After Donald Trump won this month’s election, one of the first things he did was to name two unelected male plutocrats, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a new Department of Government Efficiency. The yet-to-be-created entity’s acronym, DOGE, is something of a joke—a reference to a cryptocurrency named for an internet meme involving a Shiba Inu. But its appointed task of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy and slashing its spending heralds a new political arrangement in Washington: a broligarchy, in which tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates, some of whom appear indifferent or even overtly hostile to democratic tradition.

The broligarchs’ ranks also include the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance’s mentor, former employer, and primary financial backer—as well as venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, both of whom added millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. Musk, to be sure, is the archetype. The world’s richest man has reportedly been sitting in on the president-elect’s calls with at least three heads of foreign states: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Musk joined Trump in welcoming Argentine President Javier Milei at Mar-a-Lago and, according to The New York Times, met privately in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in a bid to “defuse tensions” between that country and the United States. Recently, after Musk publicly endorsed the financier Howard Lutnick for secretary of the Treasury, some in Trump’s camp were concerned that Musk was acting as a “co-president,” The Washington Post reported.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is a blueprint for a MAGA government]

Musk doesn’t always get what he wants; Trump picked Lutnick to be secretary of commerce instead. Even so, the broligarchs’ ascendancy on both the foreign- and domestic-policy fronts has taken many observers by surprise—including me, even though I wrote last August about the broligarchs’ deepening political alignment with Trump. Though some of them have previously opposed Trump because of his immigration or tariff policies, the broligarchs share his politics of impunity: the idea that some men should be above the law. This defiant rejection of all constraint by and obligation to the societies that made them wealthy is common among the world’s ultrarich, a group whose practices and norms I have studied for nearly two decades. Trump has exemplified this ethos, up to the present moment: He is currently in violation of a law—which he signed into effect during his first term—requiring incoming presidents to agree to an ethics pledge.

Trump—who infamously said of sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it”—cites his celebrity as a basis for his elevation above the law. Many broligarchs also see themselves as exceptional beings, but arrived at that view through a different path: via science fiction, fantasy literature, and comic books. Ideas from these genres have long pervaded Silicon Valley culture; last year, Andreessen published a manifesto calling for “Becoming Technological Supermen,” defined by embarking on a “Hero’s Journey” and “conquering dragons.”

Superhero narratives also appear to inform many of Musk’s more eccentric political views, including his reported belief that the superintelligent have a duty to reproduce, and may help explain why in September he reposted a claim that “a Republic of high status males” would be superior to our current democracy. Last week, Musk likened Matt Gaetz, Trump’s then-nominee for attorney general, to Judge Dredd, a dystopian comic-book character authorized to conduct summary executions. Musk seems to have meant this as a compliment. He described Gaetz—who, until his resignation from the House, was under a congressional investigation in connection with an alleged sex-trafficking scheme—as “our Hammer of Justice.”

[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]

Whatever its source, the broligarchs’ sense of their innate superiority has led many of them to positions on taxation quite similar to Trump’s. In 2016, the Republican presidential nominee bragged about avoiding tax payments for years—“That makes me smart,” he crowed from the debate stage. The broligarchs have quietly liberated themselves from one of the only certainties in life. As ProPublica reported in 2021, Musk paid zero federal income taxes in 2018 and a de facto tax rate of 3.3 percent from 2014 to 2018, during which his wealth grew by $13.9 billion. Thiel used a government program intended to expand retirement savings by middle-class Americans to amass $5 billion in capital-gains income, completely tax-free. The Trump-friendly broligarchs’ political ascendancy turns the rallying cry of the Boston Tea Party on its head, achieving representation with minimal taxation.

In their hostility to taxation and regulation, the men who rule Wall Street and Silicon Valley resemble earlier generations of wealthy capitalists who enjoyed outsize influence on American politics. Even some tech barons who supported Kamala Harris clamored for the firing of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who favors vigorous antitrust enforcement. But the broligarchs are distinct from old-school American oligarchs in one key respect: Their political vision seeks to undermine the nation-state system globally. Musk, among others, has set his sights on the privatization and colonization of space with little or no government involvement. Thiel and Andreessen have invested heavily in creating alternatives to the nation-state here on Earth, including libertarian colonies with minimal taxation. One such colony is up and running in Honduras; Thiel has also invested in efforts to create artificial islands and other autonomous communities to serve as new outposts for private governance. “The nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level,” Thiel said of these initiatives in 2008.

Cryptocurrency is the financial engine of the broligarchs’ political project. For centuries, states have been defined by two monopolies: first, on the legitimate use of coercive force (as by the military and the police); and second, on control of the money supply. Today’s broligarchs have long sought to weaken government control of global finance. Thiel notes in his 2014 book, Zero to One, that when he, Musk, and others started PayPal, it “had a suitably grand mission … We wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” If broligarchs succeed in making cryptocurrency a major competitor to or replacement for the dollar, the effects could be enormous. The American currency is also the world’s reserve currency—a global medium of exchange. This has contributed to U.S. economic dominance in the world for 80 years and gives Washington greater latitude to use financial and economic pressure as an alternative to military action.

[Read: What to expect from Elon Musk’s government makeover]

Undercutting the dollar could enrich broligarchs who hold considerable amounts of wealth in cryptocurrencies, but would also weaken the United States and likely destabilize the world economy. Yet Trump—despite his pledge to “Make America great again” and his previous claims that crypto was a “scam” against the dollar—now seems fully on board with the broligarchs’ agenda. Signaling this alignment during his campaign, Trump gave the keynote speech at a crypto conference last July; he later pledged to make crypto a centerpiece of American monetary policy via purchase of a strategic bitcoin reserve. The day after the election, one crypto advocate posted on X, “We have a #Bitcoin president.” The incoming administration is reportedly vetting candidates for the role of “crypto czar.”

If American economic and political dominance recedes, the country’s wealthiest men may be well positioned to fill and profit from the power vacuum that results. But is a weakened country, greater global instability, and rule by a wealthy few really what voters wanted when they chose Trump?

Musk spent millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign and promoted it on X. He’s now doing everything he can to capitalize on Trump’s victory and maximize his own power—to the point of siccing his X followers on obscure individual government officials. Some evidence, including Axios’s recent focus-group study of swing voters, suggests that Americans may already feel queasy about the influence of the broligarchs. “I didn’t vote for him,” one participant said of Musk. “I don't know what his ultimate agenda would be for having that type of access.” Another voter added, “There’s nothing, in my opinion, in Elon Musk’s history that shows that he’s got the best interest of the country or its citizens in mind.” Even so, we can expect him and his fellow broligarchs to extend their influence as far as they can for as long as Trump lets them.

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In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Musk wants to slash government spending by a third, and Ramaswamy wants to cut 75% of the federal workforce. Can they?

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have laid out their plans for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Despite being labeled an “outside of government” group by President-elect Donald Trump, the two say that DOGE will work closely with Congress and the executive branch.

Read more...

Although the plight of America’s 2.2 million federal bureaucrats seldom elicits public sympathy, spare a charitable thought for their future. Not since the congressional elections of 1882 has civil-service reform received so much political attention. President-Elect Donald Trump and his allies now face a fundamental decision: Will they listen to the loudest and most extreme voices in their party and be agents of chaos and disruption in upending the civil service? Or will they adopt a more measured, incremental approach that would deliver improvements and burnish their managerial credentials? The recent appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency is a clear signal that Trump is leaning toward disruption. But the risks are significant—and the president-elect has other reform options that could be more effective at a far lower cost.  

Few would argue that the current federal civil service is perfect. In 2017 and 2018, the National Academy of Public Administration, an independent nonprofit chartered by Congress, issued a two-part white paper describing the government’s staffing system as “fundamentally broken,” with too many rules and too little flexibility. Its authors argued that firing nonperformers and attracting new talent can be too difficult. Other observers have bemoaned the bureaucracy for its cost, inefficiency, and unresponsiveness. Change is clearly needed, and would in fact be welcome in many corners of the federal government.

Although distinguished bipartisan commissions may agree on a path forward, Republican and Democratic politicians—buffeted by the interests and passions of their bases—have been unable to come together to address these problems. Under pressure from public-sector unions, Democrats have shied away from even modest reforms of their own and have focused instead on resisting GOP proposals—which have centered on removing protections from federal employees. Some on the hard right are working toward “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the “total destruction of the deep state,” as the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has put it. But most Americans—including many moderate Republicans and Democrats—do not share this animus. They value government services and simply want to see them performed better.

Efficient and effective institutions are easy to degrade, difficult to build. The United States needs to retain the benefits of technical competence and impartial advice from a meritocratic civil service while ensuring that federal employees are accountable to political oversight. There are more constructive ways to achieve the objectives that both Republicans and Democrats claim to want, while retaining a high-performing, meritocratic civil service.         

[Read: Brace for the storm]

Late in his first administration, Trump used an executive order to introduce Schedule F, which sought to remove civil-service protections from any career official with a policy-making role, giving the White House much greater discretion in hiring and firing. Currently, there are about 4,000 political positions, out of which some 1,200 are subject to congressional approval. The number of positions that could be designated as Schedule F is unknown, but estimates suggest it could be 50,000 or higher. Trump’s campaign pledged to “immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” and he himself has promised to wield this power “very aggressively.”

He will have broad support from his party, which has sought to reap political benefit from stoking public hostility toward civil servants. In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, then a presidential primary candidate, claimed that he would start “slitting throats” of federal bureaucrats from day one. Other prominent Republicans, such as Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have indicated their openness to Schedule F. During the primaries, Ramaswamy denounced the administrative state as “an unconstitutional fourth branch of government,” and proposed firing more than three-quarters of federal employees. He later revised this mass-termination plan to cover just half the federal workforce, selected randomly: “If your SSN ends in an odd number, you’re fired.” More recently, Ramaswamy has expressed admiration for Musk’s drastic staff cuts at X (formerly Twitter) as a template for reducing the federal government.

In the Senate, Florida’s Rick Scott has been the Republican most aggressively pressing for a radical restructuring of the civil service. In 2022, he rolled out his 12-point Rescue America plan, which included a proposal for many government agencies to either move out of Washington or shut down entirely. Although about 85 percent of federal employees already work outside the greater Washington, D.C., area, the idea of moving staff out of the capital has caught on in Republican circles—the Trump campaign said he would move as many as 100,000 civil-service positions “to places filled with patriots who love America.” Cutting civil-service protections is also popular with the MAGA base: The Public Service Reform Act, which Scott introduced last year, proposed to place the entire workforce in “at will” employment status, allowing them to be terminated “for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.” (The bill has not yet passed through committee.)

And then there is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Tonally, the document is uncompromising. The federal government is a “behemoth” deployed against American citizens and conservative values; federal bureaucrats are “underworked, over compensated and unaccountable.” The project argues that the entire edifice of civil-service protections is a legacy of the American left: “Progressive intellectuals and activists demanded a more professionalized, scientific and politically neutral administration.” That statement is partly accurate but woefully incomplete. Republicans have historically been at the forefront of reform efforts, and the last major one, during the Carter administration, was a notably bipartisan affair.

Rhetoric aside, the project’s analysis of central agencies and federal personnel policy is more subtle and nuanced, grounded in a careful review of the relevant institutions and legal and regulatory frameworks. What influence Project 2025 will have on the second Trump administration remains to be seen. Tactically, the president-elect chose to distance himself from it during the campaign, but in office Trump may draw heavily on the document—as well as the personnel who drafted it.

As Francis Fukuyama has argued, the reintroduction of Schedule F will make the federal government “less competent and vastly more politicized.” The United States already has a much higher number of political appointees than any other advanced-industrial democracy—nearly 28 times the number in the United Kingdom, for example. Political appointments stretch down four or five levels of bureaucracy in some agencies (such as the Department of Defense).  

Republicans would be unwise to view Trump’s reelection as a mandate for completely uprooting the civil service. The most recent survey of public confidence in government by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service found disturbing evidence of reduced trust in government. Yet attitudes toward federal employees remain positive. A majority of respondents (55 percent) agreed with the statement that most civil servants are competent; a similar proportion agreed that most are committed to helping people “like me.” Only a quarter of respondents said that presidents should be able to fire “any civil servants that they choose for any reason,” whereas 72 percent disagreed with this statement.

[Read: Trump takes aim at Republicans]

Several measures could improve responsiveness, accountability, and performance at a much lower cost and risk than the ideas currently circulating in Republican circles. Departments and agencies should have more flexibility in managing their human resources, and be empowered to tailor their personnel policies to their particular business needs. The allocation of political appointees across the government needs regular review: A bipartisan commission should examine the current 4,000 such posts and make recommendations to the administration about streamlining and redistribution. Performance management is a key area for improvement: Currently, less than 0.5 percent of the federal workforce is rated “marginally satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” which at best stretches credence and at worst damages public trust. All government agencies ought to evaluate their staff’s performance on a standard curve, so that poor delivery is consistently identified and addressed. (Adjustments could be made so as not to penalize high-performing agencies and units.) Lastly, labor relations in the civil service need an overhaul: The processes and paperwork surrounding termination should be simplified; the window for appeals should be narrowed; and the role of unions in the grievance process for individual employees should be curtailed.

Such measures may disappoint the more fervent anti-government voices in today’s GOP. But a sober assessment would view Musk’s experience with X as a cautionary tale. Although the platform has functioned as a megaphone for its owner, it has also shed users; experienced repeated and embarrassing technical glitches; witnessed steep declines in advertising revenue; and may now be worth as little as a fifth of what he paid for it in 2022. In the private sector, such failures fall primarily upon owners and investors; in the public sector, they would affect us all. Do Americans want vital government services such as food inspection, air traffic control, or Social Security payments to suffer similar breakdowns? Dislocation and deconstruction may have a visceral appeal among elements of the MAGA base. But once the new Trump administration is in office, the American people will expect it to deliver the public goods and services they rely upon—and do so smoothly, fairly and efficiently. Disruption may sound trendy in Silicon Valley or tough in conservative think-tank circles, but delivery is what will ultimately determine the success or failure of these reforms.

“On the record? We’re as calm as calm can be,” a European official assured me last week when I called him to ask what he thought about the reelection of Donald Trump.

His answer surprised me. I’d first met the official earlier this year when I was reporting on European allies’ view of the U.S. presidential election. Back then, almost every leader and diplomat I interviewed expressed dread at the prospect of Trump’s return to power; this same official had described the stakes as “existential” for his country. The reasons for the anxiety were obvious: Russia was waging war on NATO’s doorstep, and America, the alliance’s most powerful member by far, appeared to be on the verge of reelecting a president who had, among other things, said he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries he considers freeloaders. Yet now, the official on the other end of the line was talking optimistically about the “transatlantic cooperation” his government looked forward to fostering with its partners in Washington, and “working toward strong relationships with the new administration.”

[Read: What Europe fears]

“We approach the next Trump presidency with calm and focus, not wobbling and panic,” he confidently declared.

Then he asked if he could speak anonymously. I agreed. “Obviously,” he said, “a million things could go wrong.”

Political leaders and diplomats across Europe are clear-eyed about the threat that the next president will pose—and yet they can do very little about it. “The overall level of anxiousness is fairly high,” the official told me. “People are expecting turbulence.” America’s allies now know that they can’t simply ride out a Trump term and wait for a snap back to normalcy. So far this century, Americans have elected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Trump again. “Predictability is gone,” he said. “The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.”

In the short term, sources told me, the plan is to cozy up to Trump and those close to him and hope for the best. In the long term, a growing consensus has emerged that Europe will need to prepare for a world in which it no longer counts on America for protection.

Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat who has served as ambassador to the United States, is among those urging calm. He has publicly cautioned European leaders against “finger wagging” in their interactions with the president-elect, and said they should take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy. Like other Europeans I spoke with, he was relieved by the choice of Marco Rubio—who has signaled support for NATO and has traditional views of America’s role in the world—for secretary of state. Ischinger also welcomed the realism that has shaped Europe’s response so far to Trump’s reelection. “We’re just going to have to deal with him—we’re prepared to deal with him.”

European officials, who have spent years planning for this contingency, are working to deepen personal relationships with Trump’s Republican allies, Ischinger told me, and talking about gestures they could make to flatter him. But these efforts will almost certainly face resistance from the European public, which, he said, broadly finds Trump repellent and even sinister. “I see a lot of disdain and panic,” he told me.

These reactions were reflected in the postelection headlines in the European press, which greeted Trump’s return with a mix of bafflement, scorn, and Apprentice puns. “What Have They Done … Again?” asked the cover of Britain’s Daily Mirror. The Guardian plastered its cover with the words “American dread.” And an op-ed on the homepage of the German newspaper Die Zeit resorted to English to capture the moment with a four-letter headline: “Fuck.”

Behind the scenes, Ischinger told me, European leaders have discussed inviting Trump to a capital for a grand state visit where allies could roll out the red carpet and hopefully cultivate some good will. But Ischinger worries that such an attempt could backfire. “I cannot imagine any such scenario in any German-French-Spanish-Italian city where you would not have huge anti-Trump demonstrations, probably really ugly ones,” he told me. “Organizing a decent visit for Mr. Trump would really be quite a nightmare for the police.”

Ischinger told me that the return of Trump and his hard-edged “America First” policy is emboldening Europeans who have been arguing that the continent needs more independence from its most powerful ally. Ischinger himself seems to be listening. When we spoke earlier this year, he was somewhat dismissive of the idea that Europe could chart a post-America course, at least in the near term. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” he told me in March. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

Last week, though, he spoke urgently of the need for Europe to start manufacturing more of its own weapons and get serious about being able to defend its borders. “Are we finally going to wake up to the fact that we cannot rely forever on being protected by the United States?” he asked. He said he doesn’t believe that Trump will move to withdraw from NATO, but the fact that it’s even a question puts Europe in a deeply precarious position. The U.S. has more troops stationed in Europe (about 85,000) than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined. It provides essential air-force, intelligence-gathering, and ballistic-missile defense capabilities; covers about 16 percent of NATO’s operating costs; and manufactures most of the weapons that are bought by European militaries. Ischinger said that the situation is untenable: It’s just too risky to rely indefinitely on American military might to deter Russian aggression in the region. “We have a war now. This is urgent—this is not just political theory,” he told me. “This is a decisive moment in European history.”

Meanwhile, some in Europe are looking beyond the immediate military implications of Trump’s election. At Faith Angle Europe, an annual conference hosted last week by the Aspen Institute in France, journalists and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic gathered in a resort on the French Riviera and, in between pastry buffets and dips in the pool, contemplated the potential end of liberal democracy in America. To many in Europe, Trump’s election looks less like a historical fluke or “black swan event” and more like the climactic achievement of a right-wing populism that has been upending politics on their continent for much of this century—the same forces that led to Brexit in the United Kingdom, brought Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, and made Marine Le Pen a major player in France. Not all Europeans, of course, are put off by the brand of politics that Trump represents

Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist who has worked as an adviser for the ministry of foreign affairs and the European Union, predicted that Trump’s victory would “galvanize” far-right movements around the world. “They feel they really are on a roll, and they probably are,” she told attendees at the conference. “There’s a sense of legitimization … If this is happening in the heart of liberal democracy, surely you can’t make the argument that this happening in Europe is undemocratic.”

In recent years, Tocci said, far-right leaders in Europe were on their best behavior, eager not to alienate America by, say, airing their real views about Putin and Ukraine. Now that Biden, a classic transatlanticist, is set to be replaced with Trump, she said, “there’s going to be quite a lot of lowering of the masks.”

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

Maçães, like others I talked with, was eager not to be seen as hysterical or fatalistic. He said he didn’t think Trump’s foreign-policy appointments so far have been disastrous. But when he looked at the people Trump was naming to key domestic positions, most notably Matt Gaetz as attorney general, he found it hard to see anything other than a profound deterioration of political culture and democratic norms. “Americans have more reason to worry than the rest of the world,” he said.

The President-elect was joined by Robert F Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will be joined by Vivek Ramaswamy as “outside of government” consultants on federal spending for President-elect Donald Trump’s coming administration. Exactly what that means is still unclear.

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The announcements of Donald Trump’s early picks for his administration have been like the limbo: The bar keeps dropping and the dance keeps going.

One of the first nominees was Marco Rubio for secretary of state; the Floridian holds some questionable views but is at least a second-term senator and member of the foreign relations committee, and is not the nihilist troll Ric Grenell. Then there was Representative Michael Waltz for national security adviser; he has no experience running anything like the National Security Council but he does have expertise in national security. Former Representative Lee Zeldin for EPA? The bar kept sinking, but hey, he has worked in government and isn’t a current oil company executive.

By yesterday afternoon, though, the bar was hitting amazing new lows. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was one of the least-qualified appointees in the first Trump regime; he might be one of the more experienced this time around, though Trump’s statement putting him forward for CIA director, which cited not his resume but his sycophancy, was not reassuring. For the Department of Homeland Security, one of the largest and most complicated parts of the federal government, Trump selected Kristi Noem, a small businesswoman and governor of a lightly populated state—but a diehard MAGA loyalist. The low point, so far, was reached when the president-elect announced Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. Hegseth is a National Guard veteran who has lambasted the military for being “woke” and lobbied for pardons for convicted war criminals. He once bragged that he hadn’t washed his hands in 10 years, but he still hawks soap shaped like grenades. His major qualifications to run one of the most complicated bureaucracies in human history are that he looks the part and Trump has seen him a lot on Fox News.

[Tom Nichols: The loyalists are collecting their rewards in Trump’s cabinet]

Perhaps the bar cannot get lower from there—at least not in terms of positions of immense consequence with real power to do a lot of damage in the world. But another appointment announced yesterday was in a sense even more ridiculous: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a Department of Government Efficiency. That’s DOGE for short. Get it? Such efficient. Very slash. Wow. Welcome to the era of government by meme.

Memes are slippery, neither serious nor quite joking. Try to pin them down and they slide through your fingers. DOGE, like doge, is no different. Why is this thing called a department when only Congress has the power to stand up a new body by that name? Is it because Trump doesn’t know or because he doesn’t care? Why does a government-efficiency panel have two chairs? Maybe it’s a joke. Who can tell? Is DOGE a clever way to sideline two annoying loudmouths who can’t or won’t get through the Senate confirmation process, or could it radically reshape the federal government? Like the meme says, why not both? The whole thing is vaporware, concocted by three people—Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump—who are all terminally online.

“Waste, fraud, and abuse” is something of a meme itself—an idea that gets repeated and used in many different formats, but offers more of a symbolic meaning and cultural connotation than specific denotation. Like most memes, this one is neither serious nor joking. Who could possibly want waste, fraud, or abuse of taxpayer money? The problem, as Eric Schnurer has explained in The Atlantic, is that there simply isn’t as much of it as people think. The way to radically cut government spending is to slash whole categories of things. (As a contractor, it must be noted, Musk is a huge beneficiary of government largesse.)

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

Trump has not provided a great deal of detail about how the DOGE would work, though Musk has, naturally, already produced a dank meme. Ironically, we don’t know how DOGE will work or how it will be funded. Trump says it will “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” to the White House and Office of Management and Budget, making recommendations no later than the nation’s semiquincentennial on July 4, 2026.

In the absence of real info, Musk’s takeover of Twitter is probably a pretty good model for understanding how this might function. When Musk bought the social-media network, he made many promises. He said he’d eliminate bots, improve the user base, fine-tune the business, and reduce political interference, so that Twitter could function as “a common digital town square.” Judged by those metrics, the takeover has been a failure. The service is awash in bots. Users and advertisers have fled. Many technical functions have degraded. Rather than becoming a more politically neutral venue, it’s become a playground for the hard right, with Musk using it to spread conspiracy theories and aid Trump. He has given it a slick rebrand as X and slashed the workforce.

We can expect much the same from DOGE. Will it successfully achieve the stated policy goal of reconfiguring the federal workforce to reduce waste and fraud and improve provision of services? Almost certainly not. Will it work to drive out dedicated employees? Probably. The surest bet is that it will be a highly effective vehicle for furthering Musk and Trump’s political agenda. Such winning. Very chaos. Much bleak.

Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will be joined by Vivek Ramaswamy as “outside of government” consultants on federal spending for President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration. Exactly what that means is still unclear.

Read more...