1 day ago
9
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
Maureen Dowd
May 31, 2025, 7:00 a.m. ET
Elon Musk came to Washington with a chain saw and left with a black eye.
Shrinking government is hard, particularly when you do it callously and carelessly — and apparently on hallucinogens.
As with President Trump’s tariffs, DOGE has created more volatility than value.
A guy who went bankrupt six times doesn’t really care about spending. And Trump certainly didn’t want to see the headline, “Trump Cuts Social Security.”
He just wanted to get revenge on “the bureaucracy” by deputizing Musk to force out a lot of federal employees and give the impression they were cutting all the waste.
As always with Trump, the former reality star, the impression matters more than the reality, especially the reality of his own sins. This past week, Trump tried to recast the very nature of crime.
As The Times’s Glenn Thrush wrote: “President Trump is employing the vast power of his office to redefine criminality to suit his needs — using pardons to inoculate criminals he happens to like, downplaying corruption and fraud as crimes, and seeking to stigmatize political opponents by labeling them criminals.”
It is sickening that the Justice Department is considering settling a wrongful-death lawsuit by giving $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt — who was shot on Jan. 6, 2021, by a Capitol police officer when she ignored his warnings and tried to climb through a smashed window into the Speaker’s Lobby in the Capitol.
