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“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” then–CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves cackled in February 2016, as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign churned forward. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun … It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going.”

Moonves appeared merely ghoulish then. He now looks both ghoulish and wrong. Trump has not been good for CBS, and the steps and statements he’s made since returning to the White House show that his campaign promises to restore and defend free speech were balderdash. His goal is to protect the speech that he likes and suppress what he doesn’t.

On Sunday, Unelected Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk attacked CBS’s flagship program. “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” he posted on X. “They deserve a long prison sentence.” This would seem less threatening if Musk weren’t running roughshod over the federal government, or if the president disagreed. But earlier this month, Trump said that “CBS should lose its license” and 60 Minutes should be “terminated.”

The source of their anger is an interview that the program conducted with Kamala Harris—remember her?—during the presidential campaign last year. Trump alleges that 60 Minutes improperly edited the interview. CBS denies any wrongdoing and declined to comment on Musk’s post. CBS said in a filing this week that it intended to seek information on Trump’s finances if the lawsuit proceeds. Even so, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is considering whether to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement with Trump to resolve a suit seeking $20 billion in damages. Interpreting such a move as anything other than paying off Trump to leave CBS alone is very difficult—in other words, it’s a protection racket. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports that executives are concerned they could be sued for bribery if they settle. (Moonves is long gone; he was forced out in 2018 over a series of accusations of sexual assault and harassment. He denies any wrongdoing.)

Trump initially filed his suit last October and has since amended it. The crux of the claim is that CBS aired two different snippets from the same Harris answer about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like many past lawsuits from Trump, this one reads more like a political memo than a legal brief. He claims, without any evidence, that CBS edited the interview to help Harris’s electoral prospects. (Like other MAGA lawsuits, it was filed in a specific Texas court so as to draw Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has delivered sweeping fringe rulings in the past.) The suit doesn’t make a great deal of sense. If CBS was trying to hide something Harris said, why did it broadcast the clip?

The Federal Communications Commission initially rejected a complaint about the interview, but Brendan Carr—Trump’s newly appointed FCC chair—reopened it and demanded that CBS release the transcript of the interview. CBS did so, and to my read, the transcript establishes that CBS’s use of the clips was not manipulative. (Judicious editing is essential. I’ve interviewed many politicians, and much of what they say is incurably dull, nonsensical, or both, sometimes by design.)

The charge of “election interference” doesn’t make any sense, either—especially coming from Musk, who both is the owner of a major media platform and spent nearly $300 million to back Trump and other Republican candidates. The position of the Trump GOP appears to be that spending any amount of money on politics is free speech, but press outlets covering the campaign are interfering with it.

The bombardment of CBS is part of a wide-ranging assault on free speech. Last week, the White House barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office because editors there have opted not to adopt Trump’s renaming of the body of water long known as the Gulf of Mexico. In December, ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump even though almost no media lawyers thought the network would have lost; critics charged that ABC was trying to curry favor with the president-elect. (ABC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Carr, the FCC chair, recently wrote a letter to NPR and PBS suggesting that by airing sponsors’ names, they may have violated rules against noncommercial stations accepting advertising, although the FCC has not objected to this practice in the past. He noted that the answer could help Congress in deciding whether to defund NPR and PBS. That’s a tight vise grip: Don’t take funding or we might take your funding.

Not all criticism of the press is media suppression. Politicians are free to criticize the press, just as all Americans are free to criticize their elected officials. And besides, if political leaders aren’t upset about at least some of the coverage they’re receiving, journalists probably aren’t holding them to account. At times during the Trump era, some members of the media have overreacted to flimsy provocations, like Trump’s posting a silly GIF that superimposed the CNN logo over someone being body slammed. Vice President J. D. Vance snarkily replied to the journalist Mehdi Hasan on Monday, “Yes dummy. I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!”

Even if you’re willing to grant Vance’s premise that banishing the AP is no big deal—I am not—there’s a lot of territory between that and jailing people, and that’s the ground that Trump is occupying: using the power of the government to intimidate. Paramount, for example, is currently awaiting FCC approval for a merger with Skydance Media. A Paramount Global spokesperson told me the lawsuit is “separate from, and unrelated to” the merger, but the company’s leaders would be reasonable to be afraid that Trump might block the deal if they don’t cooperate. During his first term, Trump tried to block the acquisition of CNN’s parent company. Speaking about the AP’s banishment, one journalist told CNN’s Brian Stelter, “Everyone assumes they’re next.”

Threats to the press are not new for Trump, who has been critical of press freedom for years. But during his most recent campaign, he criticized “wokeness” and argued that he would be a voice for free speech by pushing back on what he characterized as attacks on constitutional rights from, for example, social-media companies that blocked or throttled content (such as suspending his accounts after January 6). On the first day of his new term, Trump signed an executive order purportedly “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and announced that he was a “free speech absolutist,” but quickly disproved that, suspending reporters who criticized him and cooperating with foreign governments to suppress speech.

A news outlet that is afraid of the government is an outlet whose speech is only partly free. When media companies are afraid that the president will use regulators to punish their business, owners are anxious to protect non-media commercial interests. When journalists are wary of becoming targets for petty retribution, they may pull punches or shape coverage in ways that do not—and are not intended to—serve the public interest. Jeff Bezos’s decision to spike a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s attacks on his own newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, both look a lot like this, though the two owners insist otherwise.

Over the past few years, Trump, Vance, and others complained loudly about the government studying mis- and disinformation or pointing out instances of disinformation to social-media companies. They charged that this was censorship because even if the government wasn’t requiring those companies to do anything, its power made this an implied threat. Now that they are in office, they’ve had a change of heart. They’re perfectly happy for the government to try to tell private companies what opinions are acceptable and which ones aren’t. They never believed in anyone’s free speech except their own.

Related:

Intimidating Americans will not work. What conservatives mean by freedom of speech

Today’s News

The Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director in a 51–49 vote. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell announced that he would not be seeking reelection.

The Trump administration removed protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in America, which puts them on track to be targeted for deportation this summer.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: “The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium,” Kat Hu writes. “As persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it.”

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More From The Atlantic

George Packer: The Trump world order The secret that colleges should stop keeping The ultimate antidote to toxic behavior online Spared by DOGE—for now

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

The Fantasy of a Nonprofit Dating App

By Faith Hill

Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Listen. Americans are stuck. Who’s to blame? Hanna Rosin talks with Yoni Appelbaum about the end of upward mobility in the United States.

Read. “The Moron Factory,” a short story by George Saunders.

“Is true: our office odd. No one stable. Everyone nuts in his/her own way. Usually, at work, I keep to self. Don’t socialize. Just do my work, head straight home.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Threats to free speech aren’t just a national problem, and they’re not just about the press—they’re about the public’s right to hear from and be involved in government. I was struck this morning by two different, appalling stories out of Mississippi. The Mississippi Free Press reports on how a chancery court judge has ruled that the state legislature is not a public body and therefore not subject to open-meetings laws. If the elected lawmakers of a state aren’t a public body, what is? Meanwhile, The New York Times reports on another judge in the state ordering a local paper to remove an editorial from its website criticizing Clarksdale officials for not issuing a public notice before a special meeting. The headline on the article: “Secrecy, deception erode public trust.” Perhaps the judge would have been well served to read it himself.

— David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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There is a rule in politics never to ascribe to malignity what one can explain through incompetence and stupidity. This approach has become difficult to sustain in the case of the Trump administration. But there is another possibility: Both explanations operate simultaneously.

This seems to be true of the latest burst of diplomatic activity by the Trump administration. Before focusing on the malice, however, first note the utter incompetence of the Trump team. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for example, was speaking the truth when he said at the Munich Security Conference that a Ukrainian cease-fire will probably freeze the battle lines and not involve NATO membership. But Senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was equally correct in calling it a rookie mistake to have given away one’s position in advance. Hegseth stumbled through a retraction, but the damage was done.

The only word to describe Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the conference is loutish. He meddled in European politics, was patronizing and hectoring, and seems not to have understood that if you are giving a tough message to allies, you need to combine it with an affirmation of the underlying relationship. Dumber yet was his apparent failure, and the administration’s, to recognize that even the United States needs allies, and that the European nations, with all their troubles, are some of the most important ones we have got.

The latest meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, between an American delegation consisting of the secretary of state, the national security adviser, and a special envoy with two experienced Russian diplomats was even worse. It was a meeting about Ukraine without Ukraine—a move calculated to make the Ukrainian leadership less tractable. It was a meeting about a European war not only without Europeans, but without the slightest consultation with them. Instead, the U.S. made concessions to the Russians—promising to let them send intelligence operatives masquerading as diplomats back to their embassy in Washington without extracting anything in return.

The Trump administration seems not to realize that the Russians are the ones in trouble, not us; that they are the ones with a faltering economy, a stalemated war, and more than three-quarters of a million casualties. Most important, the administration refuses to see Russia under President Vladimir Putin for what it is: a predatory dictatorship bent on rebuilding an empire on the bodies of its former subjects.

The commentary on the meeting offered by the three Americans who acted as if they intended to be stooges was embarrassing.

Steven Witkoff burbled businessman gobbledygook: “It was positive, upbeat, constructive, everybody there to get to the right outcome, solution-based.” Maybe the right flimflam for a real-estate deal, but not for a discussion with a couple of longtime hoods from Moscow Center who represent a country up to its armpits in the blood of innocents. It was a witless thing to say.

National Security Adviser Michael Waltz seemingly could not speak a paragraph without a grovel in the direction of his boss, President Donald Trump. His assessments were those of a courtier praising a king, not of the representative of the great republic conducting affairs of state.

And then there was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, delighted at the possibility of normal relations and exciting economic ties. Not only was this another implicit concession and gift to the Russians—why not extract something for the willingness to restore such ties?—it was a betrayal of all that Rubio used to say about Ukraine. For that matter, it was a betrayal of the sentiments he used to spill out on the campaign trail when he ran for president, invoking the story of his parents who were refugees from Castro’s Cuba. And here he was cheering on negotiations with Russia, the patron and inspiration of that very regime.

The negotiators displayed mainly incompetence, as well as cringeworthy servility to their master in the White House. Trump’s part, though, was pure malignity. Shortly after the meeting ended, he criticized Zelensky, lied about the latter’s polling numbers, and said, in a particularly callous remark, that Ukraine had had a seat at the table for three years. How being invaded and having your civilians tortured, raped, and slaughtered counts as a seat at the table is beyond understanding.

To be clear, no deal was inked in Riyadh, merely a set of commitments to begin working on ending the conflict in Ukraine without participation by the victims or their neighbors, even though the former are our friends and the latter are our allies. But the way it was done, and the mood music that surrounded it, has to confirm some of the worst fears of friends of Ukraine, and those who believe that the United States should stand for something in this world beyond the crudest kind of self-interest.

But an account of the supposed deal Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent put before the Ukrainians in Kyiv, before the Munich Security Conference, makes clear that the crudest imaginable self-interest is what this administration is all about. As one disgusted British observer commented in the podcast Ukraine: The Latest, the terms were more severe than what was demanded of Germany after its defeat in World War I. Bessent’s offer was an attempt to seize the most productive parts of the Ukrainian economy, permanently—unacceptable and shameful even to have presented.

The Trump administration seems to have some notion of the conduct of foreign affairs as being a set of deals, chiefly with America’s enemies, while administering kicks to America’s friends and allies. As a vision it is, in some reasonable sense of the word, evil. It is also appallingly dumb, and one wonders that intelligent men such as Rubio, Waltz, and Witkoff can bring themselves to articulate the demands that it implies.

Like so much of the Trump administration’s program, this will ultimately end in real disaster for others—quite possibly including the overrunning of Ukraine—and in political disaster for itself. The Biden administration never recovered from the debacle of its Afghanistan withdrawal; Obama from the disappearing red line in Syria; Bush from the mishandling of the Iraq War. At a deeper level, these policies will give aid and comfort to America’s enemies, which will never be partners; shatter the alliances that have made us strong; induce fearful former allies to align with the Chinese and develop nuclear weapons; and demoralize the men and women who have to implement policy.

People like Marco Rubio know better. But judging by the transcript of their CNN interview after the Riyadh meeting, the negotiators are determined to pretend otherwise. The level of sycophancy they show toward the president is shocking, but it conceals another source of future disaster. In this administration, no one will contradict the president, and no one will raise alarms about stupid and immoral policies. It’s a good way to walk into brick walls in foreign affairs, as it is with regards to all manner of other policies. In international politics as in economic affairs, public health, and emergency preparedness, this administration is a set of culpable disasters waiting to occur.

In such a situation the least of our concerns may be the souls of those who have chosen sycophancy despite their better selves and previous service. But they will pay a price. I knew a few of those who served in Trump’s previous term. Many of them ended up psychologically damaged, people who had no doubt once believed in integrity and an idea of America and then sacrificed them. History will treat them with contempt, and more important, they will never be whole again.

During Rubio’s abortive presidential campaign, Trump called him “Li’l Marco,” a put-down typical of someone with the manners of a grade-school bully. It was a reference to physical stature. What this sorry episode reveals, however, is that Rubio really has become small in a much more important sense—and in a way that no earnest television interview or ghostwritten memoir can ever fix .

The extraordinary evolution of American leadership over the past decade can be grasped from just two moments. In 2016, Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lectured Donald Trump, then an upstart presidential candidate, on the Middle East. “The Palestinians are not a real-estate deal, Donald,” Rubio quipped during a primary debate on CNN. “With your thinking,” Trump retorted, “you will never bring peace.” Turning to the audience, Rubio got in a last word: “Donald might be able to build condos in the Palestinian areas, but this is not a real-estate deal.”

On Wednesday, President Trump sat alongside the king of Jordan and reiterated his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza from its inhabitants and rebuild the area. “We’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it,” he said. “It’s fronting on the sea. It’s going to be a great economic-development job.” Sitting on Trump’s left was Rubio, the secretary of state tasked with carrying out the plan he’d once publicly derided. In the span of 10 years, U.S. foreign policy had transformed from the domain of expert-brokered consensus to the province of personality-driven populism.

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

In his first term, Trump could be dismissed as an accident of the Electoral College, someone to be humored domestically and internationally before the resumption of traditional elite-managed American governance. Today, with Trump returned to office and a host of like-minded leaders ascendant around the globe, he looks less like an aberration from the old international order and more like the apotheosis of a new one. But what will that new order look like? The past few weeks, during which Trump has hosted multiple leaders from the Middle East, rattled sabers with traditional American allies, and proposed his radical plan for Gaza, provide some early clues.

A new era of American empire

While Trump was out of office, a mythology arose that cast him as not simply a dissenter from military misadventures abroad, but a fundamentally anti-war figure dedicated to American restraint. Promulgated by prominent commentators such as the right-wing pugilist Tucker Carlson and the libertarian gadfly Glenn Greenwald, this narrative helped Trump present himself as the “peace candidate” to a war-weary electorate. “Why do they hate Trump so much?” asked the John Jay College professor Christian Parenti in an influential essay. “To the frustration of those who benefit from it, Trump worked to unwind the American empire. Indeed, he has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.”

In reality, Trump supported the Iraq War before he turned against it, failed to pull out of Afghanistan during his first term, and escalated American arms sales and drone strikes in the Middle East while in power. Since returning to the White House, he has governed not as a neo-isolationist, but almost as a neo-imperialist, calling for the United States to “get Greenland,” musing about making Canada the 51st state, and demanding that America take over Gaza. He has also fast-tracked arms sales to Israel and likely soon to other states in the Middle East, while his border czar recently threatened military action in Mexico. Trump’s team has signaled its desire to wind down the war in Ukraine, in accordance with the preferences of most Republican voters. But otherwise, “Donald the Dove,” as the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once dubbed him, has once again failed to report for duty.

[Read: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

On balance, Trump’s personnel choices align with this aggressive posture. The small but capable neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party and its leftist sympathizers can fairly point to Vice President J. D. Vance and several notable hires in the Pentagon as fellow travelers. But those calling the shots at the top are far more hawkish—Trump, Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—and the administration’s policy to date has largely reflected their inclinations.

A Middle East policy that includes the Palestinians, but not the Palestinian national cause

Trump’s first administration famously brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf Arab states without including the Palestinians in the process. The success of this endeavor disproved decades of conventional wisdom that Israeli normalization in the region would not happen without a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians. For a time, the momentum of the Abraham Accords looked as though it would carry all the way through to an Israeli agreement with Saudi Arabia, leaving the Palestinians in the cold.

After October 7 and the ensuing brutal war in Gaza, however, the Palestinians can no longer be sidelined from the discussion. Trump has responded to this new reality by attempting to include them in his diplomacy while sidelining their aspirations for statehood. He has downplayed the prospect of a two-state solution and, with his Gaz-a-Lago proposal, called for millions of Palestinians to leave the decimated Strip in favor of “beautiful communities” in third-party countries “away from … all the danger.” Speaking to Fox News, Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff made the logic behind this thinking explicit. “Peace in the region means a better life for the Palestinians,” he said. “A better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you are in today. A better life is about better opportunity, better financial conditions, better aspirations for you and your family. That doesn’t occur because you get to pitch a tent in the Gaza Strip and you’re surrounded by 30,000 munitions that could go off at any moment.”

Trump is not wrong that Gaza is a “demolition site” and that its people desperately need something better than the decades of war they’ve experienced while caught between Hamas and Israel. And contrary to the claims of many activists, the preferences of the Palestinian people are not always congruent with the demands of Palestinian nationalism. If given the chance, many Gazans would jump at the opportunity to escape the trap they find themselves in, even if it means moving abroad. But to address Palestinian material needs without regard to their historical and national ones is to bracket a core component of Palestinian identity and ignore what makes their conflict with Israel so intractable. Perhaps Trump’s gambit will once again confound the experts with its outcome. But for now, his policy seems more like an answer provided by someone who failed to read the entire question.

The eclipse of the rules-based international order

For decades, American foreign policy has been guided by the assumption that the United States is the benevolent shepherd of a global system, underwriting international security and trade through positive-sum alliances and international institutions. “We’ll lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” President Joe Biden declared in his 2020 inaugural address. “We’ll be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”

Arguably no concept was invoked more frequently by his foreign-policy team than the “rules-based international order,” the notion that there ought to be evenly applied standards for all state actors. Like most ideals, this one was often observed in the breach, with critics regularly pointing to perceived American hypocrisy, most recently in Gaza.

But the postwar order has been under severe strain for some time. Russia, a revisionist power, flouted it with an expansionist assault against neighboring Georgia back in 2008, resulting in little pushback and ultimately leading to the war on Ukraine. China, a rising power, subverted Hong Kong, menaced Taiwan, and sterilized Uyghur Muslims in camps, all while the liberal international order effectively shrugged and made its next purchase from Temu. Even those who purported to venerate the rules-based order regularly made a mockery of it. The United Nations, the avatar of internationalism, stood by haplessly as all of these events unfolded—that is, when it wasn’t actively abetting them, as when the members of its human-rights council rejected debate over China’s treatment of the Uyghurs. South Africa took Israel to The Hague over the war in Gaza, while simultaneously backing Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

Trump, by contrast, has never felt constrained by such ideals in the first place, having long preferred power over pieties. He has expressed admiration for dictators, used American muscle to extract concessions even from allies, and dismissed the protests against his approach from bureaucrats, nongovernmental organizations, and international institutions as the grumblings of the “deep state.” With Trump’s return to Washington, critics of the flawed U.S.-led rules-based order are discovering what a world without it looks like.

Freed from the need to justify his actions in traditional terms, the president has enacted policies no predecessor would have countenanced while moving to purge any internal dissenters. He has dismantled USAID, putting desperately needed American assistance around the world in jeopardy, including George W. Bush’s anti–HIV/AIDS program, PEPFAR; proposed relocating Gazans from their land, feeding far-right dreams of ethnic cleansing; and sanctioned the International Criminal Court.

[Read: The cruel attack on USAID]

Whether one considered the rules-based order a faulty but essential engine of collective prosperity or a sclerotic hypocritical holdover from another era, it now appears to be in decline. Trump is transitioning the old order to a new regime remade in his image—one where statecraft is entirely transactional and the strong, not international lawyers, write the rules. After all, how many divisions does the United Nations command?

Yesterday, during Trump’s meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, he was asked “under what authority” he was permitted to take the “sovereign territory” of Gaza. The president responded: “U.S. authority.” In the Trump World Order, no more explanation was required.

Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis.

Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told us.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.

The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”

Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.

Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

Even if DOGE has not tapped into these particular databases, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the group has accessed sensitive personnel data at OPM. Mother Jones also reported on Wednesday that an effort may be under way to effectively give Musk control over IT for the entire federal government, broadening his access to these agencies. Trump has said that Musk is acting only with his permission. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.” The specter of what DOGE might do with that approval is still keeping the government employees we spoke with up at night. With relatively basic “read only” access, Musk’s people could easily find individuals in databases or clone entire servers and transfer that secure information somewhere else. Even if Musk eventually loses access to these systems—owing to a temporary court order such as the one approved yesterday, say—whatever data he siphons now could be his forever.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

With a higher level of access—“write access”—a motivated person may be able to put their own code into the system, potentially without any oversight. The possibilities here are staggering. One could alter the data these systems process, or they could change the way the software operates—without any of the testing that would normally accompany changes to a critical system. Still another level of access, administrator privileges, could grant the broad ability to control a system, including hiding evidence of other alterations. “They could change or manipulate treasury data directly in the database with no way for people to audit or capture it,” one contractor told us. “We’d have very little way to know it even happened.”

The specific levels of access that Musk and his team have remain unclear and likely vary between agencies. On Tuesday, the Treasury said that DOGE had been given “read only” access to the department’s federal payment system, though Wired then reported that one member of DOGE was able to write code on the system. Any focus on access tiers, for that matter, may actually simplify the problem at hand. These systems aren’t just complex at the code level—they are multifaceted in their architecture. Systems can have subsystems; each of these can have their own permission structures. It’s hard to talk about any agency’s tech infrastructure as monolithic. It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.

Musk’s efforts represent a dramatic shift in the way the government’s business has traditionally been conducted. Previously, security protocols were so strict that a contractor plugging a non-government-issued computer into an ethernet port in a government agency office was considered a major security violation. Contrast that with DOGE’s incursion. CNN reported yesterday that a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their own servers is madness,” one source told us, referring to an allegation that DOGE had connected its own server at OPM. “It’s really hard to find good analogies for how big of a deal this is.” The simple fact that Musk loyalists are in the building with their own computers is the heart of the problem—and helps explain why activities ostensibly authorized by the president are widely viewed as a catastrophic data breach.

The four systems professionals we spoke with do not know what damage might already have been done. “The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases,” Scott Cory, a former CIO for an agency in the HHS, told us. At the Treasury, this could mean stopping payments to government organizations or outside contracts it doesn’t want to pay. It could also mean diverting funds to other recipients. Or gumming up the works in the attempt to do those, or other, things.

In the FAA, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us. “‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, on Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Even if DOGE members are looking to modernize these systems, they may find themselves flummoxed. The government is big and old and complicated. One former official with experience in government IT systems, including at the Treasury, told us that old could mean that the systems were installed in 1962, 1992, or 2012. They might use a combination of software written in different programming languages: a little COBOL in the 1970s, a bit of Java in the 1990s. Knowledge about one system doesn’t give anyone—including Musk’s DOGE workers, some of whom were not even alive for Y2K—the ability to make intricate changes to another.

[Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government]

The internet economy, characterized by youth and disruption, favors inventing new systems and disposing of old ones. And the nation’s computer systems, like its roads and bridges, could certainly benefit from upgrades. But old computers don’t necessarily make for bad infrastructure, and government infrastructure isn’t always old anyway. The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do, such as batch processing for financial transactions.

Like the FAA employee, the payment-systems expert also fears that the most likely result of DOGE activity on federal systems will be breaking them, especially because of incompetence and lack of proper care. DOGE, he observed, may be prepared to view or hoover up data, but it doesn’t appear to be prepared to carry out savvy and effective alterations to how the system operates. This should perhaps be reassuring. “If you were going to organize a heist of the U.S. Treasury,” he said, “why in the world would you bring a handful of college students?” They would be useless. Your crew would need, at a minimum, a couple of guys with a decade or two of experience with COBOL, he said.

Unless, of course, you had the confidence that you could figure anything out, including a lumbering government system you don’t respect in the first place. That interpretation of DOGE’s theory of self seems both likely and even more scary, at the Treasury, the FAA, and beyond. Would they even know what to do after logging in to such a machine? we asked. “No, they’d have no idea,” the payment expert said. “The sanguine thing to think about is that the code in these systems and the process and functions they manage are unbelievably complicated,” Scott Cory said. “You’d have to be extremely knowledgeable if you were going into these systems and wanting to make changes with an impact on functionality.”

But DOGE workers could try anyway. Mainframe computers have a keyboard and display, unlike the cloud-computing servers in data centers. According to the former Treasury IT expert, someone who could get into the room and had credentials for the system could access it and, via the same machine or a networked one, probably also deploy software changes to it. It’s far more likely that they would break, rather than improve, a Treasury disbursement system in so doing, one source told us. “The volume of information they deal with [at the Treasury] is absolutely enormous, well beyond what anyone would deal with at SpaceX,” the source said. Even a small alteration to a part of the system that has to do with the distribution of funds could wreak havoc, preventing those funds from being distributed or distributing them wrongly, for example. “It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

DOGE is many things—a dismantling of the federal government, a political project to flex power and punish perceived enemies—but it is also the logical end point of a strain of thought that’s become popular in Silicon Valley during the boom times of Big Tech and easy money: that building software and writing code aren’t just dominant skills for the 21st century, but proof of competence in any realm. In a post on X this week, John Shedletsky, a developer and an early employee at the popular gaming platform Roblox, summed up the philosophy nicely: “Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn’t we run it?”

This attitude disgusted one of the officials we spoke with. “There’s this bizarre belief that being able to do things with computers means you have to be super smart about everything else.” Silicon Valley may have built the computational part of the modern world, but the rest of that world—the money, the airplanes, the roads, and the waterways—still exists. Knowing something, even a lot, about computers guarantees no knowledge about the world beyond them.

“I’d like to think that this is all so massive and complex that they won’t succeed in whatever it is they’re trying to do,” one of the experts told us. “But I wouldn’t want to wager that outcome against their egos.”

Darren Beattie may not be a household name, but you are almost certainly familiar with his long-standing ideas and preoccupations. Beattie, a speechwriter whom Trump fired in 2018 and appointed to a top State Department job this week, is a fixture in far-right conspiracist circles.

Over the years, Beattie has reportedly spoken alongside white nationalists, alleged that the FBI orchestrated January 6—his preferred term is Fedsurrection—and repeatedly posted online that various Black personalities and politicians should “take a KNEE to MAGA.” In his new role as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, he will help shape the tone of America’s public messaging abroad, oversee “the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Global Public Affairs,” and participate “in foreign policy development,” according to the State Department’s website.

Beattie’s ascent is another sign that the new administration has no interest in catering to norms established by its critics or perceived political foes. What was a scandal in Trump’s first term is grounds for a promotion in his second. Beattie’s 2018 firing came after CNN reported that he had spoken at the 2016 H. L. Mencken Club, an event whose attendees have included prominent white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Peter Brimelow. Beattie then launched Revolver News, a right-wing website that trumpeted his appointment and described him as “a relentless force in exposing the left’s DEI agenda, their censorship schemes, and the J6 entrapment operation.”

Many of the site’s articles are standard conservative fare: attacks on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats alongside criticism of powerful technology companies that purportedly censor the right, including Revolver itself. Other content on the site veers sharply into conspiracism: It often posts external links to content from the likes of Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonym of the pro-authoritarianism writer Costin Alamariu, who has posited that “Black Africans” are so genetically ”divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries,” and Steve Sailer, another prominent booster of pseudoscientific racism. Beattie has also used Revolver as a platform to advance his nationalist views, including pushing for mass deportation and “America-first trade policy.”

[From the September 2023 issue: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Beattie is a “well-regarded” and “beloved” figure in Trump world, as Semafor and Politico describe him, respectively. (Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson both praised Beattie in text messages to Semafor’s Ben Smith.) His appointment will likely be seen as a win for the nationalist wing of the Republican Party, which has been fighting against tech-right figures including Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sacks for influence in the Trump administration. While the tech-right and nationalists have been aligned in many areas, they vocally diverged on H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants in a very public internet fight in December. More recently, as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer reported, Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE, the team he leads within the Trump administration. Bannon, who sits squarely in the populist-nationalist camp and is friends with Beattie, has aggressively criticized Musk and other tech elites and said publicly that he wants to impede their influence.

True adherents to the nationalist-populist wing of MAGA are almost nonexistent in Trump’s Cabinet. For as long as he is in his acting role in the State Department, however, Beattie joins a small but powerful group of nationalist Trump appointees. The immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller, who is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and his fellow conservative intellectual Michael Anton, who is also at the State Department, are among this cohort.

The ascendant intellectual wing of the nationalist right will be particularly pleased with Beattie’s appointment. Prior to his time in the Trump administration, Beattie received a Ph.D. in political theory from Duke University, where he wrote his dissertation on the prominent German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and he has contributed to The New Atlantis, a publication with a reputation among the right for its rigorous critiques of technology.

If nothing else, Beattie’s eccentricities—buttoned-up intellectualism on one hand, crude and offensive polemic on the other—demonstrate one underlying truth of Trump world: It’s a big tent. Kiss the ring, and you may just be welcomed back.

Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.

As the head of an improvised team within the Trump administration with completely ambiguous power (the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in reference to a meme about a Shiba Inu), Musk has managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has called in employees from Tesla and the Boring Company to oversee broad workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management (one of Musk’s appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21 years old, while another graduated from high school last year). During this time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an “on-premise” email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect data on government employees—one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002 (there has not yet been a response to the complaint). Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the Treasury’s payments system—used to disburse more than $5 trillion to Americans each year (a national-security risk, according to Senator Ron Wyden, a democrat from Oregon)—as well as computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of civil servants. (They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those systems, according to Reuters.) Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration put two senior staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on administrative leave—staffers who, according to CNN, had tried to thwart Musk’s staff’s attempts to access sensitive and classified information. Musk posted on X yesterday that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” USAID staffers were barred from entering the unit’s headquarters today.

This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.

Two days before the 2024 election, I wrote that Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter was going to be the blueprint for his potential tenure at DOGE. Unfortunately, I was right—he’s running the exact same playbook. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there are two ways of measuring success for Musk’s projects: first, whether the organizations themselves benefit under his leadership, and second, whether Musk himself gets something out of the arrangement. Musk’s stewardship of X has been a financial nightmare. He has alienated advertisers, tanked revenue and user growth, and saddled investment banks with debt from the purchase that they’ll need to sell off. Yet Musk’s own influence and net worth have grown considerably during this time. His fanboys and the MAGA faithful don’t care that X is a flailing business, because Musk did deliver on giving liberals their supposed comeuppance by de-verifying accounts and reinstating banned trolls. He turned the platform into a conspiratorial superfund site, has boosted right-wing accounts and talking points, and helped elect Donald Trump as president. Musk’s purchase is a success in their eyes because he succeeded in turning X into a political weapon.

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

The same thing is happening right now with DOGE. Musk and his Silicon Valley acolytes are acting on a long-held fantasy of approaching the federal government like a software company and running it like a venture-backed tech start-up during the days of zero-percent interest rates. Here’s the problem: The federal government is not a software company. “The stakes are wildly different,” a former senior Twitter executive told me recently. This person, who requested anonymity because they worked closely with Musk during his takeover and fear retribution, argued that Musk seems incapable of recognizing the limits of his own knowledge. When I asked them to describe Musk’s managerial strategy, they borrowed a term of art from SpaceX’s own rocket mishaps: “This is a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.”

The theory that the government is inefficient is not altogether incorrect. I recently spoke with Robert Gordon, formerly the deputy assistant to the president for economic mobility in the Biden administration, to get a sense of how intricate government agencies are and what it would take to reform them. Gordon, who has spent time in the Office of Management and Budget and as the assistant secretary responsible for grants policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, was quick to note that we desperately need to simplify processes within the federal government to allow workers to execute more quickly and develop more agile technology, such as the Direct File product that the IRS recently made to allow Americans to file taxes for free. “No doubt the government could do more here,” he told me. “But it requires incredibly specific approaches, implemented in a thoughtful way. It requires paying enormous attention to detail, not blowing shit up.” Musk and DOGE have instead operated with a “vast carelessness,” Gordon wrote in a Substack post last week. “This government cannot trouble itself to plan for the biggest things, the funds that thousands of organizations use to serve millions of people,” he wrote. “It has swept up civil servants in a vortex of confusion and fear.” Musk wrote today on X that the Treasury team that built Direct File no longer exists. “That group has been deleted,” he said.

[Read: The American people deserve DOGE]

Among Gordon’s biggest concerns is that DOGE’s slapdash cuts will remove key links in the bureaucratic chain that make the government function. Even simple-sounding procedures—allocating government funds in a crisis like, say, a pandemic—require coordination among teams of civil servants across multiple government offices. “All of this is done by back-office types,” Gordon told me. “There are so many people in that process, and it matters enormously how good they are.” That this system is inefficient is frustrating, Gordon said, but he worries that the chaos caused by Musk’s efforts will halt any possibility of reform. “If you want to make this system better, you need to create space for civil servants who know what they’re doing to do that work,” he told me. “What’s very likely to happen now because of this pressure is that the most competent people on that chain are at super-high risk of saying, I gave it my best shot; I don’t need this and quit, because they can get better jobs. That’s what I see happening.”

Of course, the so-called tech right does not agree. As the political scientist Henry Farrell wrote this past weekend, “The fact that none of the DOGE people actually understand how government functions is a feature, not a bug. If you understand the workings of the federal bureaucracy, you are almost certainly part of the problem, not the solution.” But this reasoning is not usually compatible with the reality of managing complex organizations. As the former Twitter exec told me, after Musk took over the platform, his people enthusiastically championed ideas that seasoned employees with knowledge of the company had already researched and rejected: “It wasn’t that we hadn’t thought about new ways, say, to do verification or handle bots, but we rejected them on the basis of research and data. There was a huge contrast between the methodical approach and Musk’s rapid-fire whims.”

When Musk barged into Twitter in 2022 as its new CEO, his strategy was “decision making by vibes,” according to the former exec I spoke with. Those vibes were often dictated by the sycophants in Musk’s orbit. The executive described Musk as surprisingly receptive to ideas when presented with facts and data, but said that few in his inner circle questioned or spoke frankly with him: “And so, in the absence of rational decision making, we got the vibes-based, yes-man approach.”

The former executive did point to a meaningful difference between X and DOGE, however: The government is big and complex. This may be an asset during an assault. “Even if you try to take a flamethrower to the government, the destruction won’t be quick. There’ll be legal challenges and congressional fights, and in the months and weeks, it’ll be individuals who keep essential services running,” they said. The government workers who know what they’re doing may still be able to make positive incremental change from within.

[Read: There really is a deep state]

It’s a rousing, hopeful notion. But I fear that the focus on the particulars of this unqualified assault on our government is like looking at X’s bottom line, in that it obscures Musk’s real ambitions. What are DOGE’s metrics for success? If X is our guide, health, functionality, and sustainability are incidental and able to be sacrificed. The end game for Musk seems to be just as it was with Twitter: seize a polarized, inefficient institution; fuse his identity with it; and then use it to punish his enemies and reward his friends. DOGE is a moon-shot program to turn the government into Musk’s personal political weapon.

This story incorporates reporting from Bill McEwen, Space.com and CNN on MSN.com.

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Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, is upset. She believes that someone in the United States Air Force decided to interpret President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to terminate “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear,” just the way it was written.

No one is quite sure what happened, but somehow this order resulted in the excision from a U.S. Air Force training course of some materials about the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black World War II fighter pilots known as the Red Tails because of their aircraft’s distinctive markings. Air Force officials confirmed on Saturday that a video had been removed from the training curriculum but only because it was “intertwined in courses now under review,” and it is now back in the curriculum.

Britt referred to this kind of action as “malicious compliance,” meaning a kind of opposition through aggressive and sometimes overly literal implementation of a command or policy. Rather than refuse to obey, the person or group engaging in malicious compliance takes a kind of “monkey’s paw” approach, implementing the directives as destructively as possible. (Every teenager who has loaded the dishwasher improperly on purpose, hoping never to be told to clear the table again, knows what malicious compliance means.)

Britt also tagged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on social media. Hegseth, who was nominated for his position in part because of his vow to root out wokeness and DEI and to replace them with “lethality,” responded enthusiastically: “Amen! We’re all over it Senator. This will not stand.”

Britt’s complaint about malicious compliance is a diversion. Trump’s wave of executive orders is designed to be performatively malicious. My colleague Adam Serwer years ago noted that, for the MAGA movement, “the cruelty is the point,” and now Trump’s orders make clear that the malice is the policy.

The series of presidential decrees is largely intended to delight the Republican base; unfortunately, government workers cannot divine what Trump really meant. The president has not given any cue that his orders should be interpreted in some more generous way. In fact, days before the Air Force kerfuffle, federal workers received an email from their supervisors (based on a template provided by the Office of Personnel Management) that could have come straight from a party apparatchik in the old Soviet Union. This memo not only told staff to be on the lookout for attempts to hide DEI-related ideological contamination, but warned them of their obligation to rat out colleagues who did so or face “adverse” job consequences themselves.

The advisory, which has since been taken off a government website, continued: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024”—that is, since Election Day—“to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies,” employees must report it to OPM within ten days.

This is not exactly language that encourages anyone to use common sense and good judgment to decide what constitutes DEI contraband. This is a command that says, in effect: This could mean anything; if you don’t report it, and we find it, you’re in trouble. When government employees get a memo like that, they are not inclined to sit around wondering what counts and what doesn’t.

Trump’s other executive orders are likewise designed to show the GOP base that the new administration is doing all of the things that Trump promised he’d do—even if they’re things that, legally, no president can do. Trump had pledged, for example, to eliminate birthright citizenship, so he sharpied out part of the Fourteenth Amendment and declared victory. He froze federal grants and loans—an order now temporarily blocked by a judge—which could have endangered any number of programs, including school lunches. (And about time, according to Representative Rich McCormick, Republican of Georgia, who told CNN today that those indolent kids need to go get jobs—even, apparently, schoolchildren who aren’t old enough to work—instead of “spong[ing] off the government”).

What would non-malicious compliance with such a mandate even look like? Instead of a lunch, are schools supposed to hand poor kids a glass of water and then wish them luck in their job search?

Of course, the Trump administration knows that aid to states and localities will begin to flow again, that children will be getting lunches, and that babies born on U.S. soil are citizens. The goal of all these orders is not to implement policy, but to generate outrage, report the spasms of liberal apoplexy to the MAGA faithful, and then, when necessary, go to court. And why not? The president now has a politically sympathetic Supreme Court majority that worked hard to keep him out of prison while he was a candidate, and has functionally immunized him against almost any challenge now that he’s back in office. Trump’s people know that they cannot actually shake the Constitution like an Etch A Sketch and make birthright citizenship disappear, but why not give it a shot, especially if a trolling executive order makes the base happy?

Trump and his people may also believe that a sleet storm of executive orders, some of which might stick here and there while others melt on contact with reality, is a way to demonstrate competence. They are likely still stung by the fiasco over the 2017 travel ban that initially got swatted down in court, and this time they want to appear as if they know what they’re doing.

But this is merely mimicking competence and energy. The “return to work” order, for example, is a MAGA fan favorite, because it plays to a common stereotype among many Americans that federal employees who work from home are scamming goldbrickers plodding around the house in their bunny slippers and tapping the occasional key on a laptop. Although showing up to an office or worksite in-person is (and should be) a basic requirement of most jobs, remote work in many cases benefits the government and the taxpayer: It reduces congestion in cities, and it offloads a lot of overhead costs (heat, water, lighting, etc.) onto the worker. That’s why the government and private industry were trending toward remote arrangements long before the pandemic.

In any case, many federal offices don’t have enough space to bring everyone back, but Trump may be attempting to make government service onerous enough that some of them will leave anyway: All federal employees have until February 6 to accept a sizable buyout if they cannot or will not return to in-person work. In the end, the RTO power play isn’t really about trying to fill empty offices. Instead, Trump is telling federal employees that all of the arrangements they’ve made with their departments about schedules, child care, commutes, and staffing are now invalid, because their career and service matters less than making some red-state voter feel that the president finally stuck it to them and their co-workers.

Maybe a non-malicious way to enforce such orders exists. But that’s not the point.

Related:

The cruelty is the point. (From 2018) The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump tries to seize the “power of the purse.” What an undervaccinated America would look like China’s DeepSeek surprise

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A district-court judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s pause on federal grants and loans. Trump signed an executive order that would exclude gender-transition care from federal insurance programs. The Department of Justice announced yesterday that it has fired more than a dozen officials who worked on the criminal investigations into Trump.

Evening Read

Illustration by Danielle Del Plato

Just Say No to Terrible White LEDs

By Gilad Edelman

God said, “Let there be light”—everyone knows that. But God did not specify what color light, and this would eventually prove problematic.

In the age of the LED light bulb, consumers have an unfathomable range of lighting options. This has, perversely, made the task of pleasantly illuminating our homes harder, not easier.

Read the full article.

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During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an election, limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate. In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds political parties, proportionate to their number of elected parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track election-­related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates, as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people; in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania, or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—­and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political advertising. Meta, which announced in January that it is abandoning fact-checking on its sites in the U.S., also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or TikTok.

In truth, no one knows if any platforms really comply with political-funding rules either, because nobody outside the companies can fully monitor what happens online during an intense election campaign—and after the voting has ended, it’s too late. According to declassified Romanian-intelligence documents, someone allegedly spent more than $1 million on TikTok content in the 18 months before an election in support of a Romanian presidential candidate who declared that he himself had spent nothing at all. In a belated attempt to address this and other alleged discrepancies, a Romanian court canceled the first round of that election, a decision that itself damaged Romanian democracy.

Not all of this is new. Surreptitious political-party funding was a feature of the Cold War, and the Russian government has continued this practice, sometimes by offering deals to foreign business­people close to pro-Russian politicians. Press moguls with international political ambitions are hardly a novelty. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who has U.S. citizenship, has long played an outsize role in U.K. politics through his media companies. John Major, the former British prime minister and Conservative Party leader, has said that in 1997, Murdoch threatened to pull his newspapers’ support unless the prime minister pursued a more anti-­European policy. Major refused. Murdoch has said, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything,” but one of his Conservative-­leaning tabloids, The Sun, did endorse the Labour Party in the next election. Major lost.

That incident now seems almost quaint. Even at the height of its influence, the print edition of The Sun sold 4 million copies a day. More to the point, it operated, and still does, within the constraints of U.K. rules and regulations, as do all broadcast and print media. Murdoch’s newspapers take British libel and hate-speech laws into consideration when they run stories. His business strategy is necessarily shaped by rules limiting what a single company can own. After his journalists were accused of hacking phones and bribing police in the early 2000s, Murdoch himself had to testify before an investigative commission, and he closed down one of his tabloids for good.

[McKay Coppins: Europe braces for Trump]

Social media not only has far greater reach—Musk’s personal X account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power to set the news agenda around the world—it also exists outside the legal system. Under the American law known as Section 230, passed nearly three decades ago, internet platforms are not treated as publishers in the U.S. In practice, neither Facebook nor X has the same legal responsibility for what appears on their platforms as do, say, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. And this, too, has consequences: Americans have created the information climate that other countries must accept, and this allows deceptive election practices to thrive. If countries don’t have their own laws, and until recently most did not, Section 230 effectively requires them to treat social-media companies as if they exist outside their legal systems too.

Brazil broke with this pattern last year, when a judge demanded that Musk comply with Brazilian laws against spreading misinformation and political extremism, and forced X offline until he did. Several European countries, including the U.K., Germany, and France, have also passed laws designed to bring the platforms into compliance with their own legal systems, mandating fines for companies that violate hate-speech laws or host other illegal content. But these laws are controversial and hard to enforce. Besides, “illegal speech” is not necessarily the central problem. No laws prevented Musk from interviewing Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on X, thereby providing her with a huge platform, available to no other political candidate, in the month before a national election. The interview, which included several glaringly false statements (among others, that Weidel was the “leading” candidate), was viewed 45 million times in 24 hours, a number far beyond the reach of any German public or private media.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

In the past, the EU has not hesitated to try to apply European law to tech companies. Over the past decade, for example, Google has faced three fines totaling more than $8 billion for breaking antitrust law (though one of these fines was overturned by the EU’s General Court in 2024).

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”

Does America “winning” mean that European democracies, and maybe other democracies, lose? Some European politicians think it might. Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and a leader of that country’s Green Party, believes that Musk’s frenzies of political activity on X aren’t the random blurts of an addled mind, but rather are “logical and systematic.” In his New Year’s address, Habeck said that Musk is deliberately “strengthening those who are weakening Europe,” including the explicitly anti-European AfD. This, he believes, is because “a weak Europe is in the interest of those for whom regulation is an inappropriate limitation of their power.”

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.

A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them and their organizations—­whether it be online trolling and harassment or lawsuits—­is too great. Still, both advisers said that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty, and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”

At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers more control over what they see, and more information about what they don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal framework—­rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as viral as one of Musk’s tweets.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Can Europe Stop Elon Musk?”