To Win America, Win the Story

Demonstrators and lawmakers protested President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s shutdown of foreign aid at a rally on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Before we get started, let me ask for your help. It’s been a tough stretch for all of us. I’ve been doing what I can to pursue kickass journalism that produces scoops about Donald Trump’s worst nominees, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (here, here, here, here, here), Kash Patel (here, here, here), and Tulsi Gabbard (here) and articles that provide context necessary for understanding the profound crisis and dangers at hand—stories that you won’t find elsewhere. If you appreciate this, please consider supporting Our Land by becoming a premium subscriber, if you’re not one already. You’ll receive more content and features than what’s in the limited version and be able to join the Our Land Zoom get-togethers. But, most important, you’ll help us keep this newsletter going as we navigate this challenging period in which democracy and decency are under siege. Without the support of premium subscribers, there would not be any version of Our Land. Thank you for considering this request...and hang in there. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

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 the Trump 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.

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. (See Dumbass Comment of the Week below.) 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.”

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 is merely the first and most vulnerable casualty of their war on the inept and capricious feds. That’s how they want Americans to see their crusade, and the media are helping them.

A few days ago, 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 work force 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.

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. Last week, 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.

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 the most recent issue of this 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.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

There’s nothing like a constitutional crisis to trigger loads of idiocy. On Trump fanboy Charlie Kirk’s podcast, Meghan McCain extolled Tulsi Gabbard, the onetime apologist for dictators Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad nominated by Donald Trump to be director of national intelligence, and issued a threat against Republican senators:

If anyone votes against her, I promise you I will do anything in my power to make sure there are consequences for this...You can’t give me a real reason why you don’t like Tulsi other than you listened to some propaganda on the internet…I do think we’re going to get her over the line. But if for some reason we don’t, there will be hell to pay.

It’s always sad to see good genes go to waste. John McCain, her late father, would have passionately opposed placing a lapdog for dictators and a purveyor of Russian disinformation in charge of the US intelligence community. And he certainly would not have threatened anyone who voted against such a nominee. But for his daughter, cult loyalty reigns over national interest.

Here was more cultish behavior: Discussing Trump’s tariff threats with White House aide Stephen Miller, Fox host Larry Kudlow noted it was unclear what Trump was trying to achieve with his trade war. But he added, "I'm supporting what you all are doing. I'm just trying to figure out what exactly it may be."

Blind acceptance without understanding is an element of faith...and cultism.

In deciding to vote for the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a doctor who has been a big supporter of vaccination programs and who had previously expressed strong reservations about Kennedy, said he had received “serious commitments” from the White House and RFK Jr. These supposedly included Kennedy accepting existing federal policies and recommendation on vaccines. Anyone familiar with Kennedy’s record on vaccines—which includes repeated lies about his opposition to all vaccines—knows that nothing that RFK Jr. says on this subject can be trusted. Cassidy is aware of this. Up for reelection next year and obviously worried about being primaried by a Trumper (and facing an attack financed by tens of millions of dollars from Elon Musk), he took a dive to avoid crossing Trump and MAGA. And he violated his sacred oath: First, do no harm.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), a maniacal attention-seeker waging a crusade against transgender people, used the pejorative term “tranny” during a congressional hearing. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) objected, and this exchange ensued: 

Connolly: The gentlelady has used a phrase that is considered a slur in the LGBTQ community and the transgender community.

Mace: Tranny, tranny, tranny. I don't really care. You want penises in women's bathrooms, and I’m not going to have it.

Writer (and former colleague) Adam Serwer once said of the Trump era, “cruelty is the point.” There’s a corollary: “Rudeness is the point.”

And Mace this week competes with...Mace. She managed a second nomination for a tweet: “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-A-Lago.”

It’s difficult to outdo mean-spirited bigotry. But endorsing the crime of ethnic cleansing—which Trump proposed by suggesting the Palestinians be cleared out of Gaza and the US take ownership of the strip—does achieve that.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt could qualify for multiple nominations, too. But the judges restricted her to one for this comment about Musk and his many potential conflicts of interest:

The president was already asked to answer this question this week. And he said, if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts, and he has again abided by all applicable laws.

This’s right out of Catch-22. Only Musk will determine if he’s engaged in a conflict of interest, which itself is...a conflict of interest. As Donald Kettl, a former dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told Bloomberg, “I don’t know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) showed slavish devotion to Musk by pronouncing on Fox: "I support what Elon Musk is doing. He's being very transparent with the American people.”

That was ridiculous. Musk is waging much of his campaign in secrecy. He is not even sharing with the public the identity of the people he’s inserting into the US government to gut the US government, and he has threatened legal action against reporters and citizens who publicize information about his henchmen. (They seem to be mostly, if not entirely, guys.)

As for Musk, he won this week with a record four nominations—and there could have been more. The first came for a tweet from him that boosted Russian disinformation that claimed USAID paid for American celebrities to visit Ukraine.

The second came for his endorsement of an absurd, newly minted MAGA conspiracy theory: USAID is somehow the nexus of all supposed left-wing evil, propping up the media, the Democrats, the public health community, universities, and terrorists. In response to a tweet posted by a former Trump State Department aide named Mike Benz (whose alt-right online persona pushed racist conspiracy theories) that advanced this nutty notion about USAID, Musk posted, “It’s more than just USAID, but…yes.”

And Musk reposted another tweet propagating this bunk that said: “What we’re finding out in real time is the entire modern left is just smoke and mirrors. There is no left wing voter base, all the elections are rigged and fake, all the liberal media outlets have no audience and are kept alive by USAID funding.” To this, Musk replied, “Yes.”

All this shows that Musk is delusional. How demented must one be to believe that USAID is at the center of some grand conspiracy to fund the entirety of the left, all liberal media, and nefarious operators who rig every election? Yet the fellow spreading this batcrap craziness has been granted the power (perhaps illegally) to run amok throughout the US government and demolish entire chunks of it.

And there’s one more: In another tweet, Musk exclaimed, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

Imagine saying this about an agency that has helped millions of needy people around the world escape malaria and gain access to clean water, food, and basic health care. Especially when you’re the world’s richest man and your net worth is 20 times this agency’s annual budget. What a foul soul. What a villain. Musk deserves infinite more opprobrium than this week’s lowly honor.

The recent issue on the Trump-Musk war on government and the Democrats’ slow (to be generous) start in opposing this crusade provoked much response.

Chris Randall emailed:

The Dems have never come up against a media savvy psychopath and after eight-plus years still have no idea how to deal with him. Who, where are the leaders? Steny Hoyer (85), Maxine Waters (86), Joe Biden (82), Chuck Schumer (74). The current Democratic Party is a leaderless and rudderless joke. If we never heard another word from Biden, the Clintons, Kamala Harris, Schumer, and the rest of the old guard, we would be better off for it. Who, where is this “deep bench” I keep hearing about?

I feel your pain, Chris. As I noted last week, it’s time for the Democrats to make sure that fierce and sassy figures, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Chris Murphy, are center-stage in the battle against Trump, Musk, and MAGA.

Bobby Nowell complained:

If the Democrats haven't known this was a war since George W. Bush stole the election, then they are asleep and in fact complicit in the methodical destruction of the Constitution. This has been coming for 50 years, and Democrats act like it just started in January 20, 2025. A sad state of affairs.

Harvey Berman agreed:

I have said for years that if politics is like a game of dodgeball, the Democrats lob beach balls while the Republicans hurl hand grenades. They won't accept that you need to fight the opposition on their own terms. They still try to be considerate towards someone who is trying to destroy them. We can win this fight if we use every tool at our disposal. It's a shame if they lose simply because they left their best weapons unused. I see few Democrats in Congress who are willing to fight the good fight other than AOC.

Rebecca Secor had a question:

Has Kamala Harris been banished from public life? We need her now more than ever. She was given an impossible task to win the election with too few days. She still managed to create a movement. She is the only person able to stand on the same stage with Trump and expose him for what he is: a bully and a fraud. I hope she will return soon to unite and invigorate a weary force.

She clearly has chosen to lay low for a bit, while she figures out her next steps—if there are any. I'm not sure she would be the best leader of the opposition, having just loss to Trump. But certainly she could add her voice to the pushback.

Maggie Cecil wrote in with a compliment and a request:

I’ve subscribed to Our Land for some time now because I think you’re sharp and smart and fair-minded and mostly right in your views. The past couple of weeks, I have been struggling. I wonder if you have advice for all the regular folks in the USA who are sitting at their computers and phones and seeing the meltdown of our democracy (kinda—it’s actually pretty sanitized) on TV every night. What can we do? Many are calling their representatives daily to voice opinions and concerns; many are writing emails. You’re much closer to the action than the rest of us, and you’re someone many feel they can trust (I’m one). I have lived through the civil rights movement; Roe v. Wade; Vietnam; Watergate. Nothing has prepared me for this. Can you advise any/all of your readers and followers what they might do at this time?

It's tough, Maggie. In DC people have been turning out for protests where Democratic House members and senators have decried the Musk takeover. That's been effective in getting press. There may be more protests coming, and people can certainly support those here and in your own towns and cities. Calling your representatives, even the Republican ones, is good to do, just to let them know that people are paying attention. Meanwhile, if you're in a position to donate, making contributions to groups that have lost aid or those that are fighting and mounting lawsuits can be productive. I know it can be frustrating. There are not a lot of options for opposition. The mantra needs to be everything, everywhere, all at once. 

Paul Roden had a few ideas on this front:

Since you have asked, this is what I am doing to help organize resistance to Trump:

Get people to sign petitions to get the Congress to Impeach Trump: https://tinyurl.com/3te2v3sj or https://impeachtrumpagain.org/. MoveOn also has a petition.

Read the book Why Civil Resistance Works, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.

Read the case studies on civil resistance at the Global Nonviolent Action Database at https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu. There are over 250 forms of nonviolent action catalogued. When the Tunisian and Egyptian governments shut down the internet and cellphone towers and repeaters, they used roof-top battery powered repeaters in milk crates to send walkie-talkie type messages from cell phone to cell phone. I'm afraid we will have to do the same thing.

Remember when the late Rep. John Lewis led a sit-in at the well of the House to protest the lack of gun safety debate? The House Republicans shut down the lights and the C-Span cameras. Dem senators joined in, and they used their smartphones and Periscope to video stream the sit-in for 36 hours. That is what I would like to see happen again in both Houses of the Congress.

Organize or join your own local group to build the resistance at https://mobilize.us. Indivisible is using this. I am joining a protest at my local GOP congressman's office to protest Musk trespassing and tampering with our government.

Several readers thanked me for confronting Del Bigtree, a leading anti-vaxxer and conspiracist, at one of the confirmation hearings for RFK Jr.

Pat Fox emailed:

Thanks for sharing the details about your chats with a man who seems to earn a very high salary profiteering on disinformation. He smugly believes he has a good shot at increasing his wealth, if Kennedy is confirmed. Please God, let him be wrong. But right now anything can happen, and it is hard to sit on the sideline and watch the fast-moving tsunami of horrific nominations flow. Your efforts are greatly appreciated! 

Joanie Freeman had an unusual request:

Some of my friends and I wish to send former President Biden a thank you. I’ve tried to find an address for doing so, but no luck. Seems like his contact info isn’t yet available. The media has been so unkind. We want him to know we’re grateful for what he did as president and for all the years of public service. Thanks for any information you can provide.

Hmmm. That's a good question. I, for one, do not have any contact info for the former president. He did sign with a talent agency. You probably could send a note to him care of that firm. I wonder what would happen if you sent it to the current White House and asked it to be forwarded.

“Moxie, at a time like this, how can you sleep?”
“What’s going on?”
“A multi-prong assault on democracy, the rule of law, and decency!”
“Has losing sleep due to worry ever helped you achieve a goal?”
“Uh, no.”
“I rest my case. And…I rest.”