The below article is an updated version of a piece that first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Politics is a realm of stories. It is through stories that people understand their lives and the world. All good stories have heroes and villains. Whoever defines the story in a political battle usually triumphs, and the more a story is repeated, the greater the likelihood it prevails. Democrats and citizens who care about preserving American democracy must keep this in mind.
In December 2017, the New York Times reported, “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” The first season of Donald Trump’s presidency didn’t always play out that way, as he stumbled along—and then came the midterms, a sound rejection of Trumpism; the pandemic that he mismanaged, with lethal consequences; and the 2020 election that he lost and failed, though he tried, to overturn with his criminal conniving and promotion of violence.
In Season 2, Trump has stuck to the script. To get elected last year, he went full demagogue and mounted an extensive disinformation campaign that demonized immigrants and Democrats even more than he had done before. (“They’re eating the dogs…They’re eating the cats.”) He invented enemies—Venezuelan gangs taking over whole cities in Middle America—and vowed to conquer them. And as president once again, he has set up a series of rivals to best, including Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Colombia—as well as migrants, anything woke, the transgender community, anyone involved in past prosecutions that targeted him and his January 6 brownshirts, and, most of all, the US government.
Define the narrative, win the narrative.
At the center of his blitzkrieg has been the assault led by Elon Musk on the executive branch, with the US Agency for International Development and foreign aid the first targets for vanquishing. How the story of this attack is conveyed to the public will determine how it registers—and that will determine whether Trump, with the help of Musk, will succeed in establishing an autocracy that will crush the common good and benefit an American oligarchy. Are Trump and Musk fighting to remake a bloated, corrupt, inefficient, out-of-control bureaucracy and save American taxpayers money? Or are they waging a battle to undermine the one force that can counter the otherwise unchecked power of wealth and safeguard Americans from corporate abuses that threaten their safety, health, security, and well-being, as well as the environment we all share? Define the narrative, win the narrative.
Trump and Musk might have the advantage at the moment. Theirs is a holy war against waste, fraud, and abuse—against anonymous federal workers who are depicted as lazy and dumb yet underhanded and diabolical. Musk insanely has characterized USAID as a “criminal organization” that is part of a nefarious cabal that uses its funds illegally to support leftists, Democrats, the liberal media, academia, and evil election-riggers. The Trump White House decried USAID for spending $47,000 for a “transgender opera in Colombia.” (It didn’t.) And Trump denounced the agency as being run by left-wing “lunatics.”
For Trump and Musk, USAID has been merely the first and most vulnerable casualty of their war on the inept and capricious feds.
It’s a reckless smear campaign against an agency that spends $23 billion—one-third of 1 percent of the federal budget and far less than Musk’s $101 billion proposed compensation package from Tesla—helping millions of people around the world avoid malaria, obtain clean water and health care, build democracies, and develop better economies. The smearers know that the American public is both skeptical and uninformed about US foreign assistance. Americans tend to believe that 25 percent of the US government’s budget is used for foreign aid, while noting it should probably be 10 percent, far higher than the actual level of spending.
For Trump and Musk, USAID has been merely the first and most vulnerable casualty of their war on the inept and capricious feds—which has spread to an assortment of agencies that do crucial work, including the EPA, the IRS, the FAA, the Department of Eeergy, the Department of Education, the National Instituteas of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. A battle against supposed bloat is how they want Americans to see their crusade, and the media are helping them.
Recently the New York Times published a lengthy account on Musk’s “aggressive incursion into the federal government.” (There were six names on the byline.) “Empowered by President Trump, Mr. Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy,” the newspaper declared. It noted his goal was to “reshape the federal work force.” It quoted Trump publicly praising Musk for being “a big cost-cutter.”
The piece did point out that there are extensive and unprecedented potential conflicts of interest for Musk, given the multitude of financial interests he and his companies have related to the federal government. And it quoted historian Doug Brinkley calling Musk’s efforts “a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.” Overall, though, the article cast what’s transpiring in terms favorable for Musk and Trump. Battling the federal bureaucracy and reshaping the workforce to save money probably sounds good to many Americans. No one really likes a bureaucracy, right? It’s faceless, an abstraction. Think Kafka. Disruptors versus nameless red-tape pushers—that’s a characterization that favors the destroyers.
Musk wants to emasculate, if not eradicate, government and create a libertarian dystopia in which modern-day robber barons like him can romp along however they like.
But Trump and Musk are prosecuting a war on institutions that exist to serve and protect the public interest. (They do sometimes fail, can be hampered by fraud, waste, and political influence exerted by powerful interests, and warrant scrutiny and, frequently, reform.) These agencies and departments establish rules and standards to prevent corporations from despoiling the air and water. They establish safety regulations for the railroad business and other transportation industries. (Air traffic controllers!) They make sure foods, medical devices, and drugs are safe. They research remedies for disease and plan to thwart pandemics. They try to keep workplaces safe. They seek to monitor Big Finance and maintain a stable financial system. They protect consumers from being ripped off. They oversee national security. They strive to bolster cybersecurity. They should be monitoring the rise of artificial intelligence and ensuring it is safely and wisely developed and implemented. And they do much more.
Musk wants to do away with most of this. During a public chat on X with Vivek Ramaswamy and two GOP senators, he expounded, “Regulations, basically, should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.” He said, “These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done.” The man who has amplified racist, antisemitic, far-right, and loony social media posts also blathered, “If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”
His is not just an effort to cut costs and modernize a bureaucracy—an appealing-sounding task. He wants to emasculate, if not eradicate, government and create a libertarian dystopia in which modern-day robber barons like him can romp along however they like, and the rest of us work and live at their mercy.
What’s up for grabs is the foundation of America. We are fighting over what sort of society this country will be.
That was not the story told by the New York Times. In all its thousands of words, the article did not include Musk’s publicly stated wish to eliminate all regulations or explain his desire to empower the powerful and erase any checks on the elites. Remember the awful derailment in 2023 in East Palestine, Ohio, of a train carrying hazardous materials? Republicans, including JD Vance, then a US senator from that state, blasted the Biden administration for failing the good people of East Palestine. Musk wants to weaken the government’s ability to prevent such accidents. Or to prevent E. coli outbreaks in food. Or to track climate change. Or to develop intelligence on national security risks to the United States. Or to pursue criminals. Or to regulate crypto and other financial interests.
In a recent issue of ny Our Land newsletter, I asked whether Democrats realized they were in a war. In the days since, more of them seem to be getting it and displaying the fierceness and fight required to meet this moment. But as they rush—or speed-walk—to the barricades, they need to be as savvy as Trump and Musk and, without the supersized bully pulpits these two demagogic liars possess, figure out how to out-story the forces of fascistic populism and to convey clearly the aims of Trump and Musk and the true nature and stakes of this fight.
Democrats have been forceful in defending USAID. But they should not allow this conflict to become mainly a clash over foreign aid, an easy matter for Musk and the right to exploit. The war goes far beyond that. What’s up for grabs is the foundation of America. We are fighting over what sort of society this country will be. Trump sees this battle as an entertaining TV show in which he can be the valiant hero, with the richest man in the world as his faithful sidekick, combatting a malignant mass of do-nothing, self-serving, out-of-touch unelected functionaries. By pushing this simple plotline, he seeks to turn the United States into an oligarchic empire that he rules. Those who wish to preserve the nation as a somewhat functioning democracy that often (though hardly always) serves the common good and that applies some checks on the influence and actions of the wealthy and powerful have the arduous task of counterprogramming Trump TV with reality, as ugly and messy as it may be. Whoever succeeds in establishing the story will likely write the ending.
