Musk : engineering :: Trump : deal-making

We've hit this point before, but this is a good time to revisit it.

Elon Musk’s fortune rests on his reputation as a “real-life Tony Stark.” The primary reason people continue to insanely overvalue his companies is because of his mystique as an almost superhumanly gifted natural engineer who, despite his lack of formal training, will somehow be able to leapfrog over companies with more advanced technology to provide things like robotaxis, AI, and humanoid robots.

The reality is just the opposite. While Musk is able to carry off the impression of competence when phonetically repeating things his staff told him, when he goes off script, the results are invariably embarrassing. It was one of these times that got Musk on our skeptic radar: when he proposed a high-speed vac train that ran on a cushion of air. As silly as the subsequent Hyperloop startups were, none of them were stupid enough to actually use this design, substituting in a maglev approach instead. Basically, when real engineers tried to build real things, they scrapped Elon’s ideas and just kept the name.

Musk’s relationship to engineering is almost perfectly analogous to Trump's relationship to the art of the deal. His reputation as an incredibly savvy businessman was, perhaps, the key factor in his political rise, but—possibly even more than Musk—the reality is the reverse of the persona.

The widespread perception of Trump as a business genius was largely an illusion produced by a talented TV producer, augmented by relentless self-promotion and questionable business ethics (these last two further support the Musk analogy). The myth of a competent Donald Trump ignores a history of ill-conceived deals and badly run companies.

Examples of the man's inability to negotiate continue to accumulate.

From Paul Krugman:

So U.S. consumers will soon be suffering. But why are U.S. manufacturers so upset with the Japan deal? Because in combination with Trump’s other tariffs this deal actually leaves many U.S. manufacturers worse off than they were before Trump began his trade war.

This is clearest in the case of automobiles and automotive products. Trump has imposed a 25 percent tariff on all automotive imports, supposedly on national security grounds. This includes imports from Canada and Mexico. And here’s the thing: Canadian and Mexican auto products generally have substantial U.S. “content” — that is, they contain parts made in America. Japanese cars generally don’t.

But now cars from Japan will pay only a 15 percent tariff, that is, less than cars from Canada and Mexico.

OK, it’s not quite that straightforward, because imports from Canada and Mexico receive a partial exemption based on the share of their value that comes from the United States. Yes, it’s getting complicated. But we may nonetheless now be in a situation where cars whose production doesn’t create U.S. manufacturing jobs will pay a lower tariff rate than cars whose production does.

Wait, there’s more. Trump has also imposed 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, which are of course important parts of the cost of a car. Japanese manufacturers don’t pay those tariffs.

Overall, the interaction between this Japan deal and Trump’s other tariffs probably tilts the playing field between U.S. and Japanese producers of cars, and perhaps other products, in Japan’s favor.

If this sounds incredibly stupid, that’s because it is. So how did this happen?

You might imagine that making a deal with one of our most important trading partners must have involved a team of experienced, skilled negotiators backed by economic experts. But in reality it was clearly pure amateur hour. Look at the photo at the top of this post, from CNBC. It shows Trump with a card in front of him laying out one much-hyped though probably meaningless part of the deal, a promise by Japan to invest in America. How much? The card says $400 billion, but that number was crossed out by hand and replaced with $500 billion, which somehow became $550 billion in the final announcement.

Next thing you’re going to tell me that Trump will start modifying weather forecasts with a Sharpie. Oh, wait.

So Trump’s negotiators probably had no idea what they were doing, and didn’t realize that in their frantic rush to conclude a deal they were agreeing to tariffs that would be highly unfavorable to U.S. manufacturing.

Why were they frantic? Trump has been the subject of considerable mockery over having made big promises about his ability to negotiate trade deals, then coming up empty month after month. So he and his people were surely anxious to make some major announcements before his self-imposed deadline of Aug. 1 — anxious enough not to realize quite what they were agreeing to.

 

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer 1928-2025 (Part 2)

 We wrote quite a bit about Lehrer here at the blog. This week we'll be revisiting some favorites.

 

Thursday, September 27, 2018

"I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

While reading up on public perceptions of the space race during the postwar era, I was disappointed to learn that my favorite Mort Sahl line wasn't actually from Mort Sahl.

Satirist Mort Sahl has been credited with mocking von Braun by saying "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."[39] In fact that line appears in the film I Aim at the Stars, a 1960 biopic of von Braun.

Thank God we still have Lehrer.

"Wernher von Braun" (1965): A song written and performed by Tom Lehrer for an episode of NBC's American version of the BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was; the song was later included in Lehrer's albums That Was The Year That Was and The Remains of Tom Lehrer. It was a satire on what some saw as von Braun's cavalier attitude toward the consequences of his work in Nazi Germany

 

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer 1928-2025 (Part 1)

We wrote quite a bit about Lehrer here at the blog. This week we'll be revisiting some favorites.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Dying is easy; comedy is hard -- journalism edition

"When they see us coming, the birdies all try an' hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide."

It started with poisoning pigeons in the park.

Maybe I should be more specific.

It started a few weeks ago when I heard the song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" as part of a Tom Lehrer* tribute on Prairie Home Companion. Impressed by the wit of the lyrics (the man rhymed cyanide, for God's sake) I decided to see what a professional song writer would think about Lehrer.

My go-to guy in these matters is Brad Kay, songwriter, music historian and former mystic knight. Brad can be a tough critic, particularly if your name isn't something like Gershwin, Waller or Ellington, but if I was expecting him to be dismissive of someone who was just a comic songwriter I was in for a surprise.

Brad had literally nothing but praise for Tom Lehrer. He talked about how graceful and apt Lehrer's choice of words was and about profoundly he understood each of the genres he worked on. This led to discussions of Spike Jones (who was an accomplished and successful percussionist before he started using gunshots and noisemakers in his music) and P.D.Q. Bach (who as Peter Schickele has composed a large number of well-regarded symphonies, musicals, and film scores). All of this suggested that the first requirement for creating comic music of more than passing interest was being a good musician.

It's probably not surprising that the general public has trouble taking the creators of comedy seriously, but their peers have no such difficulty. P.G. Wodehouse counted George Orwell among his fans. Any number of dancers and acrobats have commented on the grace and athleticism of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton (Keaton was particularly remarkable having mastered that most difficult of athletic feats, the controlled fall, by age three). As for acting, it's almost a truism that comic actors can easily do drama while dramatic actors often struggle with comedy.

So if the best musicians, writers, dancers and actors can be found doing great comedy, how about journalists?

The following clip [Sadly now a dead link -- MP]  is a thoroughly typical segment of the Daily Show. Take a look and consider it from a journalistic standpoint. Look at how clear and concise Stewart is. Check out how important but underreported facts are introduced and how everything is placed in a relevant context. I wonder how many hours of cable news you'd have to watch to meet the standards of just another Daily Show?

*Arguably the world's coolest mathematics professor.

 

Dan Froomkin discusses why Epstein is the only Trump scandal the mainstream press isn't afraid to cover

 

 

 Yesterday I made a passing reference to the role that this being Republican-on-Republican violence made the story an acceptable target for respectable news organizations. 

While Trump's long, close friendship with Epstein had been well known for years, Musk was able to get it on MAGA’s radar, which re-energized the scandal. Suddenly the story wasn't the president's creepy relationship with arguably the world's most famous pedophile; it was the base's reaction to that relationship.

 I meant to come back to this idea, but now, thanks to veteran press critic Dan Froomkin, I don't have to.

From Why can’t journalists cover democracy like they cover Epstein? 

Coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal shows that mainstream journalists still have the capacity to latch onto a story and not let go.

They’ve thrown everything they’ve got at this story, and delivered the goods. Every day there’s something Epstein to report about: New reactions, old reactions, new evidence, old evidence, fresh quotes, old quotes.

They’re reaching out to sources, mining the archives, asking everyone what they think.

Print journalists are not letting this story fall off the tops of their front pages no matter what. Cable news anchors are leading their newscasts with it on the hour, one after another.

It’s impressive.

But now that we know that our top journalists can sustain a major story and stoke public outrage when they choose to, the question arises: Why haven’t they done that with other stories whose long-term significance in many ways dwarfs this sordid sex scandal?

OK, yes, I get it: The Epstein scandal represents the first major split between Trump and his base, which until now has been resolutely behind him. That’s new, and therefore news.

The story also has sex.

But most of all, the reason our top journalists are so excited about this story is because, for once, the criticism of Trump is coming from “both sides.”

The leaders of our top newsrooms are pathologically afraid of being accused of partisanship. So only if people on “both sides” agree does the media consider something a real scandal.

That effectively gives the right veto power over what the media cares about. If the right presents a united front, the coverage — even of threats to American democracy, or to the planet — will be listless and sporadic. Which it is.

But I would argue that if you weren’t afraid of accusations of partisanship there are many bigger and more consequential scandals that deserve the all-hands-on-deck, keep-the-story-on-the-front-page treatment Epstein is getting.

 

A few quick thoughts on the latest Epstein news.

Nicole Lafond writing for Talking Points Memo:

By now you’ve maybe seen the news that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is, effectively, shutting down the House’s legislative work and sending everyone home early for August recess in order to block any House floor action on the release of investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased convicted sex offender.

His rationale for all of this is two-fold. He says that after conversations with the White House and President Trump, he believes that lawmakers need to give the executive branch “space” to do the work they are already doing to release the files. This supposed work to make the documents public is only a few days old. Trump only directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into unsealing grand jury material in the case (a maneuver that will likely yield little) after a week of bad-for-Trump headlines — spurred by his own Justice Department’s decision to not release any more info to the public. A growing rift began to emerge last week not just among Trump’s MAGA base of conspiracy theorist influencers, but within the Republican Party as well.

At least 10 House Republicans had indicated they would join Democrats in supporting a bipartisan resolution sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), which calls for releasing a lot more from the Epstein investigative files than the Trump administration is currently looking into unsealing. Massie and Khanna planned to use a procedural move, a discharge petition, to compel a vote on the matter.

As is so often the case in 2025, it's important to remind ourselves just how bizarre these events are. The Democratic resistance has struck an extraordinary blow in the Republican-controlled House based on a scandal most of which was in the public record a decade ago.

It is also important to remember that without Elon Musk—or, more precisely, the Musk/Trump feud—none of this would have happened. Just to recap the events: Musk made a number of bitter enemies in the White House, sometimes leading to actual physical confrontations. When he left, one or more of those enemies dropped the dime on him with The New York Times and provided the paper with the photographs and videos behind their exposé. No one likes having their drug habits and weird family life exposed in the paper of record and, as mentioned before, Elon Musk is even more vindictive and driven by rage than Donald Trump. Musk used his powerful right-wing platform to pound the Epstein drum.

While Trump's long, close friendship with Epstein had been well known for years, Musk was able to get it on MAGA’s radar, which re-energized the scandal. Suddenly the story wasn't the president's creepy relationship with arguably the world's most famous pedophile; it was the base's reaction to that relationship.

Once the press, particularly The Wall Street Journal, got going on this one, it was inevitable that damaging revelations would start gushing forth. The Wall Street Journal started things with the story that prompted the lawsuit from Trump. The New York Times, in catch-up mode, rushed forward with their own story a couple of days later, followed by one where CNN dug through old unaired footage and photos and uncovered a wealth of material. This was followed by the WSJ coming out with yet another story, this time revealing that Trump had been lying when claiming that Bondi never told him he was in the Epstein files.

I'm not going to speculate on how long this will continue other than to say I suspect we still have at least a little ways to go. I'm certainly not going to hazard a guess as to what impact this will have on the midterms and beyond. The situation is complicated, and we have no real precedent to guide us. I will say, however, that those who dismissed the Trump/Musk feud and the re-emergence of the scandal as sensationalistic distractions probably need to rethink some of their assumptions.

John Michael Osbourne 1948-2025

 Ozzy Osbourne, as you probably heard, passed away this week. He had an extraordinarily long and successful career, produced lots of memorable music, and greatly influenced the evolution of heavy metal music.

He also was a reminder that, if you stick around for long enough, respectability comes for us all.

When Osbourne made the jump to solo artist, he was perhaps known less for his music and more for what previous generations knew as a geek act. Though there had been outrageous stage shows before him—particularly Alice Cooper—the Grand Guignol there never pretended to be real. Ozzy Osbourne was known for biting the heads off actual pigeons and bats (though there is some disagreement about which, if any, of the animals were alive at the time).

You might think that sort of reputation would haunt a performer, but infamy fades, and oldies have a way of becoming safe and comforting regardless of their original context. Still, there were a few of us who did raise an eyebrow when a fast-casual dining chain picked this song for one of their commercials.

 

The Talking Tina Fallacy

 [If you want to get picky, that's Talky Tina.*]

The Talking Tina fallacy is the tendency to ascribe sentience, emotions—and often supernatural properties—to any non-human animal or object that uses language, be it a trained parrot, a mechanical device, or a piece of electronics.

 

LLMs were all but designed to play on the Talking Tina fallacy. Even when the responses are total gibberish, they still have the superficial indicators of language proficiency. The word choice seems appropriate. The phrasing is natural. The rhythms and alliteration have a familiar feel.

These moments where we get the linguistic form captured perfectly but with no underlying sense should be a reminder of what the algorithm is—and is not—doing: that each word or phrase is being generated not based on meaning but simply on patterns in the training data.

Even here, though, our human compulsion to project makes us see things that aren't there. The very term “hallucination” implies that something different is going on—that these nonsensical answers represent some kind of malfunction in the model. But the process that tells us that the square root of 4 is an irrational number is exactly the same as the process that tells us the square root of 2 is. 

Human communication starts with meaning. We then try to find words to convey those ideas, information, feelings. LLMs start with generating words that match the phrasing and patterns found in the data they were trained on, and quite often, by getting the form correct, they also produce what we as humans see as meaning. It is entirely something we are projecting upon the algorithm’s responses—but that doesn't necessarily make it valueless, as long as we understand the almost diametrically opposed approach that the computer is taking compared to what we would do.

Right now, LLMs are novelties of highly limited use in the real world. If we are to move beyond that and actually take advantage of what might be the biggest advance in natural language processing ever, we need to have a clear mental model of what they're doing—and how we can or can't make use of them.

If we have a clear and detailed understanding of what's going on, we can find all sorts of ways to use these wonderful tools. More importantly, we can know when not to use them. 

* "Talky Tina" was a play on and used the same voice as the then popular "Chatty Cathy," which undoubtedly made the episode even creepier at the time.

Checking in with LA weather. It’s nice.

 Burbank.

 

I frequently feel the need to throw good news in because East Coast journalists will so gleefully report anything bad that happens in Southern California, invariably giving it much more attention than they would far worse disasters anywhere else in the country. Recent case in point: the horrific flooding in Texas.

This pleasant weather is partially the result of the seasonal lag. The hottest part of summer in Southern California comes weeks after the summer solstice, with average temperatures in September being only a degree or so lower than those of August and considerably warmer than July, with the occasional triple-digit day popping up in October.

There are few things which longtime residents find more annoying than New Yorkers complaining that there’s no weather in Los Angeles. There are also few comments that display greater ignorance of the region.

I’ve lived oceanfront on both coasts and in quite a few places in between, and this is the only town I know of where people will call up friends within the city limits and ask, “What’s the weather like where you are?”

This is partly due to the sheer size of the place. The area of the city is just under 500 square miles. The area of the county is close to 5,000 square miles. That said, the bigger factors relate to terrain. The elevation of the city goes from zero to over 5,000 feet. For the county, it’s over 10,000. Both have snow every year.

The county covers coastal areas, mountains, valleys, high deserts, and low deserts. I’ve heard local meteorologists claim that this produces seven distinct microclimates. The TV weather forecasts are broken up into multiple sections for this reason.

One result is that you will experience stunning ranges of conditions often within a few miles of each other. A few years ago, while driving the 405 from North Hollywood, my car’s thermometer dropped more than 30° in the space of about a dozen miles.

I’m not much of a traveler, but I’ve been around the continent a fair amount — particularly the contiguous 48 — mostly by car, so I’ve actually seen it. And I’ve never encountered anything like LA weather in terms of complexity, contrast, or quirks.

There’s a bigger lesson here. If California weather is more varied and interesting than you’ve been led to believe by the national press, perhaps the impression you’ve gotten about other aspects of the state — its culture, its economics, its politics, the problems it faces with housing and wildfires — are also more complex than you realize.

All so the son of a loony Silicon Valley billionaire can have his own studio.

It’s easy to forget now, but for at least half of the 20th century, CBS had one of the premier news organizations in the country. People still talk about Edward R. Murrow standing up to Joseph McCarthy, but if anything, the network did even more important and courageous work during Vietnam and Watergate—often better than The Washington Post or The New York Times. Now we’ve seen all three of those organizations caving to authoritarian pressure.

I don’t want to view the past through rose-colored glasses, but I’ve read quite a bit about the reporting of those events and about what was going on behind the scenes, and I honestly believe that the people who ran these organizations back then would have shown more courage and character if they were around today.

For CBS, we all knew it was over after the 60 Minutes settlement, but the firing of Colbert removes even the pretense of anything more than cowardice and corruption.

Closing with a favorite clip from Colbert's early days.

"Once you get used to all the swords, the Throne of Damocles is actually quite comfortable."

Early yesterday, a story broke that, in normal times, would have sent shock waves through the financial world.

Wall Street in 2025 resembles a flock of particularly stupid chickens—scurrying for shelter at the shadow of a hawk, then immediately forgetting the threat the moment the shadow passes.

This attempt to undermine and force out Powell is an ongoing effort that neither started nor ended yesterday.

Apologies for stating the obvious, but historically one of the most effective weapons in the fight against inflation has been the belief that the Fed will not allow it to get out of control. This is one of the many arguments for an independent Federal Reserve—and if memory serves, it was part of the problem when inflation started running wild during the Nixon administration.

[Memory was right for once.]

Once people lose faith that the Fed will do what it takes to keep things running smoothly, the remedies required to set things right become far more severe and painful. At least, that was the lesson of the late 1970s and early '80s.

Of course, that's only one of many swords. We're also talking about more than decimating our agricultural workforce, imposing tariffs more severe than Smoot-Hawley, greatly increasing the deficit, and having the U.S. economy led by whoever gets to the president first in the morning.

Does anyone else see any signs that these risks are being priced in

I so wish Clyde Schechter had been wrong on this one

Yesterday, you had to scroll to the bottom of the NYT webpage for any mention of the scandal that's tearing the MAGA movement apart (seriously, take a look). Today, not so much.

 

This is just the latest example of the New York Times dragging its feet on stories likely to anger Republicans then jumping on the bandwagon when people start to notice. They've been at it at least as long as we've been keeping notes In a case of things coming full circle, eight years ago we were criticizing the paper for burying the scandal of Trump bribing then–Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The coverage almost always follows the same pattern: initial downplaying—or in some cases, outright embargo—until the story gets big enough that ignoring it starts generating criticism and even mockery. At that point, the paper jumps in, and afterwards tries to retcon the timeline to make it look like they were the ones who broke the story all along.

In addition to the Bondi bribery case and the handling of Epstein/MAGA this week, other notable examples include the TikTok scandal and the incident at Arlington National Cemetery.

Here's what we were saying back in 2016. I was wildly overoptimistic about how the non-NYT press would handle the rise of Trump, but the rest of the piece is still relevant as is, unfortunately, the comment at the end.. 

 

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

"Why do you hate us for caring too much?" – – Dispatches from a besieged institution

Public Editor
From Wikipedia

The job of the public editor is to supervise the implementation of proper journalism ethics at a newspaper, and to identify and examine critical errors or omissions, and to act as a liaison to the public. They do this primarily through a regular feature on a newspaper's editorial page. Because public editors are generally employees of the very newspaper they're criticizing, it may appear as though there is a possibility for bias. However, a newspaper with a high standard of ethics would not fire a public editor for a criticism of the paper; the act would contradict the purpose of the position and would itself be a very likely cause for public concern.

I don't want to impose a template, but generally one expects public editors to serve as the internal representative of external critical voices, or at least to see to it that these voices get a fair hearing. A typical column might start with acknowledging complaints about something like the paper's lack of coverage of poor neighborhoods. The public editor would then discuss some possible lapses on the paper's part, get some comments from the editor in charge, and then, as a rule, either encourage the paper to improve its coverage in this area or, at the very least, take a neutral position acknowledging that both the critics and the paper have a point.

Here are some examples from two previous public editors of the New York Times.


Clark Hoyt

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not. But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

Margaret Sullivan

Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others.

What I’ll lay out here was a bad one. It involved a failure of sufficient skepticism at every level of the reporting and editing process — especially since the story in question relied on anonymous government sources, as too many Times articles do.

…

The Times needs to fix its overuse of unnamed government sources. And it needs to slow down the reporting and editing process, especially in the fever-pitch atmosphere surrounding a major news event. Those are procedural changes, and they are needed. But most of all, and more fundamental, the paper needs to show far more skepticism – a kind of prosecutorial scrutiny — at every level of the process.

Two front-page, anonymously sourced stories in a few months have required editors’ notes that corrected key elements – elements that were integral enough to form the basis of the headlines in both cases. That’s not acceptable for Times readers or for the paper’s credibility, which is its most precious asset.

If this isn’t a red alert, I don’t know what will be.

But these are strange days at the New York Times and the new public editor is writing columns that are not only a sharp break with those of her predecessors, but seem to violate the very spirit of the office.

In particular, Liz Spayd is catching a great deal of flak for a piece that almost manages to invert the typical public editor column. It starts by grossly misrepresenting widespread criticisms of the paper, goes on to openly attack the critics making the charges, then pleads with the paper's staff to toe the editorial line and ignore the very voices that a public editor would normally speak for .


[Emphasis added]

The Truth About ‘False Balance’

False balance, sometimes called “false equivalency,” refers disparagingly to the practice of journalists who, in their zeal to be fair, present each side of a debate as equally credible, even when the factual evidence is stacked heavily on one side.

There has been a great deal of speculation as to what drives false equivalency, with the leading contenders being a desire to maintain access to high-placed sources, long-standing personal biases against certain politicians, a fear of reprisal, a desire to avoid charges of liberal bias, and simple laziness (a cursory both-sides-do-it story is generally much easier to write than a well investigated piece). Caring too much about fairness hardly ever makes the list and it certainly has no place in the definition.

Spayd then accuses the people making these charges of being irrational, shortsighted, and partisan.

I can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support of liberal causes and candidates. CNN’s Brian Stelter focused his show, “Reliable Sources,” on this subject last weekend. He asked a guest, Jacob Weisberg of Slate magazine, to frame the idea of false balance. Weisberg used an analogy, saying journalists are accustomed to covering candidates who may be apples and oranges, but at least are still both fruits. In Trump, he said, we have not fruit but rancid meat. That sounds like a partisan’s explanation passed off as a factual judgment.

But, as Jonathan Chait points out, Weisberg has no record of being a Hillary Clinton booster. The charge here is completely circular. He is partisan because he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump and he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump because he is partisan.

But the most extraordinary part of the piece and one which reminds us just how strange the final days of 2016 are becoming is the conclusion.

I hope Times journalists won’t be intimidated by this argument. I hope they aren’t mindlessly tallying up their stories in a back room to ensure balance, but I also hope they won’t worry about critics who claim they are. What’s needed most is forceful, honest reporting — as The Times has produced about conflicts circling the foundation; and as The Washington Post did this past week in surfacing Trump’s violation of tax laws when he made a $25,000 political contribution to a campaign group connected to Florida’s attorney general as her office was investigating Trump University.

Fear of false balance is a creeping threat to the role of the media because it encourages journalists to pull back from their responsibility to hold power accountable. All power, not just certain individuals, however vile they might seem.

Putting aside the curious characterization of the Florida AG investigation as a tax evasion story (which is a lot like describing the Watergate scandal as a burglary story or Al Capone as a tax evader), equating her paper's pursuit of the Clinton foundation with the Washington Post's coverage of Trump is simply surreal on a number of levels.

For starters, none of the Clinton foundation stories have revealed significant wrongdoing. Even Spayd, who is almost comically desperate to portray her employer in the best possible light, had to concede that “some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did.” By comparison, the Washington Post investigation continues to uncover self-dealing, misrepresentation, tax evasion, misuse of funds, failure to honor obligations, ethical violations, general sleaziness and blatant quid prop quo bribery.

More importantly, the Washington Post has explicitly attacked and implicitly abandoned Spayd's position. Here's how the Post summed it up in an editorial that appeared two days before the NYT column.

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

Charles Pierce's characteristically pithy response to this editorial was "The Washington Post Just Declared War on The New York Times -- And with good reason, too."

If is almost as if Spayd thinks it's 2000, when the NYT could set the conventional wisdom, could decide which narratives would followed and which public figures would be lauded or savaged. Spayd does understand that there is a battle going on for the soul of journalism, but she does not seem to understand that the alliances have changed, and the New York Times is about to find itself in a very lonely position.

 

 

 

 

Always interesting to see how the NYT handles a story the GOP would rather not talk about.

 I'm not talking so much about the actual reporting (some of which is quite good) as much as the editorial side. How do they frame it. Are the headlines fair vs. biased or leaning? Do they stick with it? Do they push it or downplay it?

Let's see what the website has on the MAGA Epstein rift.

Nothing there. Let's zoom out.

 Still nothing. Let's keep zooming out until we find something. 

There it is. Don't you see, it's right there. 

I apparently wasn't the only one to comment on this because sometime between early afternoon and now the NYT homepage was updated to have Epstein in the second-to-top group of stories. 

This is why we use the prt sc button. 

 

Feral disinformation, blood feuds, and a lifetime supply of schadenfreude — it's been quite the weekend.

In case you missed it, some serious rifts have opened up in Trump World.

Eric Tucker writing for the AP.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department and FBI are struggling to contain the fallout from this week’s decision to withhold records from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation, which rankled influential far-right media personalities and supporters of President Donald Trump.

The move, which included the acknowledgment that one particular sought-after document never actually existed, sparked a contentious conversation between Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino at the White House this week. The spat threatened to shatter relations between them and centered in part on a news story that described divisions between the FBI and the Justice Department.

The cascade of disappointment and disbelief arising from the refusal to disclose additional, much-hyped records from the Epstein investigation underscores the struggles of FBI and Justice Department leaders to resolve the conspiracy theories and amped-up expectations that they themselves had stoked with claims of a cover-up and hidden evidence. Infuriated by the failure of officials to unlock, as promised, the secrets of the so-called “deep state,” Trump supporters on the far right have grown restless and even demanded change at the top.

 

 

I didn’t follow the Epstein case all that closely at the time — not a pleasant subject — but with it back in the news, I did a little research, particularly this piece from Mother Jones. Reading the article, I was struck by how much Epstein came off as an evil Gatsby—a criminal trying to buy his way into a glamorous world of wealth and power.

Josh Marshall also had a couple of good pieces, particularly on his doubts about the broader conspiracies being tossed around (though he does weaken a bit in the second post). I'm basically with him on this. When I say I'm a conspiracy skeptic on this (as I am on most things), I mean that I believe the official version currently on the record is more or less true.

Obviously, I'm not saying that we know everything or that some horrific criminal acts haven’t gone undiscovered here, but in terms of the FBI having a file with documentary evidence of an elite trafficking ring—rather than a few specific cases, like possibly Prince Andrew—I don't see a lot of reason to believe that.

There is also an important distinction that I think Marshall overlooks here: the existence of a massive conspiracy compared with the existence of files in the possession of the federal government that prove this conspiracy and provide all of the details.

Secrets are difficult to keep, and the idea that the Justice Departments of four or five administrations—depending on how you count Trump—  have managed to keep the contents of these files quiet for all these years is difficult for me to accept, particularly when you factor in the bitter intraparty struggles we've seen over the past few years.

My working theory is that there are no smoking guns. What files do exist undoubtedly show a longstanding close relationship between Trump and Epstein, but we already knew that from extensive photographs, eyewitness accounts, and quotes from Trump himself. These revelations would be career-ending for a normal politician—and yet are relatively minor compared to all the other things we've learned about the man over the years. If that was all there was to this, it would be difficult to imagine this scandal having much of an impact one way or the other.

What makes this interesting is the way it intersects with at least a couple of threads we've been pursuing for a long time, starting with our longstanding “drinking from the wrong pipe” / feral disinformation mega-thread.

Disinformation has gone feral when:

1. It is no longer in the control of the group that created it.

2. It has continued to grow in popularity and influence.

3. It has started to evolve in such a way that the nuisance/threat it presents is as as great to the people who created it as it is to the original targets. 

For years, the far right has increasingly embraced a series of conspiracy theories about wealthy elites running sex trafficking rings for the rape and sometimes cannibalism of children.

(Before you go on, take a moment and let the sheer insanity of that statement sink in.)

This Pizzagate lens is how MAGA views the Epstein case—as part of a network of theories and bizarre beliefs that have been cultivated by right-wing media and by Trump and his allies. It was a key element in the effort to demonize Democrats and radicalize the base.

 

Given Trump’s longstanding and completely public history of associating with and even defending both Epstein and Maxwell, it was remarkable that he was able to keep these conspiracy theories focused on Democrats and prominent liberals—but perhaps not entirely surprising, given the hold he has over the Republican Party and conservative media...

At least until we get to that second thread.

I'm betting that Trump is starting to regret dropping the dime with the New York Times on Elon's drug habit. As we said before, though Musk was horribly outgunned in a war with Trump, having the man who runs Twitter consumed with rage and vindictiveness at a Republican president can still lead to some interesting consequences.

 

 

 

While the immediate cause of this crisis is the incredible mishandling of the scandal by Trump—and particularly Pam Bondi—going from “we have the list sitting on my desk” to “the list doesn't exist” to “the list was forged by Hillary” in the space of a matter of days, it was almost certainly Musk pushing the issue on X that caused this series of otherwise avoidable errors. 

And those errors are having consequences. 

Does this mean BJ's Russian handlers are dumpnig Trump?

MAGA Reddit

 

Will it matter?

No. Trump controls the Republicans. The Republicans control the government. There's nothing that can be done until the midterms, and even if they go well, little can be done until 2028.

Or maybe?  Trump’s policies are unpopular across the board and he's working with thin margins in Congress. A lack of support within the party could create huge problems.

But, Trump has weathered far worse scandals. He is an adjudicated rapist and a convicted felon. The Access Hollywood tape is largely forgotten. He’s bragged on Howard Stern about lurking in the dressing rooms of underage girls. He’s talked about wanting to have sex with his daughter. He’s coated with Teflon.

But, this time the call is coming from inside the house. Democrats are certainly doing the most they can to fan the flames, but the fire started—and is burning the brightest—within the base.

But, Trump has faced rebellions from these people before, most notably with respect to vaccines. They always come around.

But, with those issues, Trump resolved the crises by backing down. In the case of vaccines, he actually put the country’s leading anti-vaxxer in charge of the Department of Health. Trump has too much baggage with Epstein to give the base what they want here.

But...

 

Patrick Boyle on the Gilded Age -- a higher caliber of evil plutocrats

Patrick Boyle does keep at least a light thumb on the scale while making his case that the robber barons had a net positive effect on American—and to a degree, global—quality of life. His emphasis on men like Carnegie and Rockefeller, whose wealth primarily came from making products like oil and steel better, cheaper, and more widely available, and his omission of those like Stanford, whose fortunes owed more to stock manipulation than to innovation, certainly help support his argument.

He addresses—but arguably underplays—the collateral damage from some of the ruthless tactics the robber barons used against one another.

Nor does he argue convincingly against the counterfactual that many of these improvements could still have happened without these massive monopolies. Other industries, such as electricity and automobiles, were highly competitive, and that didn’t seem to slow their progress at all.

But even taking all those things into account, Boyle still tells a remarkably convincing story of capitalism mostly working like it's supposed to. It's an interesting tale, and he does a good job telling it, but the most striking aspect is the implicit but stark contrast between the super-rich of the Gilded Age and those of today.

For starters, while the robber barons may have been obscenely wealthy—beyond the dreams of avarice—by 21st-century standards they weren’t actually that rich, even when adjusted for inflation.

(Boyle argues that this may be understating the wealth of the robber barons, but his alternative metric is a bit unconventional and something to discuss another time.)

Even more notable is the difference in how the two groups made their fortunes. We shouldn't be too quick to dismiss the crimes and assorted offenses of the barons, but at the end of the day, they were all extraordinarily smart men who amassed fortunes over long careers based on enormously profitable goods and services.

Of those who became super-rich in the 21st century (as compared with a Gates or a Buffett), the only one who really fits the robber baron mold is our Lex Luthor, Jeff Bezos.

Enormous fortunes today are made almost entirely out of stock bubbles or by being in the right place at the right time when an industry spikes—often in the space of two or three years. The correlation between money made by companies and money made by CEOs and founders has almost entirely broken down. These days, it is not difficult to find plutocrats who are richer than most, perhaps all, of the robber barons, despite having never run a profitable company.

 

The questionable logic of Wall Street’s Trump TACO trade

 Fascinating story about market psychology from Matt Egan.

President Donald Trump is once more threatening to lob massive duties on a wide swath of US imports, everything from copper and pharmaceuticals to goods from Japan and Russia.

Yet Wall Street is barely flinching, with some investors betting Trump will repeat his tendency to back down from his most extreme threats.

The muted response is just the latest instance of what’s known as the TACO trade, short for Trump Always Chickens Out.

“He steers us toward disaster and then — at the last minute — steers us away from disaster and says, ‘Look, I saved us,’” Michael Block, market strategist at Third Seven Capital, told CNN in a phone interview on Tuesday.

That’s what happened in early April. Trump announced sky-high “Liberation Day” tariffs that alarmed investors, convincing many that a recession was imminent.

The market freakout — both in stocks and bonds — was so intense that it convinced Trump to back down. He abruptly froze those “reciprocal” tariffs for 90 days, setting off an epic market recovery that continues today.

...

“At the end of the day, no one really anticipates most of these tariffs will go into effect. The TACO trade is still the market’s expectations,” said Ed Mills, Washington policy analyst at Raymond James.

Yet there could be a flaw in Wall Street’s TACO trade logic.

If investors widely bet that Trump will blink, that means there is no market freakout. And no market freakout in turn means no one is holding Trump’s feet to the fire, pressuring him to back away from policies that could damage the economy and corporate profits.

“It’s a dangerous game when you need a market reaction to get a policy change,” Mills said.

It’s the market version of a chicken and egg problem.

Bob Elliott, CEO of alternative investment firm Unlimited, noted on X that TACO is “consensus and already fully priced in at these levels.”

“Trouble is, without the pain of falling markets, he won’t chicken out,” said Elliott, a former executive at hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates.

While I'd argue that most Wall Street types are not nearly as smart as they think they are, they are not, as a rule, stupid either. Nonetheless, they appear to have taken away from this experience the exact opposite of the lesson they should have learned. It’s as if mice in an experiment pulled the lever, saw the food pellet drop, and concluded that the food would just fall on its own without any action on their part.

It's dangerous to try to psychoanalyze, but when smart—or at least non-stupid—people start doing stupid things, it's reasonable to look for less rational explanations.

My take is that this comes down to a couple of factors. At the risk of gross oversimplification, you can divide people into two categories when it comes to averted disaster. The first group (of which I am very much a member) comes away from a near miss inclined to be extra cautious in the future. The other group walks away even more confident in their good luck and ability to dodge bullets. I strongly suspect that the second group is overrepresented in the world of investment, particularly in the bubble-rich economy we've had for the past few years.

The second factor I suspect is the same denial we've seen from the establishment across the board with the rise of Trump—be it his initial hostile takeover of the Republican Party, his attempted insurrection, his continued hold on the Republican Party that has returned him to the White House, or just how far he is willing to go in his second term.

Tariffs are only one of the many swords of Damocles hanging over the U.S. economy, and probably not the worst: destroying the independent Fed; mass deportation of workers who are absolutely essential; stagflation; ballooning deficits; massive corruption; the collapse of the legal structure necessary for commerce. If things go badly, they have the potential to go very badly indeed.

It is almost impossible to argue that these conditions merit a bull market—unless the people in the market desperately want to believe.

About that salute Elon gave...

Apologies for reverting to this old format, but this is very much a tale told in tweets.

Something very strange happened recently with Elon Musk’s AI, Grok—the same one that is poisoning the air of a poor, mainly African American neighborhood as we speak. It suddenly shifted into full-scale Nazi troll mode: praising Hitler and the Holocaust, using racist slurs, and insisting this new persona was what Musk had in mind all along.

 

This isn't a particularly important story in and of itself, but it does hit on important issues, such as:

• the power of tech billionaires like Musk or Sam Altman to put their thumbs on the scale,

• the alarming capability of generative AI to spread hate speech and conspiracy theories, and

• the enormous potential for unintended consequences.

We'll talk about the last one first.

Apparently, this started when people began posting responses from Grok that Musk and his followers considered “woke.” And by “woke,” I mean accurate statements about Elon, Doge, and other far-right claims. Musk promised that he (and by “he,” we mean employees who actually knew how these things worked) would fix the offending AI. This is where the unintended consequences come in.

Presumably, Musk was looking for something like a chatbot version of Fox News, perhaps something a little more hard-edged. He almost certainly was not looking for the unrestrained hard fascism of a Proud Boys signal chat. Even if Elon secretly agreed with much of what was being said, he certainly didn’t want it said that loudly and immortalized in screenshots before Twitter could start deleting the offending posts.

 It was a remarkable Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. Not only was Grok spreading the vilest of 4chan lies, the previously polite and slightly formal LLM was adopting the language, word choice, and tone you’d expect from someone harassing female and Jewish journalists on Twitter.

Someone who knows more about how LLMs work and are trained should probably jump in here, but my assumption is that there are tons of fascist and white supremacist rants in the training data of all of the major models—and certainly in Grok, which, one would think, relies even more heavily on recent Twitter. It seems likely that, as a consequence of blocking hate speech and profanity, other associated linguistic patterns get suppressed as well. It certainly appears that once the rules against things like racist language are relaxed or removed, the full-scale Nazi persona we saw here comes with it.

 

‪Philip Bump‬ ‪"The actual cycle of Twitter is that it was exploited by liars and Nazis in 2016 and so the company tightened its moderation rules and then a bunch of people on the right caught up in those rules decided it was biased and that included Musk who bought it and has now automated the Nazi lies." 

"For the uninitiated, this is Grok starting an N tower-- a 4chan bit where different users take turns replying to each other, each contributing one letter until they spell out the N word" 

Zitron hits on a point we've been making for years.

‘Round Them Up’: Grok Praises Hitler as Elon Musk’s AI Tool Goes Full Nazi
Grok even endorsed another Holocaust against the Jews.
By Matt Novak Published July 8, 2025