of China’s Cultural Revolution, a physicist who worked on the “Western science” of general relativity could be charged with resistance and denounced at a public rally.

[Read: The death of government expertise]

These cases are extreme, but subtle interminglings of politics and science can be toxic in their own way. They can undermine the atmosphere of free inquiry that gives science its unique power, its ability to sift good ideas from bad in pursuit of a more expansive and refined vision of the universe. Even an institution’s well-meaning statement of support for a social cause may have a chilling effect on any member who does not happen to agree. A scientist’s success is determined in no small part by their peers’ appraisal of their work and character. Scientific institutions should therefore avoid actions that could be interpreted as political litmus tests. They largely do: No university would deny a Donald Trump–supporting grad student’s application for enrollment, at least not as a matter of official policy. And likewise, mere support for Trump should not and would not disqualify Musk from the Royal Society.

Of course, Musk’s support for Trump is not the issue here. In her resignation letter, Bishop raised the matter of his scientific heresies, specifically about vaccines, to argue that he breached the society’s code of conduct, which prohibits fellows from undermining the society’s mission. In 2021, Musk posted and later deleted a cartoon that depicted Bill Gates as a fearmongering villain who was trying to control people with COVID vaccines. In 2023, he insinuated that the NBA player Bronny James’s cardiac arrest could have been a side effect of those vaccines. Outrageous as these posts may be, Musk is allowed to be wrong about some things. Scientists are unevenly brilliant, if they are brilliant at all, and some of the best were heretics or even fools on one scientific issue or another. Lynn Margulis revolutionized evolutionary biology. She also promoted pseudoscientific theories of HIV transmission. Freeman Dyson had a better handle on the physical laws of the universe than almost anyone since Einstein, but he went to his grave a climate-change skeptic. Kicking Margulis and Dyson out of polite scientific society for these consensus violations would have impoverished science.

[Read: The erasing of American science]

The best case for booting Musk from the Royal Society doesn’t concern his beliefs at all. It proceeds from his actions, the way that he is degrading the world of science on Trump’s behalf. In the months since the 2024 election, he has made himself into a tool of Trump’s administration, a chain saw, in his own telling. And with that chain saw, the president has begun dismembering America’s great scientific institutions. The Royal Society is an ancestor of those institutions. During its centuries-long heyday, it funded scientific research that wouldn’t otherwise have been pursued. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health do this today, on a much larger scale. The Royal Society’s members are right to feel a twinge of solidarity as they watch Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency push deep staff cuts at the NSF and the NIH, and hear reports that deeper cuts are to come. In their speed and extent, these force reductions have no precedent in the history of American science.

Musk has done all of this in the name of efficiency, but scientific research is antithetical to unrelenting thrift. Basic research needs some slack to allow for false starts and trial and error. Musk of all people should know this. When the Royal Society announced that Musk would be made a fellow, it cited SpaceX’s advances in rocketry, first and foremost, and rightfully so. The company has made reusable rockets a reality, and if its larger Starship model starts working reliably, it will enable a host of new wonders in space. But SpaceX’s success required long experimental phases and lots of exploded rockets, all of which cost money. A big chunk of that money came from NASA, a scientific institution whose checks are signed by the U.S. taxpayer. Last week, it was reported that NASA, too, will soon face budget cuts. They are said to be concentrated in its science division.

Maybe Musk values scientific institutions only as a means to his personal ends. Maybe he sees them as disposable ladders that he can cast off after he has climbed to new heights of wealth. Either way, scientists are finding it difficult to fight back. They don’t have much money. Their petitions and open letters can be cringeworthy. But at the very least, they ought to withdraw the honors that they have extended to Musk. They don’t have to let him retain the imprimatur and gravitas of the Royal Society, one of the most storied institutions to have come down to us from the Enlightenment. If you give a man a medal, and he returns with a torch to burn your house down, figure out how to stop him, fast. But also: Rip the medal from his chest.

The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

I didn’t worry much about Trump’s threat at the time. I now realize that was a mistake. American universities did not cause the onslaught that the second Trump administration is unleashing upon them. But they would be in a much stronger position today if they had made a proactive case to the public for their own importance—and taken steps to address their very real shortcomings.

In the aftermath of the Yiannopoulos episode and Trump’s tweet, I worried less about the potential loss of federal funding than about the enormous costs of hiring additional police and converting the campus into a riot zone over and over. Berkeley’s commitment to free speech all but guaranteed that more conflict was in store. Yiannopoulos had announced that he would come back, and Ann Coulter soon accepted an invitation to speak at Berkeley as well. For a time, my concerns seemed justified. Berkeley spent millions of dollars to fortify the campus, and pro- and anti-Trump factions continued to clash. Meanwhile, Trump’s first administration largely spared higher education. Despite relentless criticism of universities for their putative anti-conservative bias, federal support for scientific research retained bipartisan support.

[Rose Horowitch: Colleges have no idea how to comply with Trump’s orders]

What I failed to appreciate was that the new administration was preparing the ground for a war on the American university—one that it might have carried out had the first Trump White House been better organized. In the context of crises and protests around controversial speakers, along with the growing preoccupation on campuses with offensive speech and so-called microaggressions, Trump and his allies contorted the idea of free speech to build a narrative that the university, rather than the political right, was the chief threat to the First Amendment. State after state introduced legislation, drawing on a template devised by the conservative Goldwater Institute, purportedly to defend free speech but also to enact draconian protocols for disciplining students who engaged in campus protests deemed to prevent others from speaking. (At least 23 states now have statutes in effect conferring some level of authority to state legislatures to monitor free speech on campus, demanding yearly reports, and imposing harsh new rules for student discipline.) Republican politicians began to include denunciations of universities in their talking points; in a 2021 speech, J. D. Vance declared, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Now the war has begun in earnest. Trump’s directives to restrict funding for science, especially the mandate to dramatically reduce National Institutes of Health grants for scientific infrastructure, equipment, and lab support—all essential components of university science—will cripple biomedical research across the country. Already, universities are reducing graduate programs and even rescinding informal offers that were made before the spending cuts were announced, and in some cases introducing hiring freezes. If the Trump administration sticks to its decision to cancel $400 million in federal grants to Columbia over the charge of tolerating anti-Semitism, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Nowhere is the assault on universities more pronounced than in the campaign to eradicate DEI. A recent Department of Education “Dear Colleague” letter warned that “using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life” is prohibited. The letter purported to base its guidance on the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action, but its language went far beyond the Court’s ruling. The price of noncompliance: no federal funds. This time, I take the threat seriously.

Universities have made two general mistakes in the face of sustained right-wing criticism. First, they have behaved as if their societal value is self-evident. In fact, they need to be far more proactive in communicating the enormous contributions they make to the public good: a campaign not just to defend themselves but to remind the country that our universities are among our most crucial assets. Many of the core elements of the technologies that enable our modern lifestyle—the internet, GPS, new immunological cancer therapies, mRNA vaccines, and medical imaging, to take just a tiny sample—have emerged from academic laboratories. Whether one is concerned about democracy, how scientific research can continue to position the U.S. as a global leader, how to solve global issues such as disease and climate change, or how to maintain a competitive edge with other nations such as China and Russia, we need our universities.

[Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

Second, university administrators have too often assumed that because a great deal of conservative criticism of higher education has been made in bad faith, none of it is valid. The truth is that universities have not always honored their commitments to free speech, academic freedom, and open inquiry as well as they should have, and the decline in public support for universities reflects, at least in part, those failures and shortcomings.

Offices of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion named values that for years were largely seen as benign. There was broad agreement that students from underrepresented minorities needed to have the opportunities higher education afforded but required special support to thrive in intense and often hostile academic environments for which they had little preparation or family support. Over the past decade, however, these offices grew in size and influence. With that came legitimate concerns about administrative overreach, bloat, and ineffectiveness.

At the same time, the liberal consensus was unraveling. Some faculty and students had indeed rejected the premise of free speech, noting that when power inflected all social relations, there was nothing like a level playing field; universities, they argued, should side with those lacking power and limit the speech of the powerful. Concerns about the ways in which prejudice was expressed in everyday interactions, often through unintentional slights and statements, not only surfaced as priorities for administrators but were converted into speech codes and protocols. A new language of “harm” was used to prosecute new canon wars, target faculty who offended students in the normal course of teaching, and deploy a new range of techniques to censor, punish, or “cancel” other members of the university community.

All of this came to a head in the protests after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Without any campus consensus about free speech, open inquiry, and civil discourse, an existing political impasse became even more intractable.

When, as Berkeley chancellor, I was petitioned by student and faculty groups to cancel invitations to speakers like Yiannopoulos and Coulter, I worried that to do so would be to invite censorship more broadly, and that any abrogation of free-speech rules on campus would soon be used against other political positions. I warned campus constituencies that the principle of free speech would not only protect liberals when national politics shifted—as they already had in the first Trump administration—but also help enshrine the university’s larger commitments to open inquiry and academic freedom, serious threats to which had already begun.

Now my fear that any curtailment of free-speech principles by universities would be used against universities is coming to pass. The new administration is targeting any use of race in statements or programs promoting diversity and inclusion. This effort goes far beyond admissions and hiring decisions, to the point of threatening institutions over the content of their curriculum, making a mockery of the administration’s supposed commitment to free speech. And the attacks on campus protests and DEI are just the opening salvo.

[Jonathan Chait: Anti-Semitism is just a pretext]

Governor Ron DeSantis has already signed legislation chilling instruction in disciplines including sociology and Middle East history in Florida’s public universities. Given the cuts to science funding at the federal level, we may soon see efforts to control the teaching of climate science, or biology, and maybe even evolution once again. The playbook to take “back” universities includes much more than what we have so far seen.

Federal support for scientific research, and for financial aid for students, is part of the postwar social contract that was articulated at a time when America recognized the need for as many of its citizens as possible to receive a university education and for American science to become preeminent. America’s universities, and its science, grew to be the best in the world.

This is the time to rearticulate and defend the unparalleled value of our research universities. They are the envy of nations around the globe. We attract the best and the brightest to our shores as students, researchers, and teachers. Creating these extraordinary institutions took the better part of a century, but they can be destroyed very quickly. The attack on the university may eventually backfire politically, but not before it does enormous damage. As higher-education leaders resist efforts to undermine and punish universities for their commitment to knowledge, science, and truth, they must also take care to deliver on the promises they make. Only then will the defense stand a chance of succeeding against the current assault.

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