- Details of the Trump/Musk meltdown;
- The Trump administration’s reign of errors;
- Such as DOGE firing people and quickly hiring them back;
- The people Trump doesn’t want to exist;
- Yuval Noah Harari on how humans won’t exist in 1000 years, perhaps not even 100.
Heather Cox Richardson, June 5, 2025, summarizes the Trump Musk public fight. Selection:
Musk’s behavior is erratic in its own right, but if there is anything but pique behind it, it appears he is threatening Trump by making a play to control the Republican Party. In response to a post by conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer suggesting that Republican lawmakers are unsure if they should side with Trump or Musk, Musk wrote: “Oh and some food for thought as they ponder that question: Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.”
…
Economist Robert Reich had perhaps the best summary of the fight today when he noted, “That any of us have to care about the messy breakup of these two massive narcissists—and that they both individually wield such massive power—is an indictment of our political system and further proves the poisonous influence of Big Money on our democracy.”
And then, as Richardson does, she segues to history: to FDR’s fireside chat on June 5 1944, discussing the progress of the war. Rome had fallen to Allied troops.
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Familiar themes, today.
Washington Post, Dana Milbank, 6 Jun 2025: They are not good at this, subtitled “Nearly five months into Trump’s new reign of error, his administration’s mistakes are multiplying.”
Most recently a list released by Kristi Noem about sanctuary cities.
But it immediately became clear that the list of more than 500 states, counties and cities was riddled with errors: misspellings, cities and counties mistaken for each other, and places that don’t exist. Cincinnati became “Cincinnatti,” Campbell County (Kentucky) became “Cambell” County, Greeley County (Nebraska) became “Greenley” County, Takoma Park (Maryland) became “Tacoma” Park, while “Martinsville County” (Virginia) was invented. And so on.
Worse, scores of the “sanctuary politicians” she called out turned out to be leaders of MAGA counties and towns with no sanctuary policies on their books. Complaints poured in from Trump allies across the country. “You don’t have that many mistakes on such an important federal document,” said Pat Burns, the Trump-backing mayor of the right-wing stronghold of Huntington Beach, California, mislabeled as a sanctuary city. He told the Associated Press that “somebody’s got to answer” for this “negligent” behavior.
Good luck with that. The only answer was to disappear the list this week, leaving behind a “Page Not Found” error.
Remember, Trump hires only the best people!
The article goes on with more and more examples. RFK Jr’s report with citations that were AI hallucinations. Trump’s list of tariff nations that included an island occupied only by penguins. The Education Secretary who didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Karoline Leavitt unaware of the results of the South Korean election. Noem again and again. She’s the one who wears a cowboy hat indoors and who famously shot her dog. What has American government come to?
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And a big example in particular.
Washington Post, 6 Jun 2025: Trump administration races to fix a big mistake: DOGE fired too many people, subtitled “Across the government, officials are rehiring federal workers who were forced out or encouraged to resign.”
Early this spring, the Food and Drug Administration fired nearly 50 workers in the Office of Regulatory Policy — only to turn around and order them back to the office with one day’s notice.
After dismissing thousands of probationary employees for fabricated “performance” issues, the IRS reversed course and told them to show up to work in late May.
And some staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development, dismantled in the first days of the Trump administration by a gleeful Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the U.S. DOGE Service, checked their inboxes this month to find an unexpected offer: Would you consider returning — to work for the State Department?
Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.
Apparently this is happening so often that most examples don’t make the news.
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Who are the people who support Trump and what his team are doing? Are they unaware of their incompetence? What is it that’s more important to them than competence? They prefer incompetence as long as Trump and his team hate the same people they do?
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For example. This is the essence of fascism, and white supremacy. Why doesn’t this bother more people??
Washington Post, Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell, 6 Jun 2025: Here are the people Trump doesn’t want to exist, subtitled “Women, people of color and those in the LGBTQ+ community are main targets”
When the Trump administration encounters a group it doesn’t respect or care for, oftentimes it just deletes them — specifically, the very record of their existence.
For example, when the Defense Department was asked to cull all DEI-related content from its websites, it removed approximately 26,000 images. A list of the deleted photos was given to the Associated Press. About 19,000 of them included descriptions, and our analysis found that 4 out of 5 depicted women, people in the LGBTQ+ community and racial minorities. We recovered a handful of the photos so you can see what’s missing.
The bulk of the piece is an interactive set of photos with captions. Ending:
This is part of a broader campaign to delete the statistical and visual evidence of undesirables, or at least those who may not fit into President Donald Trump’s conception of the new American “golden age.” Entire demographics are being scrubbed from records of both America’s past and present — including people of color, transgender people, women, immigrants and people with disabilities. They are now among America’s “missing persons.”
Of course, other categories of people Trump wants to disappear cannot be easily photographed. The scientists. The smart people.
As a gay and as an educated relatively smart person, I would be cancelled twice by the Trump administration, if they got around to finding me.
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Finally for today, a video on Facebook from Yuval Noah Harari, who takes the big picture.
Facebook: What Will Humans Be Like in a Thousand Years?
I’ll copy the description; I don’t have time to transcribe everything Harari says.
Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari said he believes humans in their current form won’t exist in 1,000 years.
On Tuesday’s episode of “The Beat” with MSNBC anchor Ari Melber, the intellectual discussed the rise of artificial intelligence and how humans will adapt to new technologies. Harari said that humans “absolutely won’t be around” in 1,000 years in their current form.
“If we survive for 1,000 years, we will change ourselves so radically that we will no longer be Homo sapiens, we’ll be something else,” he said.
He said due to climate change, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, future human beings will be of a different species similar to how today’s humans are different from Neanderthals or chimpanzees.
This is the perspective that the best of science fiction tries to achieve. And what I’m trying to capture…
