This Trump ally's 'reign of terror' is far from over — despite 'ignorant' claims to the contrary

01 June

President Donald Trump at a White House press conference on February 4, 2025 (Noamgalai/Shutterstock.com)

Friday afternoon, May 30 founding President Donald Trump holding a media event in the White House Oval Office that marked the end of Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk's work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). During an MSNBC appearance following the event, former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele argued that Musk won't be distancing himself from the Trump Administration in a significant way — and commented that Musk "is still getting what he needs" from Trump "on the back end."

The New Republic's Alex Shephard expresses a similar view in an article published on June 1.

Musk, Shephard argues, has inflicted a lot of damage on the U.S. government by helping bring about mass layoffs of federal government workers. And the New Republic journalist fears that more damage is on the way.

"What's the worst thing that the Trump Administration has done in the last four months?" Shephard writes. "One could reasonably point to immigration, where masked ICE officers are ambushing people at immigration hearings, foreign students are threatened with deportation for expressing reasonable opinions, and migrants — many of whom have committed no crimes — are being disappeared to foreign gulags….. The decimation of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is up there, though."

Shephard adds, "People around the world are starving now because of Musk's cuts. They are dying of disease because of Musk's cuts…. The full scale of his cuts to, say, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service are still not fully clear, but they will register every time there is a tornado, a hurricane, or extreme weather of any kind."

Shephard warns that Musk's "reign of terror" in Washington, D.C. is not over — and that his alliance with the Trump Administration will continue.

"So the idea that Musk's time in Washington is over is an obvious farce," Shephard stresses. "To promulgate this notion is to be either ignorant or nefarious: That narrative goes a long way toward letting Musk and Trump off the hook for a multitude of casualties — those already in the ledger and those to be counted later. It suggests that his reign of terror was actually ineffectual when, in fact, it was massively successful; Trump and Musk destroyed that which they'd planned to all along. Most crucially, it suggests that reign of terror has ended. It hasn't."

Shephard continues, "The destruction that Musk set in motion remains running in the background as an ambient menace to our safety and livelihoods. Musk's legacy is still being written, and his culpability is still accumulating. He will do more damage soon, perhaps tomorrow, even though he’s already done more than enough."

Alex Shephard's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.

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