I don't think you can extrapolate from the clusterfuck that's going on now to get any meaningful picture of what "the US Govt." has cared about at any time in the past. This is a completely unprecedented situation that nobody voted or asked for. (Not even the ones who voted for Trump, misguided as I may think they are, voted for this, because AFAIK there was no announcement before the election that Musk would be given this kind of power.)
On the contrary this is exactly what they said they'd do if elected. This is exactly what was voted for. Don't pretend like Americans didn't have agency in the destruction of their own country.
This is a good point. Aside from the objectively unavoidable and nigh-uncountable deluge of articles, opeds, social media posts, video news segments and direct statements from the candidate and his representatives describing exactly what they intended to do and a 927 page document detailing the plan that was released two and a half years before the election, what warning did anybody have?
The very fact that it's even possible to have this kind of thing happening unfettered, unconstrained, and unaccountable is evidence in and of itself that the US Govt. doesn't take its national security & secrets seriously though, isn't it?
In that taking those things seriously would have included:
* More creative threat-modeling.
* More effective prevention measures.
* More vigorous mitigation & stonewalling attempts.
* More rapid remediation & rejection of the intrusion.
Especially for a threat vector that was telegraphed so openly so far in advance. The circumstances might be unprecedented, but they're not at all surprising.
What sort of threat modeling would have prevented this?
There are plenty of mitigation and stonewalling going on, but mostly through the courts.
Executives must have some power, or else the process itself becomes the executive and there's no ability to respond to anything.
If there's anybody to blame, we must place the blame on the executive wielding the power, and those who have enabled this to happen by putting that particular executive in power by subverting the traditional vetting process. If a political party no longer performs basic vetting of that level then the entire party should probably be eliminated.
The polls are starting to agree with you. Trump’s actions are extremely unpopular, and support from his base is eroding:
> In the CNN poll, Musk having a prominent role in the administration is viewed as a “bad thing” (54-28) by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio. The Post-Ipsos poll showed Americans disapprove by a similarly wide margin (52-26) of Musk “shutting down federal government programs that he decides are unnecessary.”
> And Americans said 63 to 34 that they are concerned about Musk’s team getting access to their data, which is the subject of high-profile legal fights.
> Even 37 percent of Republican-leaning voters said they are at least “somewhat” concerned about Musk getting their data.
It was well known that this was exactly what Musk would do, by anyone paying the slightest shred of attention to what was going on.
He said it was what he was going to do, he was up on the stage, I heard many many people salivating for DOGE cuts like this before the election, and even today.
> It was well known that this was exactly what Musk would do, by anyone paying the slightest shred of attention to what was going on.
I agree, and frankly anyone feeling "surprised" right now probably still thinks strongly worded emails and letters are enough to solve the problems they're just now seeing. Those things rely on a stable democracy where constituents and what happens to them matter at all.
> anyone feeling "surprised" right now probably still thinks strongly worded emails and letters are enough
No, it’s completely different than that. Some of them I’ve talked to, they’re confused about this Musk Internet guy. And they’re confused why their news isn’t giving them the predictive edge those aware of Project 2025 seem to have in conversation. “I guess we’ll see…” “I guess we’ll have to have hope…” The same people willing to accept fabulist conspiracy theories for non-white-male candidates now openly rely on faith-based appeals about the character of the richest man in the world.
I don't think we disagree. I'm just saying they're so far behind that they're not useful; the republic is already gone. What we're talking in is the shell of it.
I see Americans defending Trumps and Musk. Or acting as if everyone just overreacted. So I would say, quite a lot of Americans are either fine with this or actively want it.
I heard a meaningful quiet after the H1B fight. The kind of guys who said “kick em out! Imma get me one of them high-pay tech jobs” Those guys had to watch Trump, revealed to employ a lot of H1-class workers, claim we need more.
There are 300M people here and Trump won by ~200K. You can safely say that some are fine with this administrations behavior, but many are not and starting to actively protest and resist. Both are true simultaneously.
Musk buying Twitter and then spending millions to buy votes in PA weeks before the election seemed pretty obvious.
People like him don't spend without an expectation of something in return.
The more surprising thing is the amount of people who think successful capitalist = successful political leader, when the incentives and constituencies are drastically different.
