Regardless of whether Musk does secure his full payout, when someone finally becomes the world’s first trillionaire, odds are it’ll be him. When that happens, his wealth would rival or exceed the GDPs of Portugal, Greece, New Zealand, and Hungary combined. As he’s already shown, Musk has the means to influence any political campaign in his adoptive country. But his immense wealth also allows him to astroturf political movements on virtually any global issue. Witness, if nothing else, his apparent support of Tommy Robinson in Britain, echoed by similar enthusiasms from Paris to Berlin.

Should one man control this much wealth, and thus have the power to tilt the scales of global politics at will? Regardless of your answer, it’s striking how much access Musk’s staggeringly deep pockets secured him on Capitol Hill. Politics moves so fast now that the specifics are easy to forget. But the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wasn’t just about advice or tech contracts — though Musk received those as well — but deciding whether government agencies deserved to live or die. Within months of the election, key civil service departments were gutted under Musk’s watch, with hundreds of thousands of federal employees fired via the vagaries of a proprietary algorithm and Musk’s cadre of 20-something tech graduates.

If DOGE was a characteristically juvenile nod to Musk’s meme-lord sensibilities — and if the Musk-Trump pact has lately acquired the will-they-won’t-they trappings of a Nineties romcom — their relationship is nonetheless one of the great turning points in American history. After all, it ultimately represents the de facto takeover of the federal government by the world’s wealthiest man, not merely for moneymaking, but to ideologically reshape it in Musk’s preferred image.

What is this new Muskian ideology he’s imposing on America? Like many on the American Right, Musk puts on a good show of believing in the mythology of classical liberalism and small government, while also cloaking himself in the aesthetics of techno-libertarianism. In truth, though, the ideological roots of his worldview go deeper and darker. Beneath that meme-saturated branding lies a politics shaped as much by late 19th-century Social Darwinism as by any genuine commitment to “liberty” or open markets, all leavened by a healthy reliance on government backing.

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To put it differently, Musk adheres to a brand of Social Darwinism, imposed from the top down. Think small government for you — and the working-class slobs you struggle alongside — but big government for them, the rightful rulers of the universe. Shortly after ensconcing himself at the White House, wandering its hall like an awe-struck child, Musk landed a $5.9 billion US Space Force contract, as well as a $200 million deal to implement xAI in the Defense Department. That’s echoed by an expanded SpaceX contract, one valued at perhaps $4 billion. The optics, of course, are damning. But more than that, these arrangements speak to the billionaire’s fundamental reliance on state munificence.

Not that Musk is only concerned about economics. Notwithstanding his large and obscure number of children, he often acts online like an angry incel — paranoid and petulant to the core. Over the years, Musk has entertained more than a few white supremacist narratives on his X feed. Though he seems to have once attended an anti-Apartheid concert, his South African upbringing may also have encouraged him to worry about racially charged civil strife. Due to his omnipresence online, certainly, he has legitimized fringe white-supremacist rhetoric that was once relegated to the fringes of cyberspace: witness the growing popularity of Groypers and other “black-pilled” race-based groups among a subset of Gen Z.

The amplification of these far-Right ideologies could prove to be one of the most consequential global shifts of the coming decade. Yet in a horseshoe-like twist, Musk’s reactionary paranoia also coexists with an unshakeable belief in radical futurism — from intergalactic colonies to brain implants. Transhumanism and extreme technophile utopianism — not typically labeled “Right-wing” — pervade nearly everything Musk offers. Whether it’s boring massive underground tunnels, apparently meant to “solve” car traffic, to manufacturing humanoid robots to replace low-skill laborers, Musk’s projects would have horrified traditional British conservatives from Oakeshott to Burke.

Yet amid this rush of contradictory ideological currents, it’s perhaps Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars, purportedly as a failsafe for Earth’s presumed collapse, that arguably represents the man in full. That’s starkest when it comes to his futurism. In an age of Icarian sci-fi projects like Saudi Arabia’s ludicrous Neom scheme, Musk’s space venture is the most extravagant techno-utopian fantasy of them all, even as the man himself has apparently convinced large swathes of the public that Martian colonies are not just feasible but actually existentially necessary.

Aside from materializing childhood Star Trek fantasies, it’s hard to find a compelling reason for such a quixotic mission to the fourth planet from the sun. Even assuming it’s possible to land a single human — much less the number needed to “colonize” the planet — the cost of the project would likely be in the neighborhood of $1 billion per person, for a total of $1000 trillion. That kind of outlay, all in a country without universal healthcare or decent public transit, would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Nor is funding the only problem here. Mars is, on average, over 225 million kilometers from Earth. Traveling there would take a minimum of seven to nine months of space travel— trapped inside a claustrophobic spacecraft. Anyone lucky enough to survive the journey would have to bring with them all the air, water, and food they needed, not just for the space voyage itself but for the rest of their lives.

All the while, life on Mars would resemble camping on an active volcano: permanently toxic, obscenely dangerous, and deeply unnatural. Once Mars mission astronauts arrived, these aspiring settlers would be forced to live an Antarctic-like existence, completely isolated from all normal aspects of human geospatial, social, and emotional life. If nothing else, there’s a good reason why the real Antarctica has no permanent settlements — no one can stand living there without losing their ever-loving mind. Now imagine that kind of existence, except 90% of it is underground and there’s no coming back.

Musk obviously knows all these details, yet remains completely undaunted. And it’s here, I’d argue, that his inverted kind of Social Darwinism comes to the fore. Notwithstanding his obscene personal wealth, a thoroughgoing Martian colony would necessarily require epic amounts of government funding — miserable living conditions on the Red Planet or continued squalor on the Blue Planet be damned. And if Musk truly believes in the necessity of humanity becoming an “interplanetary species”, he ought to then offer himself up as one of Mars’ first human residents. Of course that’ll never happen. Instead he’ll sucker poor, naïve — and almost certainly desperate — souls into doing it for him.

That’s obvious enough from his behavior here on Earth. For one thing, Musk is virulently anti-labor, once saying he not only disagrees with the necessity of trade unions, but even the very idea. Among other things, he claims unions are a “lords-and-peasants sort of thing” that “create negativity in a company.” For another, he has got into ugly disputes with Tesla janitors trying to unionize, while also being found guilty by the US National Labor Relations Board — a notoriously weak agency compared to similar bodies elsewhere — for laying off hundreds of unionized workers in retaliation for their collective bargaining efforts.

Combined with his enthusiasm for red-blooded states like Texas, which has far laxer labor laws than spots like California, and it’s clear that a large part of his affinity for his adoptive nation is those aspects of American “exceptionalism” that align most with his Social Darwinist ideals.

Along these lines, it’s quite telling that unlike past industrial tycoons, Musk has also no major charitable operations. Even during the notoriously callous Gilded Age, figures like Andrew Carnegie preached that the ultra-wealthy had a duty to give away large portions of their money to the public. Many of that era believed their good fortune required social contribution. Musk, in contrast, sees such efforts as unnecessary — or worse, counterproductive. The few charities he does fund are either self-serving, like building schools and infrastructure near SpaceX facilities, or else engaged in other dubious practices. His eponymous foundation only donated $100,000 in 2024, and that to a libertarian think tank. Musk doesn’t even appear to grasp the basic function of most philanthropy: pretending to care.

Such results-focused brutality arguably hints at yet another current in Musk’s ideological bloodstream. In a funny way, technophile futurists like him and Peter Thiel arguably have more in common with Marxist-Leninists than they know. Both regard their political opponents as victims of “false consciousness” — unable to grasp the “scientifically” inevitable direction of history. Any dissent is seen not as disagreement, but as clear proof of ideological delusion. Their version of Progress is treated as inescapable and morally righteous. To question it is to endanger humanity itself. Thiel recently went so far as to liken critics of AI and technological acceleration to apocalyptic figures, and perhaps even Antichrists.

Musk is obviously no Stalin or Pol Pot. But like the undemocratic masters of the 20th century, he surrounds himself with sycophants, while believing that no one could possibly know more than him. When confronted with his failures, he also exhibits the same brand of epistemic totalitarianism — either denying or ignoring shortcomings and continuing to insist on his own revolutionary vision defining all legitimate knowledge. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Musk did not buy Twitter to “restore free speech”. He bought Twitter to shape the narrative in his preferred image, providing free speech to his preferred groups and their preferred narratives. Like a true Enlightenment ideologue, with no acceptance of the limits of the human experience, Musk, like Marx before him, believes in truth with a capital “T”.

One good example here is Musk’s efforts to develop xAI, with the company hunting for “political bias” experts to ensure its large-language model is stripped of all supposed bias from its training modules. Whatever he might claim, genuine “impartiality” is impossible. Just as with academic peer review, choosing what constitutes a “non-biased expert” is itself an ideological act. Postmodernists were completely correct in this sense: no one is capable of decoding human society without bias. But like the Marxists of old, Musk’s supreme faith in scientism and rationalist pseudo-objectivity is his greatest intellectual failing.

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Why Elon’s third party failed

By Ross Barkan

Due to his South African birth, Musk cannot become US president. But, as he’s already shown, he can clearly buy unprecedented government sway. More to the point, there are signs he wants to formalize this influence by creating his very own political party. A few months ago, when the president he helped install grew tired of his presence, Musk threw a tantrum and announced the launch of his own political movement, the so-called “American Party”.

The debut of Musk’s party appears to be on hold, though, with its launch being used as a stick to prod the GOP towards anti-statist, low “entitlement” policies — the same Social Darwinist policies Musk believes must inevitably improve society. The American Party threat is rarely discussed, yet represents an important component in explaining why the GOP continues to hold the “small government” line in the ongoing shutdown of the US government, now a month old and counting. That American Party name is itself a highly telling moniker since it was last used by the extremely violent, ethno-nationalist Know Nothings of the mid-19th century.

The danger, then, isn’t just Musk’s erratic behavior or his unchecked ego. It’s the precedent he’s set. A centi-billionaire — well on his way to trillionaire status — with no democratic mandate and no governing experience now wields unprecedented influence over both the American state and civic discourse. He controls one of the largest social media platforms, and has been allowed to fire government employees at will, treating American society as a sandbox for his own fantastical experiments. For Musk, society isn’t a fragile ecosystem. It’s a plaything for his brilliance to break and rebuild at whim.

Musk hardly started the trend of the ultra-wealthy trying to hijack the US government, but he’s also taking it to dramatically new heights, setting a precedent that’s being followed by tycoons from Bill Ackman to Bernard Marcus. In the 2024 election cycle alone, 100 American billionaires together spent some $2.6 billion in “donations”. To put that into perspective, a minimum-wage worker would need to work for over 174,000 years — and start during the last Ice Age — simply to gross that same figure. It goes without saying, of course, that this trend could yet have disastrous consequences for the average American, with millions feeling their votes don’t count and that whatever gains they secured during the 20th century are already slipping away.

As for Musk himself, the nearer-term danger is less that he’s a hubristic technophile huckster or a deluded space-faring Don Quixote. It’s that, like Stalin, he can afford to keep being wrong — forever. With wealth at this unprecedented scale, he can act, fund, fire, and build without opposition. And, if liberal democracy relies on key shared understandings, his outsized influence might signal something worse than just the rise of authoritarian wealth. Rather, it could ultimately herald a breakdown in our attachment to our mother planet and thus, the conditions for human flourishing. What an ironic “scientific” legacy that would be.

Consider the odds. If you use a gun with six chambers, the chances of surviving a single round are a little over 83%. By the time you have reached round four, your survival chances will be roughly 50-50. From then on, things deteriorate swiftly, and by round 25, should you have survived that long, your chances are around 1%. Now assume that everyone in the US is playing this game. By the time the trigger is pulled for the 70th time, there are only approximately 1,000 survivors playing. That also happens to be the number of billionaires in the US. Elon Musk and Donald Trump are among them. Both think they are really good at the game and they’re still playing. But how long can their luck hold out?

Musk’s chances of survival aren’t looking too healthy. He spun the barrel of the gun one time too many when he decided to start a public spat by criticizing Trump’s big, beautiful budget bill. It was an impulsive move that might work in business, where visionaries are rewarded for disruption. But in politics, the chamber is loaded more often than not.

Perhaps you object to my Russian roulette comparison. It’s too random. Success, in business and politics, you think, isn’t the result of luck. These guys have skills. Musk is intelligent; Trump is street-smart. Success in the real world is often a mixture of skill and luck.

This is all true. But my thought experiment makes an important point about big gambles that is often lost in journalistic narratives. Skill is important in everything we do, but few of us, including the most intelligent and best educated, are possessed of skills that no one else has. We mistake survival for superiority. Yet what makes the difference between success and failure comes down to the opportunities we grasp and the risks we take. Success is often the result of choices we made a long time ago, and which set us up for life.

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Lawfare won’t beat Trump

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This is certainly the case for Musk. He is the world’s richest man because he gambled on the success of two businesses: investing early on in Tesla and founding SpaceX. These two shots paid off. But the odds of that happening are incredibly small. In our game metaphor, this is like hitting the lottery jackpot twice, or getting to round 100 in two Russian roulette games. The odds of that happening are vanishingly small. But once you’ve made it that far, it’s tempting to believe it wasn’t luck at all — that you were just better than everyone else.

Musk, for his part, has not been so successful in politics. And that is in large part because of a cognitive error that successful people are especially prone to — the fallacy of composition. This is the mistake of thinking that something that is true for me and my world is true for everybody. Musk made the mistake of thinking that what worked at Tesla and SpaceX would work in politics. He assumed that his outstanding success in this world, and his disregard for convention, would be transferable to politics. But what made him excel at business has made him clumsy, even self-destructive in politics.

He’s not unusual to think like this. I know several successful investment bankers and business consultants who were plucked from obscurity to become the finance ministers of their countries. They were, the story goes, good at numbers. But they had only ever known Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, and the world of politics functions according to very different rules from the boardroom. Almost all of them failed because their skills didn’t translate to politics. They were not stupid, but they were ignorant.

Musk’s DOGE experience is the perfect example of this. If you want to save money in a large company, it’s pretty straightforward: you start with cutting waste. But fixing a bureaucracy is different. You do not start with what you see, but with the laws and regulations that are the root cause of the waste. These aren’t immediately obvious. It takes time and requires patience and attention and a deep knowledge of how these things glue up the system. These are things that Musk doesn’t have in abundance.

Politics and business don’t only look at waste differently, they see risk differently too. Bankruptcy is the extinction event you risk in finance, but it happens rarely. In politics, however, extinction events occur all the time: just look at Liz Truss. I do think she was unlucky: she made a grave error at the wrong time. But it is much harder to hedge risk in politics than in business or finance. Political risk is harder to hedge, harder to model, and almost impossible to bounce back from. Musk is learning this the hard way. He took a gamble by investing heavily in Trump’s win, and then burning bridges with the administration: he is left with two companies whose fortunes are heavily intertwined with regulation that Trump ultimately controls. Trump has the gun to Musk’s head.

Originally, Trump was the same as Musk. He was a businessman who had never really dabbled in politics. He thought money talked. As a result, he has been prone to fallacy-of-composition type errors: he, too, thought he could run the administration like a business. But he learned — believe it or not — that he had to be more cautious. He knows it’s not all about luck. He knows that he is the elected CEO of a democracy, not the dictator for life in the boardroom. Yet Musk is still thinking like a business dictator whose companies will do exactly what he wants. And unlike Trump, he will not get a second term.

There is also a more subtle difference at play that one billionaire now understands and the other does not. In business, money rules. But in politics, money only matters. Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you can remake politics according to whim; you can’t buy votes. You may be, like Musk, one of the true creatives in our economic life: you can succeed in business even if 51% of the population absolutely hates you. But to succeed in politics, you need to build coalitions of voters, or parties, that constitute a majority.

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By Malcom Kyeyune

Musk had the good chance — and terrible fortune — to be the owner of a large social media platform at just the right time: it gave him the power to enter politics when the odds were heavily stacked against him. But it was also part of his downfall. In politics, you have to be prepared for people to disagree with when you try to get anything material done. Opposition leaders will challenge you and tell different stories. A debate in parliament couldn’t be more different from a trip down the X hole, where you can spend an entire day having discussions with people who reinforce your views. Musk, rarely away from his smartphone, believed what it told him.

This echo chamber effect is particularly pernicious in our current moment. It has left leaders in the dark as to what voters really think. Spend too much time talking to your own people, and reality disappears from view. We saw it only the other week during the Polish presidential elections. The supporters of the losing candidate, Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, were absolutely convinced that their man was going to win — even though the polls were too close to call. We saw it, too, during the Trump-Harris race last year. The liberals keep on talking to themselves and massively misjudging the strength of their opponents, along the way disregarding the will of the people. The same also happened in the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016.

Today, X and Truth Social, Musk’s and Trump’s media platforms, are the Right-wing counterparts to the Left-leaning metropolitan newspapers. And when the inhabitants of each are surprised by a result they didn’t expect, they don’t accept the result — they look for someone to blame. So the Russians get fingered. Today, the delusions on each side are being amplified. And such is the disconnect that, from the talk in his little echo chamber, Musk is now convinced he can use his money to create a new political party at the center of US politics. He should probably look at what is happening to Emmanuel Macron and his party, perhaps the most daring political experiment of radical centrism we have seen in an advanced Western country. There’s plenty of money, and there’s no support. It has failed to appeal to voters. Trump knows this. He is the antithesis of all centrist politics. He knows how to disrupt, but he also has a keener understanding of how politics works now: unlike Musk, who got lucky, but thought that luck was enough.

Here is my prediction about Musk. He will continue to make reckless bets unshaken in the belief that he can’t fail. In my Russian roulette example, we can expect only one person to be alive by round 107. That person will be Trump.

To supporters and detractors alike, the Department of Government Efficiency promises to remake the republic. Already, the media is stuffed with lurid stories of teenagers accessing the US Treasury Department’s archaic payment systems, even as swathes of the bureaucracy have already been defunded. Given USAID alone boasted an annual budget of $40 billion, it’s clear change is coming, and that’s before Elon Musk’s outfit gets to the $500 billion of government spending supposedly “unauthorized” by Congress.

Yet if the Right heralds the demise of the pen-pushers, and their liberal opponents fear the rise of an American Caesar, the truth is far less impressive. Whatever the sluggishness of DC’s civil servants, DOGE barely scratches the surface of government spending. And besides, worrying about waste, let alone fantasy projects abroad, ignores the real problem — that US democracy is fundamentally broken, that Congress is incompetent, and that none of the country’s basic challenges, from immigration to jobs, can be solved by its exhausted class of ancien régime failures.

In basic terms, DOGE is Trump’s attempt to assert wider control over the way the government handles its finances. This flies in the face of well-established American norms. The US Constitution clearly states that the federal government is supposed to operate on a division of powers: appropriating money is meant to be the prerogative of the legislature in the form of Congress. It is Congress that decides what the government will spend money on, how much money to spend, and when to spend it. The role of the president is simply to handle implementation.

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Trump and Musk argue that the discretion the president has in implementing the decisions by Congress should include the right to defund government agencies — if, that is, the president deems they’re not doing their job properly. Certainly, that’s the argument Trump’s lawyers are busy making, even as their claims wobble between acceptable political maneuvering and an unconstitutional power grab. Just a few weeks in, Trump and DOGE are unsurprisingly drowning in court challenges, injunctions, and other legal headaches. An increasing number of Trump’s supporters are getting impatient, clamoring for the day when he simply tells the judges to take a hike. As Andrew Jackson once said of a Supreme Court justice: “Marshall has made his decision, now let’s see him enforce it.”

At the surface, this feels like a very serious drama. The world’s richest man, an erratic and unaccountable billionaire, has been set loose on the federal government — boasting undefined powers to wreck the republic. The reality, though, is rather more mundane. To understand this, you must appreciate the scale of DOGE’s sweep. Yes, it’s easy to mock USAID for schemes such as the $70,000 spent on a “DEI musical” in Ireland. Yet when placed next to the full size of the national budget, Musk is conducting the administrative equivalent of scrambling about for change behind the sofa.

After all, the government today runs a deficit close to $2 trillion a year. To fund this deficit, it borrows roughly $10 billion each and every day. It’s important to realize here that while most countries do have some kind of national debt, the size and trajectory of America’s deficit is different. In 2000, the national debt was some $5.7 trillion dollars. In 2017, when Trump first took office, it was $20 trillion. Now, it’s over $36 trillion, putting unsustainable pressure on defense and social welfare costs. Even the most generous accounting of what Musk and Trump have achieved so far boils down to a few hours of US debt. And that’s if they can defend it all in court, and make it stick — and there’s no guarantee of that.

DOGE, in short, is a gimmick. Any meaningful control of US government spending can’t be attained through bureaucratic jiu-jitsu or legal trickery. To really cut the deficit, Trump would either have to literally crown himself king and abolish the Constitution, or else go to Congress and get them to actually do the job the Founding Fathers gave them. But Trump can’t do either of these things. If he simply ruled by decree, a polarized nation would explode into civil war. Yet, as bleak as that sounds, it might actually be more realistic than having Congress appropriate the funds. The legislature can nowadays barely pass the stop-gap, temporary funding measures it uses in lieu of actual budgets to prevent government shutdowns. The last time Congress passed all its required bills on time was in 1996, and over the last 40 years it has only managed to complete the appropriations process a grand total of four times.

Where, then, does that leave the president? In a word, trapped: in a political system collapsing round his ears. To take one practical example, consider the so-called “mass deportations” Trump promised pre-election, with his supporters hoping that once he assumed office, decades of illegal immigration could be upended in an orgy of raids and detentions. To a lot of Trump’s followers, deportation almost seemed like a matter of willpower: as long as you simply wanted it hard enough, anything could be done.

Yet once Trump was finally sworn in, nothing much happened. The administration initially promised to publish the daily number of arrests and deportations. Soon enough, though, people realized that Trump wasn’t doing a much better job than Joe Biden, let alone Barack Obama. The administration’s deportations are hitting a “wall” as the limitations of funding, facility space, and personnel become ever more acute. But the hype must go on: The Guardian even discovered the White House was gaming Google search results to create the illusion of activity, with old press releases given 2025 timestamps.

Eventually, the administration simply stopped talking about mass deportations. The stories that now do come out are mostly bad, and Trumpworld is back to doing what the President himself attacked Biden for: letting arrested illegal immigrants go free because of a lack of detention capacity. That gets to the heart of the problem. Building a detention center is less an act of will, and more about planning and resourcing. But the US government simply does not have the capacity to fulfill these dreams of “mass deportations” in the medium term. That would require additional officers and cells and aircraft, none of which the country ultimately has.

There are other examples here, too, from the Mexico border wall to reshoring jobs. All these projects require the legislature to cooperate, to pass laws and appropriate funds. But, again, it’s an open secret that what the Trump administration most dreads is having to abandon executive orders — which give the appearance of strength — and wrangle enough votes in the House and the Senate. When that happens, Trump’s mirage of strength will vanish.

In theory, of course, he could get Congress to find the cash to build his camps and finish the wall and bring the factories home. That, certainly, is what the legislature is there for. But, at this point, everyone knows Congress has become too broken to do the job, and its failures since 1996 are merely the start. First, consider the question of polarization. With politicians ever more focused on painting their opponents as evil, actually working together has become near-impossible. Then there’s that ballooning deficit. At this point, the threat of Weimar-style hyperinflation, or else a government default, hangs over Congress like the Sword of Damocles, as an increasing share of the federal revenues are gobbled up by debt servicing. At the moment, over 25 cents on every dollar that the federal government makes goes towards paying interest on its debt, leaving precious little for other things.

Add to that a gaggle of special interests — healthcare, for one, uses lobbying and campaign financing to keep state spending high — and America’s ledger remains grimly in the red. Like cutting the deficit, of course, Trump could simply stage a coup, placing a crown on his head and declaring that the wall will be funded and the factories built. But, once more, that’s not actually possible: most of the state apparatus would refuse to go along, to say nothing of how ordinary citizens would react.

Combined with the hopelessness of Congress, Trump’s recent obsession with tariffs, like DOGE, must therefore be seen as a sign of weakness. At first blush, that seems counterintuitive: someone constantly threatening to destroy Canada’s economy seems like someone positively drunk with power. Well, given the Constitution, Trump can’t raise taxes or appropriate money directly — but what he can do is impose tariffs on Ottawa, as long as he fibs and pretends it’s for national security reasons. That is one of the few remaining ways to raise cash now left to the man who claims to be the most powerful on earth.

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The US allies trying to parse Trump’s muddled messaging — “Is he angry about fentanyl? Does he want to annex us?” — are anyway overthinking things. America is broke, politics has frozen, and the system can’t function as the Founders envisioned. No less striking, paralysis is spreading through the whole government apparatus. By all accounts, the Republicans are having an extremely tough time crafting even a temporary spending bill that the party can agree on. A deal with Democrats, it goes without saying, is increasingly unimaginable.

All the while, the deficit is only rising. Even if Congress weren’t such a mess, a massive fiscal crisis is approaching, and Trump seems destined to be president when it arrives. This isn’t exclusively his fault, though he did very little to turn the ship around during his first term in the Oval. Rather, these crises are the result of decades of systemic mismanagement, with bickering politicians and special interests burrowed deep.

Even more worryingly, we’ve been here before. In 1788, France was also drowning in debt, and also had an executive desperate trying to correct the tailspin. No less striking, the Ancien Régime also had a legislature too broken to find solutions — but not so broken it couldn’t spend its time blocking attempts at reform. As for today, future historians won’t remember the squabbles around USAID: that just isn’t the story of our age. What matters instead is a financial system in ruins, a political class out of ideas, and the inevitability of a 1789 moment sooner or later.

Talk to officers, and there really is an “end of days” feeling at stations up and down the land. If, to put it bluntly, we failed the victims at Rotherham and Telford and a hundred other places so catastrophically, how can we ever recover, either professionally or in our relationship with the public? The answer must begin with reform. No — not another report, but genuine change, a red-tape-cutting Trumpian revolution everywhere from the law to leadership, which together can expunge 30 years of failure, and finally build a service fit for the 21st century.

The last few decades have been torrid for British policing. Austerity led to plummeting officer numbers, and a recruitment and retention crisis. The service’s obsession with DEI impressed activists, but led to no discernible improvements to performance. Then came Covid, casting the police as government stooges. All the while, the public became tired of authoritarian busy-bodying around Non-Crime Hate incidents, especially with the virtual decriminalization of theft, and after Sarah Everard was murdered by a serving officer.

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Why Prevent isn't fit for purpose

By Dominic Adler

Amid all this rot, it’s surely worth asking: what, in this day and age, is policing actually for? It’s a question that seems to baffle the Home Office, College of Policing, Police and Crime Commissioners and the National Police Chief’s Council. Conquest’s Third Law of Politics springs to mind here: the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume it’s controlled by its enemies. It’s an overused term, but it’s impossible to avoid “Blob” here too. Spend long in British policing and you’ll see what I mean: the self-interestedness, the sluggishness, the groupthink, even as trust collapses and crime soars.

Once you grasp that basic fact, it’s easier to conceive of a solution: a Musk-like insurgency, with a Milei-like chainsaw, against complacent bosses. In practical terms, I’d start with a wide-ranging Royal Commission on policing. That’s surely needed, and not just because the last one was in 1960. Turbo-charged public inquiries, Royal Commissions are independent and uncomfortable to the powers-that-be.

What would this fantasy Royal Commission conclude? In the first place: that the police need to do less, but better, and concentrate on their core mission of fighting crime and keeping the peace. That would reverse the decline into a “social work policing” model, whereby officers pick up the slack around mental health, the homeless and youth services. The police, to be fair, are beginning to address some of the problems. Yet talking to officers on the ground, so-called “precautionary principles” mean they’re still routinely diverted from core duties. This is before we even delve into the issue of public order and demonstrations, another drain on resources.

From there, our Commission would hopefully embark on a DOGE-like spree. For one thing, we need fewer forces (there are currently 43 in England and Wales) but with local commanders enjoying much more subsidiarity. Forces are already collaborating sneakily via “strategic partnerships” which means collaborating on things like fighting organized crime. The genius of this arrangement for police chiefs? It doesn’t threaten the 43-force model, meaning senior officer posts are preserved. So pass me the chainsaw: modern technology would easily allow local policing to operate without multiple layers of management. While we’re at it, officer numbers will need re-examining too. Norfolk’s case is instructive: the chief constable is being forced to hire cops rather than admin staff due to central diktat, obliging him to use cops as admin staff.

When Toby Young first introduced Free Schools, I wondered what it would be like if the Home Office allowed Free Constabularies: officers empowered to use their initiative and be answerable for the results. That, however, would require technocrat cops to relinquish control, or anyway be forced to relinquish control. As it is, policing is currently ruled by spreadsheets and process maps, not common sense and discretion. Virtually every police function, from arrests to basic investigation to safeguarding, involves overwhelming policy, bureaucracy, guidance and advice, with some officers avoiding certain duties altogether.

Then there’s law and procedure. This is policing’s operating system — which, at the risk of revealing my age, resembles Windows NT 3.1. Law, for understandable reasons, moves glacially. Sadly, modern society moves cheetah-fast. Add to this the clunky Blairite legacy, a hybrid of common law muddied with continental-style statute, and a rights-based framework designed by a cabal of London lawyers, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Unless, of course, you’re a lawyer paid by the hour.

Therefore our notional Royal Commission should consider a bonfire not only of red tape, but of wider legislation too. Policing doesn’t exist in isolation. It relies, rather, on its partners in the wider criminal justice system: the courts, legal profession, prisons and probation services. Penal reform is a case in point: the Fabian-esque British establishment holds a traditional distaste for incarceration. This is unfortunate, because it works, as any police officer (and, indeed, criminal) will tell you.

When I say works, I mean it’s an effective way to offer respite to working-class victims in crime-plagued communities. These, too often, sit at the bottom of police priorities. Strangely, nobody listens to police officers, despite being one of the few professions to whom criminals speak candidly. From hundreds of hours of listening to criminals, occasionally while monitoring covert audio of their conversations, I can assure you the “criminal fraternity” are utterly contemptuous of the bleeding hearts who run our criminal justice system.

Then there’s the 500-pound gorilla in a custodian helmet: leadership. Pass me a dozen chainsaws. Post-Macpherson services, desperate to erase the smear of institutional racism, were uniquely vulnerable to the insidious effects of social justice politics. And so a querulous chief officer cadre took the police from being an organization with problems around race to — an organization with even more complex problems around race. From DEI programs to allegations of two-tier policing, senior officers indulged in an orgy of meaningless virtue signaling. Why? To fit in with the dominant political culture, one in which advancement is contingent on ideological compliance. Yes, the “canteen culture” of laddish humor is dead. Now, though, there are non-denominational prayer rooms and soulless “patrol bases” on the edge of industrial estates. Meanwhile, shiny headquarters are full of promotion-chasers wearing rainbow-lanyards.

It would be some comfort if my views were merely the grumblings of a disillusioned backwoodsman. Sadly, they’re not. There is, however, hope. The police have demonstrated an ability to pivot. To blow with the wind. If the political will exists, the police will change accordingly, if only for reasons of self-preservation. Which brings me back to my point about the current administration. Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer seems to me Conquest’s Third Law made flesh. So why not parachute in a new breed of leader, I hear you ask? They’ve tried that: there’s little point in having direct-entry senior leaders if they’re recruited from the same civil service cohort responsible for all that rot.

What’s the way forward? The party manifestos on law and order at the last election were uninspiring, just platitudes about bobbies on the beat and being tough on crime. Tough on crime? The increasingly ludicrous College of Policing takes a dim view of “zero tolerance” policing, even as it’s loathed by many academics for ideological reasons (which is a shame, because it works). Like every other part of the British state, in short, the wishes of our elected representatives play second fiddle to the civil service and special interest groups. Reform, intriguingly, offered a tiny ray of hope, promising to do away with the College. Considering many coppers refer to it as “Hogwarts”, you can imagine how they’d feel if it went.

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Not that any of this is easy. Quite aside from all those blobbish reactionaries, reforming a police force is like changing the wheels on a speeding train: you can’t just shut it down while you fix it. More to the point, meaningful change implies upending the existing political and cultural settlement. And is a Leftist government — by which I mean Highgate Left, not Hartlepool Left — likely to accept the challenge?

Beyond targeting “far-Right” rioters and Facebook posters, the answer is obviously no, even as a leaked Home Office-commissioned report on the disturbances suggests large segments of the British establishment are happy wallowing in clichés over “behaviors of concern”. Even the public itself is a potential stumbling block here: we like robust policing in principle, until we’re actually policed robustly. Just recall clown-show decisions by the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IPOC), let alone the old saw that a conservative’s a liberal who’s been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.

Yet with officers increasingly charged with serving an increasingly balkanized society, to say nothing of rising anarcho-tyranny in towns and cities, perhaps we no longer have the luxury of being policed by consent, reforming chainsaws or not. All the while, the question looms: what will happen when the next disaster finally, inevitably, arrives? I suspect the constables behind the riot shields will offer a familiar answer: TJF.

That analysis severely understates the case. In truth, the Department of Government Efficiency could be one of the biggest gifts that the consulting giants have received in decades. And if Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are not careful, these leaders of the DOGE experiment risk ensuring that the McKinseys and EYs of the world hamstring the very goals their new department was established for: finding savings for taxpayers and refocusing government on its most essential functions.

As Musk and Ramaswamy outlined in a recent op-ed, the DOGE exists to implement the rulings of two recent Supreme Court cases. Taken together, these rulings demand that judges no longer defer to executive agencies’ own interpretations of laws, while also denying the agencies the right to impose new regulations without specific authorisation from Congress. By recommending cuts in these in-house regulations to Trump, the pair plan to trim their headcount to only the numbers needed to implement those responsibilities authorised by Congress.

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How much trimming might the DOGE be able to do? The current Federal headcount suggests quite a bit. Excluding active members of the military, it employs about 0.6% of the US population. That encompasses some two million Americans, scattered across 15 cabinet-level agencies and a range of other functions. Excluding defence, five of those agencies, including Treasury and Agriculture, employ 70,000 people or more. With Trump promising to bring back his “Schedule F” executive order, rescinded by Joe Biden, he may have the power to make deep cuts to the civil service starting early in his term.

Even with such a large workforce, the Federal government is already one of the consulting industry’s top clients, accounting for around $23.5 billion of the industry’s annual revenue. In practice, that represents some 30,000 projects, scattered everywhere from healthcare to infrastructure. Over time, many departments have come to rely on consulting as a sort of temp agency — increasing their labour force flexibility while permitting them to undertake projects far from the prying eyes of congressional oversight. The same can’t necessarily be said of foreign rivals like China: McKinsey, one of the CCP’s favourite foreign consulting firms, has also advised the Pentagon on its F-35 programme, while also providing management counsel to the Air Force and Space Force.

It is not unlikely that as the DOGE ramps up its promised headcount reductions in federal agencies, those agencies will increasingly fill the gap with consultants. It is just as likely that many of the same career civil servants cut from the Federal government via DOGE will wind up as consultants, working for McKinsey or Booz Allen, and covertly doing much the same work they were doing before. In its efforts to dismantle the so-called deep state, the administration may therefore inadvertently push the civil service into the arms of the private sector. The taxpayer would still foot the bill here, but that work would be paid for via consulting contract fees instead of government salaries.

Such a migration would be harmful for several reasons. First, it would thwart the incoming administration’s electoral mandate to reduce spending and roll back the scope of the state. Second, it would also push projects further away from the accountability of lawmakers and the executives, let alone the voters themselves. There’s also a national security dimension here. As Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley showed in a recent report on McKinsey’s China portfolio, the spread of consultants could put even more privileged government information into the hands of firms that also work for our geopolitical adversaries. And while consulting firms swear by the information firewall they impose between projects, these promises are dubious when so much money changes hands.

That’s clear enough from Rubio and Hawley’s report, which discovered a large percentage of McKinsey work involved both Chinese state-owned firms and the CCP itself. In particular, that included the CCP’s “Made in China 2025” scheme, aimed at asserting Chinese technological superiority over the US and other rivals. Firms that McKinsey advised were also responsible for constructing artificial islands in the South China Sea, an effort intended to challenge American superiority in the Pacific.

The good news is that there is plenty that the new administration can do to close this consulting loophole and allow the DOGE to operate without fear that public sector cuts will just be made private.

For one thing, Trump must improve on his first-term efforts at filling mid-level appointments across executive agencies. Speed is crucial. In 2016, according to data from the Center for Presidential Transition, he had submitted nominations to the Senate for only 72 of about 1,200 senate confirmable positions, resulting in only 28 confirmations. His predecessor, Barack Obama, had by that point in his tenure submitted 190 nominations, resulting in 67 confirmations. Unsurprisingly, by the final year of Trump’s first term, 30% of confirmable Cabinet department positions remained vacant.

This time, Trump must regard each vacancy as a vital beachhead to carry his agenda forward across executive agencies. Vacant leadership positions create a vacuum in which business can happen behind the president’s back. While it will be the DOGE’s role to do a once-over of each agency, recommending cuts to the president, Trump’s appointees will be responsible for ensuring that those cuts stay made rather than being outsourced.

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Second, Trump should create a function within the Office of Management and the Budget to monitor consulting contracts across the Federal government. Each year, this office would report to the president on the number of contracts being made, their length, their cost, and their substance. That way, the administration can quickly flag irregularities around consulting contracting, before promptly addressing them through its appointed representatives in the agencies.

Lastly, the Administration must, in collaboration with Congress, ensure that cuts made by the DOGE are followed up with commensurate budget cuts. If the administration cuts an agency’s headcount and functions by 30%, but Congress only cuts its funding in the next year’s budget by 15%, that creates an environment rife for outside procurement, and for the entrenchment of a new deep state even less accountable to the voters than the last one.

The DOGE is the boldest attempt to roll back the administrative state in decades. It’s unique in its accountability to the American people, since Musk and Ramaswamy are both external appointees who will not draw government salaries; neither will the hordes of back-office workers supporting the project, who Musk has been recruiting on X. At the same time, however, the volunteer-driven DOGE will not be around to check the cuts it recommends are actually implemented. That responsibility falls to the White House, and to Congress, which must ensure not merely that the deep state stays cut in the public sector, but that it isn’t reborn in the private sector instead.

Those days are long gone. Since her triumph in 2022, and as some of us foresaw, Meloni has eased herself into the Euro-Atlantic consensus. Adopting a conciliatory attitude towards the EU, she’s also ensured Italy’s full compliance with the bloc’s austerity-driven economic framework. Meanwhile, the Italian premier also became a vocal supporter of Nato hawkishness in Ukraine, building strong ties with Joe Biden.

Taken together, then, you get the sense that Meloni gambled her political survival on shedding her populist image and rushing in the opposite direction, becoming more pro-European and more pro-American than your average European centrist. Now, however, the liberal media is aflame once more. Chatter about Meloni’s political journey started in September, when she was presented with a “Global Citizen Award” at the Atlantic Council in New York. Beyond the think tank’s Atlanticist flavour, what really got politicos talking was who gave Meloni her prize: one Elon Musk. This has fuelled speculation about a potential political (re)alignment with Trump on Meloni’s part. Given the mercurial South African’s financial and political support for Trump’s presidential run — and the (denied) allegations of a burgeoning romance between the businessman and the Prime Minister — these claims don’t feel completely fanciful.

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Meloni, for her part, hasn’t done much to dampen the rumours of a reactionary revival. She’s admittedly been careful not to endorse either candidate in the US election, stressing she’ll work with whoever wins. But it’s also clear that she’s well-positioned to become one of Trump’s key European partners should he reclaim the White House in November. In part, that’s thanks to her long-standing ties to the broader MAGA movement. In 2018, to give one example, Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon was a keynote speaker at a political festival organised by her Brothers of Italy party. 

That’s reflected by more recent moves too. In a clear nod to national conservatives in Washington, Meloni told her audience at the Atlantic Council that “we should not be ashamed to use and defend words and concepts like nation and patriotism”. At the same time, Brothers of Italy’s recent decision to vote against a European Parliament resolution allowing Ukraine to use Western weapons on Russian soil should also be seen as a nod to MAGA’s scepticism of Western support for Ukraine — and an indication of Meloni’s willingness to shift Italy’s foreign policy if Trump wins in November.

Taken together, and especially given the looming American elections, Meloni’s decision to receive her prize from Musk could therefore be part of a wider strategy. Aimed at rekindling ties with American conservatives, that surely makes sense, especially when Musk’s influence is expected to be significantly boosted by the tycoon’s re-election. As Francesco Giubilei, a Meloni acolyte, lately told Le Monde, the Prime Minister must be both “a force for struggle” and a force for government. “She’s very cautious, waiting to see who will win the election and maintaining her ties with Trump’s world to benefit should he win.” 

So could Meloni’s recent moves be signalling a return to her radical roots? I think not. At its core, rather, this story is less about policy — and more about cold hard cash, both in Italy itself and further afield. That’s clear enough if you put aside the trees, Meloni and Musk, and instead focus on the woods: the Atlantic Council that offered Meloni her prize. The think tank euphemistically describes itself as a nonpartisan organisation that “galvanises” US global leadership and encourages engagement with its friends and allies. In plain English, that means that the Atlantic Council exists to promote the interests of US corporations — and American imperial interests more generally. Founded in the Sixties, to boost political support for Nato, today it remains active on transatlantic security issues. 

More to the point, the organisation’s corporate partners and funders include many of the US’s largest firms, operating across finance, defence, energy and tech. A range of Nato governments also supports the Atlantic Council, as indeed does the alliance itself. No wonder it’s gained a reputation for aggressively lobbying for American financial and corporate interests worldwide. In 2014, for instance, FedEx teamed up with the Atlantic Council to build support for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a proposed trade agreement between the EU and US aimed at shielding transnational corporations from public oversight, and which was ultimately abandoned in the face of public opposition. 

More recently, WikiLeaks’s US diplomatic cables leak revealed that the Atlantic Council worked closely with Chevron and ExxonMobil to undermine a Brazilian legislative proposal to grant Petrobras, a local state-owned corporation, chief control of the oil fields off the country’s coast. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, meanwhile, the organisation has distinguished itself for its very hawkish approach to the conflict, perhaps unsurprising given the number of defence companies among its backers. 

Given all this, one might reasonably speculate that the Atlantic Council’s grooming of Meloni has little to do with US partisan politics — the organisation is, in fact, quite distant from Trumpism — and more about expanding the influence of US capital in the Bel Paese. Even Musk’s cosy relationship with the Prime Minister seems to be about more than just “shared values” and soft feelings. In June, the Italian government approved a new regulatory framework that grants foreign space companies permission to operate in the country. It’s no secret that, in this context, Musk aims to make Starlink the country’s main “white area” internet provider, in other words for places not covered by wired or mobile alternatives. That, in turn, has the potential to displace domestic rivals like Open Fiber and Tim, which Musk accuses of obstructing the rollout of his high-speed internet.

Nor is Musk the only US investor ingratiating himself with Meloni. After returning from her bash in New York, she also met with Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company. With assets worth $10 trillion, the firm boasts the equivalent of Germany and Japan’s combined GDP. In Italy itself, BlackRock is comfortably the largest foreign institutional investor on the Milan Stock Exchange, owning substantial stakes in some of the country’s largest listed companies. The firm is bolstering its Italian presence elsewhere too. Earlier this year, for instance, Meloni oversaw the sale of Tim’s entire fixed-line network to KKR, a US fund that boasts BlackRock among its main institutional investors. 

Beyond the fact that the network represents a strategic national asset, with its sensitive user data now effectively under foreign control, these varied moves represent the culmination of a long sequence of privatisations and selling-off of Italian public and private assets beginning back in the Nineties. Once you dovetail that with BlackRock’s future plans — among other things, it hopes to snatch up Italy’s highway and railway networks, currently under public or semi-public control — the country looks set to become little more than an outpost of American capital, losing what little is left of its economic sovereignty. 

That this should be happening under a nominally “sovereigntist” prime minister is remarkable enough — but what really matters is the way US investors, notably BlackRock, are using Italy as a Trojan horse to expand their influence right across Europe. Consider the example of Germany. Unlike other countries, companies in Munich or Hamburg largely remain in the hands of the families that founded them. Local investors have substantial influence too, as does KFW, the public bank dedicated to supporting the Federal Republic’s industrial development.

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In practice, that means the penetration of BlackRock and other US mega-funds in the German economy remains relatively marginal. That’s an anomaly that US capital now seems intent on fixing, using Italy as its battering ram. Last month, for instance, Milan’s UniCredit bank announced a surprise hostile takeover of Commerzbank, effectively becoming the Frankfurt outfit’s largest shareholder. Though this caused some patriotic fervour among Italian commentators — an Italian bank taking over a German rival! — the reality is that the move was likely spearheaded by BlackRock itself, which executed the move with the help of other Anglo-American funds, all to consolidate its control of Germany’s financial system. No wonder Larry Fink welcomed the move. “Europe,” he said, “needs a stronger capital markets system and a more unified banking system.” 

What we are witnessing, in short, is the economic cannibalisation of Europe by US capital. Not that we should be surprised. As Emmanuel Todd, a French historian, writes in his latest book: “As its power diminishes worldwide, the American system ultimately ends up burdening its protectorates more and more, as they remain the last bases of its power.” With European industry crucial to US interests, Todd continues, we should expect more “systemic exploitation” of Rome and Berlin from the imperial centre in Washington. The fact that this is happening under the auspices of a self-described “patriot” like Meloni only highlights the grotesque weakness of European politics.