FTA:

Rather than cautioning against it, Musk described this hardship as necessary and inevitable, supporting Trump's blueprint for restructuring the economy by slashing government programs. Musk's remarks, shared in a Telephone Town Hall organized by his America PAC, indicate that he and Trump see economic pain to average Americans as a necessary cost of their policy goals.

"We have to reduce spending to live within our means. And that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity," Musk stated in the call, fully endorsing the strain Trump's policies would place on Americans. Musk's words make it clear that the disruption is not an unintended side effect but an accepted"if not desired"outcome.

What could possibly go wrong?:

FTA: Trump has said he would appoint Musk to lead a new "Department of Government Efficiency," an agency that Musk would use to "trim the fat" from government operations and, presumably, enact sweeping cuts to public programs. The department, referred to by the acronym DOGE is a nod to Musk's favored meme cryptocurrency.

Also:

BREAKING: RFK Jr. says Donald Trump has promised him "control of the public health agencies."

RFK Jr. says "Trump has promised me ... control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others."

Here's what Elon's co-chair of the prospective Trump administration's "Department of Government Efficiency" had to say about America's future at Trump's MSG rally on Sunday:

Cantor Fitzgerald chairman and CEO Howard Lutnick came out and spoke of how his firm was decimated on September 11 when a plane struck just below their offices in the World Trade Center, how they'd given lots of money to the families, and then he finally provided a clear answer to that nine-year-old question: When, exactly, was America great?

The Gilded Age.

The crowd was a bit miffed when Lutnick extolled the virtues of the "turn-of-the-century" economy, and they didn't rouse much when he explained he was referring to 1900. They perked up a bit when he explained this meant "no income tax," though it was more of a smattering of cheers.

"All we had was tariffs!" he explained, probably expecting more of a roar, "and we had so much money that we had the greatest businessmen of America get together to try to figure out how to spend it!" Near-silence. "That's who we were then."

And there it was. We should return to the days when all the money flowed into a handful of pockets, when the Carnegies and Rockefellers got to make all the rules, and the way that billionaires like Lutnick will seek to do that is by getting Trump in there to abolish the income tax--as if any of them pay their fair share as it is. This was Reaganomics on anarcho-capitalist steroids, and the fairly frosty reception it got in the arena was a reminder of how much more effective Trump's economic populism has been for Republicans, even if he ended up signing the same old tax-cut-for-rich-people once elected.

If Trump wins next week and Republicans keep the House and take back the Senate, I expect the first hundred days of Trump's presidency to be a shock and awe take down of our current system of government. The groundwork has been laid down by the SC granting Trump immunity, and the plans via Project 2025 are in place. They are going to deconstruct the administrative state as Bannon once predicted they would. They know they will have to act quickly and without hesitation, and I believe they will. Chaos and confusion will ensue as they begin to undo the New Deal and strip away the social safety net. If there is any media bold enough to honestly report what is happening, they will be dealt with by buying out the owners and/or arresting the reporters. If average citizes take to the streets to protest, Trump will call out the National Guard/military to put those protests down. They have Orban's blueprint to follow, and they will follow it. See for yourself--creating Soros as the enemy, "Hungary is for Hungarians," building a fence, criminalizing migrants, consolidating the media under state control, creating a new constitution, instituting Christian nationism, eliminating LGBTQ rights, the list goes on:

This is a good article on the Orban playbook Trump and Republicans plan to follow:

The Orbanisation of America: Hungary's lessons for Donald Trump

Viktor Orban has seized control of nearly all the levers of power in Hungary since he became prime minister in 2010, effectively turning the country into an electoral autocracy.

Republicans in the US have noticed Orban's success. Orban's Fidesz party and the Republicans have lately strengthened their links significantly; Republicans appear to have learned from the former's march through Hungarian institutions.

In the four years since President Donald Trump left office, veterans of his administration have thought hard about how to make a new administration more effective than the last. Many believe that a similar seizure of control of the instruments of US governance is necessary.

If Trump wins the presidency, Republicans will likely adapt many of Orban's techniques to the US context to end what they view as liberal control of the "administrative state" and civil society.

OMG, Lamp, it just struck me tonight how meticulously over a period of years the Republican party has been planning their Orban style take over of the country. It's all in the article I linked to in #5. The Federalist Society and the Heritage Society play a big role in behind the scenes machinations. Trump is a necessary part of the plan, but he is only one part of it. That's where JD Vance comes in:

"I think Orban made smart decisions that we could learn from in the US." " Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, CBS Face the Nation, June 2024.

And, of course, the SC had a central role to play in this plan, and they have played it:

One important distinction between the US and Hungary is that the American president faces an independent legislature and a strong judiciary. Even if the president's party controls Congress, he does not exercise anything approaching parliamentary control of the legislature, nor is he is likely to have a "constitutional majority", which in the US requires not only two-thirds control of Congress, but also control of three-quarters of the state legislatures.

The US route to electoral autocracy therefore means, in the first instance, creating a powerful executive that can overwhelm the other branches. Since at least the Reagan administration, various Republican thinkers have been promoting unitary executive theory. According to proponents of this idea, the power of the presidency has been unconstitutionally hobbled by limits placed by the courts, Congress, and the civil service rules on the president's ability to control the executive branch. As a result, the president no longer controls his own branch of government and cannot implement the mandate the voters have given him. The unitary executive project therefore is to restore control of the executive branch to the president.

The issue of whether unitary executive theory conforms with the US constitution is a very controversial one, but the likely effects of its implementation on governance in the US are fairly clear. Over recent decades, power in Washington has flowed increasingly to the executive branch. A divided and understaffed Congress struggles to exercise its oversight function effectively over the vast executive branch. The courts are similarly too slow and lacking in administrative capacity to constrain the president on most issues. The 2024 Supreme Court decision in Trump v the United States, which asserted that the president enjoys near-total immunity in his official acts, has given the president yet more power relative to Congress and the courts.

Now that I am getting a glimpse of the big picture, it's quite scary. It's not hyperbole to say that if Trump gets elected, and espeically if Republicans take the House and Senate, democracy as we know it is over. And it won't be just Donald Trump's doing. The whole Republican party apparatus will be equally responsible as they are the ones who laid the groundwork and drew up the 2025 playbook that Trump will follow:

Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation and the man behind Project 2025, had already in 2022 spoken of the country not only as a model of conservative statecraft, but as the model. In May 2024, Heritage even welcomed Orban for a closed-door lecture in Washington, DC.

The now infamous Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, directed by Paul Dans, the former head of Trump's White House Personnel Office, contains at its heart the idea that liberal control of the "administrative state" and civil society have long stymied conservative governance and must be overcome for Trump to govern effectively. It avows that the primary effort of a second Trump administration will be to "dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people."

To ensure more loyal political appointees, Heritage's Project 2025 has created a database of some 20,000 pre-vetted potential officials. The Trump campaign has strongly repudiated Project 2025, but it will likely value that database nonetheless if Trump wins the election. There is simply no place else to go for so many loyal officials.