White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Trump Way Comes to The Washington Post

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As Juliet might have said, “O America, America, wherefore art thou America?”

What has become of us when the president, Donald Trump, who opposes big government, wants the government to have its hand in everything, from the operation of The Kennedy Center to the regulatory commissions, to gender identification, to traffic control in New York City, to the composition of the White House press pool?

Under the pretext of cutting three shibboleths (waste,  fraud and abuse), Trump is moving to bring everything he can under his control, to infuse every apparatus of the country with the Trump brand, which emerges as a strange amalgam of personal like and dislike, enthusiasm and antipathy.

He likes the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin — he who orders assassinations outside of Russia and causes his opponents to fall out of windows — so much so that he is about to throw Ukraine under the bus. Short shrift for people who have fought the Russian invader with blood and bone.

He has a strange antipathy to our allies, starting with our blameless neighbor Canada, our supply cabinet of everything from electricity to tomatoes.

He shows a marked indifference to the poor, whether they are homeless in America or dying of starvation in Africa.

He and his agent, Elon Musk the Knife, have obliterated the U.S. Agency for International Development, ended our soft-power leadership in the world and handed diplomatic opportunities to China; while at home, housing starts are far behind demand, the price of eggs is out of sight, and necessary and productive jobs in government are being axed with a kind of malicious pleasure.

The mindlessness of Musk’s marauders has cut the efficiency he is supposed to be cultivating. It is reasonable to believe that government worker productivity is at an all-time low.

If there is a word this administration enjoys it is “firing.” The Trump-Musk duopoly relishes that word. It goes back to the reality television show “The Apprentice,” when its star, Trump, loved to tell a contestant, “You’re fired!”  Now a catchphrase from a canceled TV program is central to the national government.

Meanwhile, the extraordinary assemblage of misfits and socially challenged individuals in Trump’s Cabinet — and, it must be said, who were confirmed by the Republicans in the Senate — are doing their bit to disassemble their departments, fixing things that aren’t broken, breaking things because they hated their authors or because revenge is a policy. Look to the departments of Defense, Justice, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security — really all the departments — and you’ll find these hearties at work.

There is a quality of cruelty that is alien to the American ethos, that is un-American, running though all of this. When everything that isn’t broken is fixed, we may lose:

—Our standing in the world as the beacon of decency.

—Our role as a guarantor of peace.

—The trust of our allies.

—Our place as the exemplary of constitutional government and the rule of law.

—Our leadership in all aspects of science, from space exploration to medicine to climate.

Nowhere is the animus of Trump and its lust to control more evident than its hatred of the free press. The free flow of news, fact, and opinion, already damaged by the economic realities of the news business and its outdated models, is an anathema to Trump. A free press is a free country. There is no alternative.

This week, the White House and the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, moved to destroy the norm of decades in the press room, where the press corps collectively through its elected body, the White House Correspondents’ Association, has assigned seats. The association also decides who will be a part of the small rotating group of journalists and photographers — the pool — who accompany the president. It has been effective and is time-honored.

Now Leavitt, a Trump triumphalist, will choose the pool and favor the inclusion of podcasters and talk-show hosts who are reliably enthusiastic about the president.

At The Washington Post — the local newspaper of government — editorial pages are to be defenestrated. The Post, which has had for decades the best editorial columnists in the nation, is to be silenced. Its owner, the billionaire Jeff Bezos, has told the editorial staff that going forward they will write only about personal liberties and free markets.

It is the end of an era of great journalism, the dimming of a bright light, the encroachment of darkness in the nation’s capital.

A newspaper can’t be perfect, and The Washington Post certainly is far from that. But it is a great newspaper, and its proprietor has been manipulated by the controlling fingers of the Trump machine: A machine that values only loyalty and brooks no criticism. A machine that is unmoved by the nation’s and world’s tears. A Romeo who doesn’t hear Juliet.

A Chainsaw Is the Woefully Wrong Tool for Government Reform

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At the recent “Future of the Blue Economy” conference in Newport, Rhode Island, entrepreneurs and their investors were talking about breakthroughs, but the term they used — replacing “Sputnik moment” — was “SpaceX moment.”

That was a salute to the extraordinary precision engineering that enables the booster stage of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket to reposition itself on the launch pad after firing. It is inspiring to watch, but there must have been untold preparation, thought and planning to bring about that seemingly miraculous engineering feat.

All hail Elon Musk, boss of SpaceX!

Sadly, none of that precision preparation, thinking and planning has gone into Musk’s latest venture, the Department of Government Efficiency.

It has raged across the government, leaving a trail of havoc, shattered careers, broken departments, endangered missions: techno-barbarians running wild inside the government.

In the history of social engineering, nothing as vast and self-defeating has been attempted since Chairman Mao’s  Cultural Revolution set China back decades.

Prepare for a similar dividend from the President Trump-Musk efficiency team. If they had approached launching a rocket the same way they have sought to make the government more efficient under the mantra “waste, fraud and abuse,” they would have piled a jerry-built rocket atop a pile of explosives and lit a match. Result: a catastrophic failure.

There are things here which are beyond explanation. Trump has run businesses. He knows if you fire half the front desk staff in a hotel, things aren’t going to go smoothly. If you berate the staff and accuse them of waste, fraud and abuse, essentially stealing, morale will plunge. 

In the Soviet Union there was an adage: They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. An awful lot of government workers who haven’t lost their jobs but are disconsolate will be pretending to work for the rest of the Trump administration. Efficiency? Hardly. Many will efficiently do nothing.

Everything about the unleashing of the DOGE suggests that it had little preparation and little planning. Particularly, Musk and his crew knew nothing about the departments they were savaging. Hence, the embarrassment with the nuclear workers at the Department of Energy. Or the folly of shutting the window through which most of the world saw America’s goodness, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

We have as a society a tendency to believe that those who are good at one thing must be good at everything, something which might be called “success syndrome.”

This was on display during the energy crisis which erupted in the fall of 1973 with the Arab oil embargo and lasted through the Iranian revolution of 1979 and beyond, toppling governments and driving inflation. Many thought that proven inventors, like Edwin Link, the creator of the first flight simulator for pilot training, and Edwin Land, creator of the Polaroid camera, were expected to be able to invent us out of the oil shortage. They didn’t.

Good, patient science, regulatory reform and entrepreneurial courage did that.

Another myth is that if only you put a tough businessperson in the White House, someone who will apply their foot to the rear end of the bureaucracy, wondrous things will happen.

We have a businessperson and a brilliant inventor at the controls in Washington, and so far, the kicking of the bureaucracy with the aid of high-tech tools has produced chaos in the government workplace and devastating consequences globally.

Taken together the evidence that you can’t run a government as a private company and great inventors —even one so remarkable that he has made the greatest fortune ever — can’t reinvent government without some coherent planning.

Musk was given a chainsaw as a symbol at the CPAC meeting in Washington. They are useful but dangerous tools, as any emergency-room physician who has had to sew up an over-exuberant operator can tell you. Trump and Elon Musk appear to be attempting what should be delicate surgery with one.

A restraining of the bureaucracy may be overdue, but the bloodbath is going to weaken the patients, rendering them unfit for duty at a critical time.

A chainsaw moment is not a SpaceX moment.

Tech Conquers All, From Making a New Aristocracy to Making Taylor Swift

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I sometimes write about the propensity for technology to be imperial, to conquer and to force itself on the world whether the world wants it or not. With AI taking hold, I have to say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The wise people who write about international trade say that globalization is dead, killed off by nationalism and protectionism.

Well, you might not be able to get a Big Mac in Russia these days, but I bet they know who Taylor Swift is. Tom Friedman may be a well-read New York Times columnist, but his penetration is nothing compared to that of the influencers on TikTok or maybe even Heather Cox Richardson on Substack.

Then there is the money.

The Computer Age has spawned a new class of ultra-rich, dwarfing the rich of the past, like the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the Rothschilds. Names like Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and Musk will dominate the age.

The descendants of the great internet-based companies will form a new aristocracy with money so abundant that they can influence our lives culturally and politically.

Culture will be shaped by them via what they sponsor. The rich have always sponsored the arts, but now there will be so much money, dwarfing what Carnegie, Getty, Guggenheim and their millions wrought.

If a multibillionaire wants to weigh in politically with big money, both political parties and individual politicians will tailor their offerings to get some of that campaign cash. That is occurring now. But in the future, it will be occurring even more.

One could reasonably argue that the political class has already sold out to its backers. It isn’t the kind of government a candidate will provide so much as how much that worthy candidate raised to get elected.

I suspect we are only beginning to understand the effects of money in politics and how it may reshape the future. 

The people creating innovative technologies today have little idea where their inventions will take them. Did the guys who launched Uber in San Francisco ever think it would go nationwide, let alone sweep the world and wipe out many taxi fleets? One would have believed every county or region would have its own rideshare operator. But no. Uber went global, thanks to the controlling computer technology.

One of the realities of computer-based technology is that it picks winners and losers early on — and winners win bigger than anything seen before. Losers fade away, as they did after the first tranche of tech upheaval: the dot-com bubble.

Computer tech favors monopoly, and the monopoly in each market segment wins.

With AI coming into daily use and likely to command the way we live and work after a few decades, the companies that provide that service today — and will come to control it — will potentially dwarf the existing tech mega-giants. In theory, an AI company can employ AI to consolidate its authority in the field and vanquish competition.

If that happens, a single company will have greater wealth and greater social and political power than any aspirant for global domination ever has had.

The backstory to why early bots are error-riddled and why we get hilarious “hallucinations” is that the companies — the big techies — are so aware of the stakes that they are rushing to market their products before they have perfected them. They calculate that it is better to achieve some market penetration with an inferior product than to wait for the perfected one when a rival has become the bot of choice and technological world conquest is at hand. Never let the perfect get in the way of market share.

Consider the evolution of Google. When it perfected its search engine, it was one of a handful of search engines (remember Jeeves?). But it grabbed market share, and the rest is history. Microsoft’s Bing can do everything that Google does, but it has a third of the users. Google got the reputation and was first past the post.

Where does Taylor Swift fit in? Is she the greatest singer about the travails of love? Almost certainly not, but social media loved her.

Tech loved Taylor, and she is the brightest star ever seen in the firmament of tech-influenced culture — the equivalent in entertainment of world conquest. It is the future.i