California Gov. Gavin Newsom isn’t done trolling President Donald Trump—with facts. During a press conference on public safety Thursday, Newsom offered the president some important crime statistics he seems to have overlooked.
"Mississippi leads the nation as the No. 1 murder state in America. I imagine this, in particular, may resonate with the President of the United States. It's got a murder rate that’s 180 percent — 180 percent —higher than Los Angeles,” Newsom said. “It’s interesting, L.A. has more people—these are all per capita numbers.”
...“Perhaps the president could deploy the National Guard in every corner of Mississippi,” he continued. “The murder rate is out of control there. Carnage.”
After citing other GOP-led states and cities with higher murder rates, Newsom stressed that he isn’t offering opinions but “stone cold facts.
"If the president is sincere about the issue of crime and violence, there's no question in my mind that he'll likely be sending the troops into Louisiana, Mississippi, to address the just unconscionable wave of violence that continues to plague those states," he said.
In co-opting Trump’s crass, blunt object stylings, Newsom has been successful in getting under the skin of right-wing media. Whether his style of attack will propel him into higher office remains to be seen.
But two things are certain: It sure is fun to watch, and—unlike the orange blowhard—Newsom has reality on his side.
During a briefing on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt used Wednesday’s mass shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as an opportunity to attack Democrats, particularly former press secretary Jen Psaki.
When asked about Psaki’s and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s criticism of the GOP’s refusal to take any action on school shootings, Leavitt doubled down on the “power of prayer in this country.”
“Yes, I saw the comments of my predecessor,” she said. “And frankly, I think they're incredibly insensitive and disrespectful to the tens of millions of Americans of faith across this country who believe in the power of prayer, who believe that prayer works, and who believe that in a time of mourning like this, when beautiful young children were killed while praying in a church, it's utterly disrespectful, um, to deride the power of prayer in this country.”
Leavitt’s stammering response came after Psaki—through tears—described her frustrations as “half of the politicians in our country have little more to offer than thoughts and prayers,” during her MSNBC show Wednesday night.
“We have seen this play out over and over again. There is a shooting, then come the thoughts and prayers, and then comes the attempt to shift the focus. This is what always happens,” she said.
.Like clockwork, Republicans and their pro-gun allies have pivoted to mental health and transgender rights, ignoring the obvious truth that the only factor that separates the United States from other countries is the sheer number of guns.
As for action, the Trump administration has continued to offer nothing more than thoughts, prayers, and a vague promise to investigate medicines that have already been well researched.
At least one White House press secretary knows how to tell the truth.
President Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic Monday, seemingly boasting about his bromance with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
"I think [Putin] wants to make a deal,” Trump said. “I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand that, as crazy as it sounds?"
The audio was captured shortly before the convicted felon was scheduled to meet with European leaders to discuss strategy for ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
Trump met with Putin this past Friday in Alaska, in what was billed as an attempt to pause Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Trump’s special relationship with Putin has not led to any slowing down on the part of Russia, which continued to bomb Ukraine, reportedly killing 14 people in an attack on Monday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about a federal judge blocking the release of grand jury documents related to Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
"We think that decision is unfortunate. Of course, we move to unseal that information because the president has said he wants to see credible evidence released,” the White House’s front-facing lie machine said about the documents, which are decidedly not the same as the long-promised Epstein files that Attorney General Pam Bondi said were “sitting” on her desk in February.
“As for the appeal process, I would refer you to the Department of Justice for that," Leavitt added.
But she conveniently forgot to mention that Judge Paul A. Engelmayer pilloried the White House in his ruling, calling the effort to unseal the grand jury documents a "diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such."
Leavitt’s spin sessions and the Trump administration’s ludicrous conspiracy theories—designed to distract from Trump’s ties to Epstein—have become so absurd that it’s hard to tell if they’re simply getting lazy or if they’re so cynical about their base’s intelligence that they’re willing to serve them undercooked slop—or both.
President Donald Trump announced a state of emergency in Washington, D.C., during a press conference Monday, claiming with no evidence that the city is gripped by a crime epidemic. He pledged to deploy the National Guard and extend the authoritarian order to other Democratic cities.
“We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don't even mention that anymore—they're so, they're so far gone,” he said. “We're not going to let it happen. We’re not gonna lose our cities over this. And this will go further. We're starting very strongly with D.C., and we're going to clean it up real quick. Very quickly, as they say.”
Joined by U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, Trump weaved a story of violent youth, crumbling infrastructure, and chaos in the nation’s capital. He also demanded that homeless residents leave the city.
Trump’s claims are contradicted, of course, by reality. Violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year-low, and Baltimore and Oakland have seen similar drops in crime.
Trump’s occupation of D.C. is consistent with his repeated threats to control the capital by force.
And his promise to deploy federal troops in other Democratic-run cities on similarly false pretenses has been a hallmark of his second term. Citing lies about violent immigrant hordes as the reason for his inhumane immigration policies, Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles in June without Gov. Gavin Newsom’s consent.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul held a press conference Monday to respond to ongoing GOP efforts to disproportionately increase Republican representation in Congress. She discussed potential Democratic strategies to combat Texas’ gerrymandering scam, including redrawing New York state’s congressional maps to offset the loss of Democratic seats.
"If that's what's called for, I will put saving democracy as my top priority at any cost, because it is under siege,” Hochul told reporters. “Just like those who put on a uniform to fight in battles across the ages. For centuries we've stood up and fought. Blood has been shed. This is our moment in 2025 to stand up for all that we hold dear and not let it be destroyed by a bunch of renegades in a place called Texas.”
Hochul joins Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has also pledged to counter Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s machinations to sabotage democracy by redrawing California’s congressional maps.
Texas Democrats have been preparing for this fight. On Sunday, most Democratic state legislators left the state, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass any legislation. Texas Democratic state Rep. James Talarico accused the GOP of “trying to rig the midterm elections right before our eyes.”
Abbott has since threatened to replace Democratic representatives and charge them with “bribery.”
President Donald Trump went on quite the emotional journey Wednesday after a reporter informed him that the financial community has coined a new term for dealing with his chaotic tariff threats: the “TACO trade,” which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out.
The revelation followed an Oval Office ceremony to swear in bottled-water tantrum thrower and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Washington.
“Oh, isn’t that nice—I chickened out. I never heard that,” Trump responded, seemingly unaware that his trade “strategy” of bluster followed by retreat is being mocked by the very finance bros he seeks approval from.
Trump worked himself up into a lather trying to defend his wounded ego, bragging that he is opening China and characterizing his latest capitulation to the European Union after threatening 50 percent tariffs as strategic.
“We have the hottest country in the world right now,” Trump said, quoting an alleged compliment from the king of Saudi Arabia. “Six months ago, this country was stone cold, dead. We had a dead country.”
A still rambling Trump proceeded to admit that he had to reduce his crazy high proposed tariff rates after realizing, “Wow, that's high.” It isn’t the first time that Trump has confessed to making up numbers when blabbing out misguided policies.
Trump closed with one of his routine attacks on the free press, admonishing the reporter who hurt his feelings by telling him the truth.
“But don't ever say what you said. That's a nasty question,” he whined. “To me that’s the nastiest question.”
That query was the least nasty thing about being in a room where Pirro had just been sworn in for anything other than a deposition.
Just like the so-called Department of Government Efficiency it was named after, the House Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency Caucus has delivered little more than chaos and waste.
Started by Republicans Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida, the DOGE caucus pledged to help multibillionaire Elon Musk scour the federal government to find trillions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.
Reps. Jared Moskowitz of Florida and Greg Landsman of Ohio were the first Democrats to join the committee, arguing that if Republicans are truly interested in government efficiency and oversight, Democrats should be at the table. While the move drew some criticism, it effectively called Republicans’ bluff.
“The DOGE caucus is dead. It’s defunct. We haven’t met in months. We only had two total meetings in five months. And we weren’t involved at all in anything [happening at DOGE], which Elon was in charge of. Zero. Zilch. Nada. [Musk] did it all on his own,” Moskowitz told Politico.
He added that “DOGE was a complete failure. Complete failure. Nothing has been made more efficient. Ask the people in Newark [Liberty International Airport, which has suffered delays and cancellations] how efficiency is going.”
If these DOGE offshoots have succeeded at anything, it's toeing the Trump administration line: Musk is somehow both in charge of everything DOGE does and completely blameless for its failures.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has left National Weather Service teams desperately scrambling to staff depleted operations ahead of the hurricane season.
According to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, there are at least 155 vacancies that need to be filled, including forecasters essential for the around-the-clock coverage needed during hurricane season.
“For most of the last half century, NWS has been a 24/7 operation. Not anymore, thanks to Elon Musk,” Tom Fahy, legislative director of the union, wrote in an email to the Washington Post.
Now, the Trump administration is looking into reassigning some of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s remaining staff to the “critically understaffed” weather service offices.
At the start of 2025, NOAA had more than 600 vacancies, but instead of trying to fill these important roles, President Donald Trump—with the help of Musk’s DOGE goons—illegally fired and pushed out about ten percent of the remaining workforce.
And the effects of these cuts were felt immediately. In March, the NWS announced that it would suspend weather balloon observations in several locations and greatly reduce data collection efforts in others due to staffing issues.
The economic value of NOAA’s weather and climate data has been estimated at more than $100 billion, but that was before Trump and Musk got their hands on it.
The Trump administration’s efforts to destroy NOAA are part of its broader strategy of undermining climate science. By gutting weather and climate research, it obscures the real costs of climate change and extreme weather events, leaving Americans in the dark.
They say Kennedy uses the disorder as a political tool and pushes damaging stereotypes that spread misinformation.
“The U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr., made false comments about autism, like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families,” said Teddy, a fourth grader from New Jersey whose statement at a school board meeting went viral earlier this month.
“I have autism and I’m not broken,” Teddy said. “And I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr.'s lies.”
The New Jersey schoolkid and autism awareness groups felt the need to speak out after Kennedy’s vile comments last month about U.S. autism rates, where he repeated his false claim that autism is an epidemic that “destroys families.”
Kennedy also mischaracterized autism as a “preventable disease” and falsely asserted that 25% of autistic people are non-functioning—ridiculous notions that experts say are inaccurate.
“His comments were incorrect, but more to the point, they were eugenic,” Colin Killick, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, told the Boston Globe. “Talking about autistic people as themselves being destroyed but also having destroyed their families is a horrific argument.”
“There’s an unscrupulous industry of alternative medicine providers who exploit families by charging them tens of thousands of dollars to ‘recover’ people with autism,” Ari Ne’eman, who is autistic and an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told NBC News. “The way that industry works is by terrifying families.”
David Mandell, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health, told PBS News that Kennedy’s “fixed, myopic view” stems from needing to interface with parents of autistic children and scientists who work in the field.
Julie DeFilippo, a social worker with an autistic son, told the Boston Globe that “as a parent of an autistic kid, I get hundreds of moments of joy every day. That’s the easy part—being at home and supporting him.”
Kennedy’s characterization of autism as a preventable tragedy also appears connected to his notorious anti-vaccine crusade. In a recent interview with Dr. Phil McGraw, he repeated the vigorously debunked claim of a link between autism and vaccines.
“Many of the parents have reported that their kid, that their child, developed autism immediately after [childhood vaccinations],” Kennedy told the psychologist-turned-TV star.
Kennedy has used his position as America’s chief public health official to launch what he claims is a scientific study into the cause of autism, to be led by an anti-vaccine activist with heinous ideas about treatments for the condition that include experimenting with chemical castration drugs.
“I have seen a lot of people treat [Autism Spectrum Disorder] as some sort of disease that needs to be ‘cured,’ which is very offensive towards people like me,” John Trainor, a high school student, told the Boston Globe. ”We are normal people who have a much harder time socially.”
Kennedy has also announced plans to create an autism database, using the private medical information of millions of Americans, promising Trump in a surreal Cabinet meeting in April that he’d be able to identify the cause of autism by September.
Kennedy announced on May 7 that he intends to direct the National Institutes of Health to use Medicare and Medicaid insurance claims related to autism diagnoses to build his database.
Critics point out that Kennedy’s plan amounts to an autism registry, and experts add that Kennedy’s promises are unrealistic.
"If you just ask me, as a scientist, is it possible to get the answer that quickly? I don't see any possible way,” Dr. Peter Marks, a former top vaccine scientist for the FDA, said on Face the Nation last month.
If you thought FBI Director Kash Patel had any competence whatsoever, think again.
Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, Patel was unable to provide a timeline for when his department’s budget—which was required by law to be submitted more than a week ago—would finally be delivered to Congress.
Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland noted that the hearing was essentially pointless, since Patel failed to provide critical spending and budget documents.
“How do we, as Congress, do our budget and our work without that request and without the spend plan?” Murray said, calling Patel’s lack of preparedness “insufficient and deeply disturbing.”
Patel’s signature dunderheaded combativeness was on full display during a tense exchange with Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who asked whether people deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 have the constitutional right to due process under the Fifth Amendment.
“It’s not for me to call the balls and strikes on it,” Patel responded.
“You haven't read the Constitution?” Merkley asked, citing the Supreme Court ruling in Reno v. Flores as part of the settled law on the matter.
“It concerns me that you're not familiar with the core concept of due process applying to all persons as written in black and white in the Constitution,” Merkley added.
After the hearing, Murray called out Patel’s incompetence and the threat it poses to the United States.
“Kash Patel, the conspiracy theorist that Republicans made FBI Director, came to a Senate hearing on the budget—with NO budget, NO timeline, and NO clue. It's downright incompetent, and it's making America less safe. We need serious leadership at the FBI,” she wrote on Bluesky.
No budget? Check! Equivocating statements about the Constitution? Check! Seems like Patel’s competence is perfectly in line with the rest of the Trump administration.
The insanity continues with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who appeared on Dr. Phil McGraw’s YouTube channel Tuesday to crow about the “revolution” in health he and the Trump administration are administering to the American people.
“Many of the parents have reported that their kid, that their child, developed autism immediately after the vaccine,” Kennedy said.
Of course, this claim has been debunked many times by many different scientific studies.
He then cavalierly implied that a pharmaceutical conspiracy is behind medical professionals’ support for the measles vaccine.
“I got chicken soup and vitamin A, which, you know, which nobody can patent. But now the only treatment that doctors really know about is you've got to get the measles vaccine,” Kennedy said.
When an audience member asked whether new parents should vaccinate their children, Kennedy gave an intentionally vague anti-vax response.
“We live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research,” he said.
Kennedy also repeated the myth that the COVID-19 vaccine led to an increase in myocarditis in children, ignoring the evidence showing that the risk of myocarditis is actually higher in those who contract COVID-19 than in those who are vaccinated.
And during a Q&A session, a woman who identified herself as “Emily” raised concerns that “stratospheric aerosol injections” are “continuously peppered on us every day.”
“Stratospheric aerosol injections” is the sesquipedalian way of referring to the chemtrail conspiracy theory, which purports that the white trails left behind airplanes—officially called condensation trails—are some kind of biological weapon sprayed by sinister and shadowy actors to manipulate everything from the weather to human minds.
“It's not happening in my agency. You know, we don't do that. It's done, we think by DARPA. And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel,” Kennedy said, blaming the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it. We'll bring on somebody who's going to think only about that.”
For years, Kennedy and other Republicans have eschewed their actual responsibilities to bring bills to state legislatures that presuppose that the unsubstantiated chemtrail theory is true. Just last month, Kennedy boasted that he would use his office to tilt at this windmill.
Kennedy’s interview with Dr. Phil wasn’t the revolution he thought it was. Rather, it was an hour-long disinformercial for Kennedy’s rampant conspiracy theories, proving that he remains one of the most dangerous obstacles facing public health today.
Recent filings with the Federal Election Commission have revealed the scale of record-breaking corporate donations to the Donald Trump-JD Vance Inaugural Committee. Trump smashed his previous inaugural donation record of $107 million for his first presidency, raising more than twice as much, with 650 donors—140 of whom gave no less than $1 million. This includes the tech billionaires who ponied up and got VIP seats at the dreary event.
The crypto industry donated a total of $18 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and has been one of the biggest winners so far. Trump courted cryptocurrency firms during his campaign, promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which dropped a cool $1 million on Trump, watched the Securities and Exchange Commission drop its lawsuit against them after Trump came into office. And Trump Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently announced that the Justice Department’s unit that investigated cryptocurrency fraud-related crimes would be disbanded.
Companies with a large investment in the electronics market such as Apple, whose CEO Tim Cook gave $1 million to Trump, have received a respite from potentially crushing China tariffs on popular products like the iPhone, though Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said there’s a good chance that will change.
Pilgrim Pride, a poultry company owned by Brazilian meat conglomerate JBS, reportedly made the largest donation to Trump’s inaugural committee, $5 million. What did they get in return so far? Trump recently paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that has allowed the U.S. to investigate and prosecute foreign corruption tied to America’s trade interests since 1977. JBS knows this law intimately, having already paid out more than a quarter of a billion dollars in criminal bribery charges under the FCPA.
And there is no end in sight for billionaires who want to make payments to Trump in some form or another. Major companies like Meta, Amazon, Tesla, and X, which all face ongoing government lawsuits, are settling cases, many of which are considered by critics to be baseless, with Trump himself.
With hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts on the line, and many companies coincidentally linked to investors with names like Musk, Vice President JD Vance, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to connect the swampy dots in Trump’s White House.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is continuing his life’s work of making public health more precarious as the Food and Drug Administration, which he oversees, is suspending its quality-control testing of raw fluid milk and other dairy products due to budget cuts, according to Reuters.
The suspension of testing begins this week and includes Grade “A” raw milk and other finished dairy products. Grade “A” is the nation’s highest sanitary standard for milk, making sure it does not contain harmful pathogens.
According to a spokesperson, the FDA's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory, which conducts such food safety testing, has been “decommissioned.” That, along with massive Trump administration budget cuts, has left the FDA "no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis,” according to an internal email obtained by Reuters.
This news follows the suspension of programs focused on bird flu outbreaks, which included studies showing how pasteurized milk can kill the virus, after Kennedy fired senior veterinarians designing them.
In his quest to fund tax for the wealthy, President Donald Trump’s administration demanded that the HHS, which includes the FDA, cut $40 billion from its budget. Since January, HHS has lost an estimated 20,000 positions in its workforce.
It remains unclear whether Kennedy will be able to slap together a replacement testing program, like the one at the now-closed Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory. Like many of the government agencies decimated by Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the scramble to rehire essential employees seems to have become a weekly crisis.
As Trump continues to pretend that he has conquered soaring egg prices, which are still largely driven by one of the worst outbreaks of avian flu in U.S. history, his budget cuts and the decision to have Kennedy run public health leave no clear end in sight.
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador joined President Donald Trump for a Q&A session with reporters on Monday, during which he pigheadedly said that he would not return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.
“I suppose you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist threat to the United States. I'm not going to do it. It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous,” he said.
Bukele continued to claim, “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” before Trump eventually jumped in to call the press “sick people” for asking about Garcia's Supreme Court-ordered return.
Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen and legal U.S. resident who is married to a U.S. citizen, held valid documents of residency issued by the Department of Homeland Security
But the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that the Trump administration must facilitate Garcia’s return to the United States.
Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is now wrongfully claiming that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over this case—because that would be a democracy with checks and balances, not a dictatorship.
An eight-year-old Texas child died of pulmonary failure as a result of measles, marking the third confirmed measles death and the second death of a child from measles to occur in the United States in decades. Both children were unvaccinated.
“[T]here are 642 confirmed cases of measles across 22 states, 499 of those in Texas,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote on X.
Kennedy also announced that he was traveling to Texas to offer condolences to the family of the recently deceased child.
While the infamous anti-vaxxer failed to mention that the majority of cases are in unvaccinated children, he did admit that the MMR vaccine is the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”
As the measles outbreak rages on, Kennedy has admitted that the MMR vaccine is the most effective way to fight against the disease, while also undermining the necessity of vaccinations. In public appearances, such as on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Kennedy said it was better to get infected with measles than to be vaccinated.
Texas HHS has confirmed that, while most confirmed cases remain primarily in the western part of the state, new cases have emerged in central Texas and a concerning rise in the northeast region. Meanwhile, New Mexico has reported more than 50 cases, and Kansas has reported 24.
At the same time, Kennedy’s nonprofit Children’s Health Defense Fund continues to promote dangerously uninformed science about vaccines and measles, falsely claiming that poor medical treatments are to blame for the recent deaths. The organization is also pushing vitamin A supplements, which not only can’t cure nor stop the spread of measles, but can actually be toxic for children.
Outside of offering “comfort” to grieving families, Kennedy’s actions belie any meaningful scientific or medically proven solutions to stopping this public health nightmare.
So while Kennedy may occasionally acknowledge the importance of vaccines, his actions and continued encouragement of anti-vaccine rhetoric consistently undermines any public health efforts.
Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and a terrible parent, was handed another loss on Wednesday, after his electric vehicle company Tesla released its first quarter sales report. The news wasn’t good. The EV maker reported its lowest quarter sales since 2022, well below the modest predictions analysts had forecasted.
Tesla shares fluctuated, beginning Wednesday with a six percent drop, before rebounding, possibly due to talk that Musk would be leaving his Department of Government Efficiency. And even Tesla cheerleaders, like Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, were having a hard time turning this lemon into lemonade, as he expressed on X.
Musk’s latest setback comes just a week after reports that Tesla’s sales in Europe had dropped 40 percent in February, even as Europe’s EV market was enjoying an upswing in sales. Tesla’s losses in Europe can be partly attributed to Musk’s full-throated support of Germany’s far-right, neo-Nazi-affiliated Alternative for Germany party.
“In addition to Elon Musk’s increasingly active role in politics and the increased competition it is facing within the EV market, the brand is phasing out the existing version of the Model Y—its best-selling vehicle,” Felipe Munoz, global analyst at Jato Dynamics told the Financial Times.
Tesla’s brand has taken hits on top of Musk’s embrace of right-wing extremism. Nearly all of Tesla’s Cybertrucks were recalled in March due to issues stemming from the glue used to hold the stainless steel facade detaching, creating possible dangerous road hazards.
While Tesla faces increased competition in the market, the biggest problem the company faces is Musk’s politics and personality. Musk and DOGE’s unconstitutional attack on government agencies has cost tens of thousands of Americans their jobs and threatened their economic security.
The Trump administration has clearly been ordered to cravenly prop up the billionaire’s nosediving reputation. But promising to throw people in jail if they protest against Tesla, holding an informercial in front of the White House, and having the entire Trump administration hawk Tesla stock during their television appearances has clearly not been the recipe for success they hoped for.
And now, Musk’s toxicity has become so great that even Donald Trump’s most loyal parasites are trying to find the right way to distance the GOP leader from his top donor. Whether or not Trump and friends can quit Musk’s hundreds of billions of dollars remains to be seen.
