Twitter Mask is a MAGA government project

In a recent interview, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an offhand comment that I thought connected several points of view. Ramaswami was conversation with Ezra Klein that tens of thousands of government employees could lose their jobs if Donald Trump is re-elected. In his opinion, this would be a healthy development. That could happen, he said, by reinstating Trump’s “Schedule F” executive order, which stripped some government workers of their job security, making them easier to fire, and creating a commission on government efficiency headed by Elon Musk. Ramaswamy said Trump should get rid of 75 percent of the federal government employees “on day one.” The subject of discussion, he said, is whether some of those people will eventually be rehired. “Certainly that’s not indicative of what Elon did on Twitter, and I don’t think it’s going to be indicative of what the most important part of this project actually looks like, which is cutting down and thinning out bureaucracy. »

Ramaswamy’s Twitter message makes sense. In 2022, after acquiring the social network, Musk infamously purged Twitter’s ranks, firing 80 percent of its employees in the first six months, and then made a series of management decisions that ultimately plunged the company into further financial chaos. Listening to Ramaswamy speak and hearing the respect in his voice when he mentioned the centenarian’s tenure, it was clear that he saw the Trump administration’s plan. If Musk is appointed federal firing squad, it will likely not be because of his electric cars, rockets or internet-broadcasting satellites: but because he has made the dream of draining the swamp a reality, albeit on a smaller scale. Musk’s purchase of Twitter isn’t just a Republican success story; this is the federal government’s model of MAGA. Even Mama Mask said same thing in a recent Fox News interview: “He’s going to just get rid of people who don’t work, or don’t have jobs, or aren’t doing a good job, just like he did on Twitter… He can do it.” and for the government too.”

Musk’s argument for killing Twitter was that the company was so bloated that it was running out of money and only had “four months to live” Musk hit it so close to the bone that there were genuine concerns among employees I spoke with at the time that the site might crash during major news events or become unusable. “I am completely convinced that if Musk does what he promises, it will be complete crap,” Trust and Security Engineer at another technology company. told me in 2022. Musk did dismiss most of the employees of the trust and safety department, as well as those responsible for supervision and “human rights“, And Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability Team. The purge of these people, in particular, pleased some right-wing commentators, who saw Musk’s firings as a long-overdue destruction of the woke bureaucracy within the company. “Nothing of value was lost,” one MAGA account tweeted following news of the layoffs.

Read: I saw how Elon Musk was killing Twitter culture from the inside

Twitter didn’t self-destruct as my sources feared (although it did on some occasions, perhaps most memorably when Musk tried to host Spaces events with Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and they crashed). Minor hiccups aside, the site mostly functioned during elections, World Cups, Super Bowls, and world-historical news events. But Musk’s cuts have not relieved the platform of deep financial difficulties. His chaotic management strategy for Twitter was to rename the site X, alienate many of its most important advertisers, introduce a dubious paid subscription program, and dabble in artificial intelligence features in hopes of one day turning the platform into “whole application” The end result was disastrous for the company’s bottom line. Soon after coming to power, advertising revenues fell sharply 40 percent, but the bleeding has not stopped. According to assessmentsX lost about 52 percent of its U.S. advertising revenue last year. Recent Fidelity Report proposed that the company may have lost almost 80 percent of its value since Musk bought it (as Maybe much more than it was worth). If this continues, some suggested that Musk may have to sell some of his Tesla shares to keep the company afloat. Musk’s financiers were also left with huge loans on their balance sheets. Wall Street Journal has called “the worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis.”

Trump and Ramaswamy don’t seem to care. What matters is that Musk turned X into a political weapon in service of the MAGA movement. X, as I wrote last weekhas become a formidable vector for the spread of far-right opinions and talking points; it poisons the information environment with unverified rumors and conspiracy theories about election fraud. Far-right believers don’t care what his platform is from time to time marked Pro-Kamala Harris considers spam (temporarily) prohibited journalists, limited accounts that tweeted this word cisgenderAnd completed asking foreign governments to censor speech. Republican lawmakers don’t seem to care that Musk is using his platform to elect Trump, even after spending the better part of a decade fuming over how tech platforms were allegedly biased against conservatives. Their silence about Musk’s apparent bias, coupled with their admiration for his activism, suggests that they truly appreciate how Musk was able to hijack a popular communications platform and turn it into something they can control and use against their political enemies.

The idea is not unlike the vision articulated in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a conservative policy proposal to reform the federal government under the second Trump administration. Project 2025 is a rich, often radical, and unpopular set of policy proposals that, as my colleague David A. Graham has said, notes“would dissolve the Department of Education and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationcut Medicare and Medicaid, ban pornography, set federal restrictions on abortion, repeal some child labor protections, and allow the president to fire tens of thousands of federal professionals and replace them with political appointees.” In other words: if Trump were elected and decided to make Vision 2025 a reality, his administration would take an existing piece of bureaucratic infrastructure, strip it of many of those who can control its power, and then use that power for and against ideological ends. political enemies.

The parallels between this element of Project 2025 and Musk’s Twitter are stark. They should also raise alarm bells. The Federal Government is not a software company and should not be run as such. Our departments and agencies may be bloated, but government employees work every day to solve technical problems that are critical to a functioning country, such as conducting the census, tracking hurricanes, and preparing for pandemics. Simply cutting these people (and replacing others with political appointees) could have serious consequences, such as suppressing disaster response and strengthening probability corruption.

Consider also financial dynamics. Last week at Musk’s virtual town hall. said that the Trump administration’s second-term agenda, including tax cuts, federal budget cuts and import tariffs, “is bound to involve some temporary hardship” but will ultimately lead to long-term prosperity. “We must cut costs to live within our means,” Musk added. The line is similar to his justification for Twitter’s layoffs, which he called at the time “painful” and necessary for Twitter to balance its budget. But Musk bought the platform with no idea how to turn it into a profitable business. His main interest seems to be prioritizing shitty posts and trolling over finding advertisers or pursuing his ideas of turning X into a WeChat-style commercial app. Musk has never shown interest in understanding the mechanics of a social network or the difficulties of content moderation or even the specifics First Amendment. His indifference to what he ended up leading was surpassed only by his desire to use it as a personal playground and political weapon.

Before Musk officially took over Twitter, the tech oligarch at least feigned interest in running the company with an eye toward actually running it. “For Twitter to earn public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means equal frustration for both the far right and the far left,” he said. tweeted in 2022. Trump, however, has made no effort to hide the vindictive goals of his next administration and how he plans to words belonging New York Times columnist Jamel Bouie, to “unify the presidency with himself” and “reestablish it as an instrument of his will, used for his friends and against his enemies.” In other words, he plans to launch Elon Musk’s Twitter script across the country.