Earlier this week, Vanity Fair published a two-part story about the Trump regime’s “inner circle”, including extensive interviews with his chief of staff, who was openly critical of the people that she works with, from Trump on down. The story caused a stir and so did the photos that accompanied the piece, taken by Christopher Anderson.
The Washington Post interviewed Anderson about the photos. The interview is interesting throughout but Anderson’s answer to the final question is…I don’t even know how to describe it; read it for yourself:
Q: Were there moments that you missed? Anything that happened that’s on the cutting room floor?
A: I don’t think there’s anything I missed that I wish I’d gotten. I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”
In some sort of bizarro version of our world, where people somehow aren’t themselves, Miller may have reflected on Anderson’s comment, may have thought about all the pain, anguish, and death caused by the exercise of his power, may have felt some regret, a chink in the armor that would grow over time, leading to a softening of his perspective and approach. But we live in the real world; Miller knows exactly what he’s doing and does not want to be kind. He wants to be unkind, to rip mother from child. I’m reminded of A.R. Moxon’s thoughts on hypocrisy:
It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.
It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.
Kindness for me and not for thee.
This is excellent reporting by the Times (although at times it makes Musk’s actions sound heroic rather than unconstitutional, criminal, and treasonous) on how Elon Musk took over a huge chunk of the US government, which he still controls today. It began at a Republican fundraiser in September of 2023:
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
Musk, motivated by the Biden administration’s regulation of his companies, went to work:
Seasoned conservative operatives like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate Mr. Musk about the workings of the bureaucracy. Soon, he stumbled on an opening. It was a little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.
Mr. Musk and his advisers — including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.
They would call it the U.S. DOGE Service, and they would not even have to change the initials.
They began their move on the digital service unit earlier than has previously been reported, The Times found, while President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still in office — giving them the ability to operate on Mr. Trump’s first day.
And now here we are, an unelected private citizen in charge of the US government:
The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A month into Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Musk and his crew of more than 40 now have about all the passwords they could ever need.
His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.
Read the rest of it for how it was all hurriedly planned out ahead of time.
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