Round up: Musk deported? Ukraine denied Patriots. MAGA call for genocide.

Analysis of the week's events

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Musk deported?

With the passage of Trump’s signature piece of economic legislation this week, the Trump-Musk feud is back on. The bill gives a massive tax cut to the wealthy, and because DOGE was always bullshit and Trump’s claim that tariffs will generate enough revenue to make up the difference makes no sense, that tax cut is going to be funded by a massive increase in the national debt.

Whatever else you say about him - and believe me, I say a lot - Musk seems to genuinely care about America’s increasingly unsustainable debt trajectory. He has threatened to fund primaries against Republican congresspeople who vote for the bill and even to create a third party. Third parties are pretty much always doomed, but they can still do some damage to one of the main parties if they compete for its voters.

So, no surprise, Trump clapped back - threatening to cancel Musk’s federal contracts and set DOGE on the parts of the government he makes money from. He also threatened to look into deporting Musk, a course of action that Steve Bannon and others are pushing for.

One totally valid reaction to this is to say that it’s pretty funny. Musk is one of the biggest amplifiers of far-right, racist, anti-immigrant politics in the United States, so to see him get eaten by the tiger whose back he was riding has a certain ironic charm.

But I think that the bigger and more disturbing point here is that it’s extremely bad when the president starts threatening to deport his political enemies.

The United States is in the midst of building a deportation engine the likes of which the country has never seen. Another part of the “Big Beautiful Bill” dramatically increases resources for immigration enforcement, including a network of new detention centers and 10,000 new ICE agents. People are already being disappeared off the streets by masked agents on a routine basis, sometimes never to be heard from again.

That deportation engine has already been turned against people purely based on their political activities. Mahmoud Khalil, a campus protester who appears to have violated no law except supporting a political cause that the Trump regime opposes, is just one of the people that they have deported or tried to deport.

But there’s also a subtle different between these cases and that of Musk. The arrest of pro-Palestinian protesters is essentially performative - they pose no actual threat to the administration, but detaining them sends a political message.

Musk, by contrast, actually does pose a political threat to Trump - he is well-connected, well-resourced, and very angry. We all wish that billionaires had much less influence over U.S. politics, but within the rules of the game as they exist, those are all things that he is allowed to be. And the moment that people who pose a major political challenge to the president start getting deported is a moment that the rules of the game fundamentally change.

Ukraine abandoned

At the dismal NATO summit that took place last week, pretty much the only concrete achievement was that Trump supposedly promised to sell some more Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine. Kyiv desperately needs those missiles to protect its cities against the relentless Russian bombardments that have continued despite the Trump regime’s attempts to negotiate a ceasefire, so it seemed like good news.

But then earlier this week the opposite happened - the Pentagon announced that it would cease the delivery of Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine because they are needed by U.S. forces in other parts of the world.

The decision on its own merits is of course awful. How badly Ukraine needs those missiles was on display last night, when Russia hit the country with the largest drone barrage of the war. If the U.S. is really serious about forcing Putin to come to the negotiating table, it needs to be signalling strength, not weakness. Denying Kyiv these missiles will not only cost lives, but makes it even harder to end the war.

But there’s also another story here, about the Trump regime’s incompetence and the extent to which Trump is not really calling the shots in his own government.

The decision to cut off the Patriot missiles seems to have originated in the Pentagon, where Elbridge Colby is overseeing a review of U.S. global military posture. Colby has made it his life’s work to see that the U.S. military draws down its commitments in Europe and the Middle East in order to pivot to the Indo-Pacific and get ready for what he believes is a coming conflict with China. Patriot missiles might be needed in the event of a war over Taiwan, so that’s where Colby wants them to go.

But if this is what the Pentagon is busy doing, then how could Trump promise Zelensky more Patriots? One of the answers is that he is not the sort of president who pays attention to the details of policy. He goes into meetings with foreign leaders unprepared and unbriefed, causing him to behave erratically and make impulsive decisions and promises that are disconnected from what the government is actually doing.

Another answer is that Trump has dismantled the National Security Council, which is the office that is supposed to impose central direction on U.S. foreign policy and make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction. Now that Marco Rubio is supposedly Secretary of State and National Security Advisor - and many NSC staffers have been fired - nobody is really doing that job. Rubio might be supposed to be doing both, but that’s not humanly possible. There’s a lack of coordination at the very heart of U.S. foreign policy.

I’m still trying to figure out the dynamics of this new White House, and they will change over time. But I’m starting to see a strange dualism emerge. On some matters, Trump exercises tight control - he runs a personalistic regime which responds to his whims. But on other matters, his lack of knowledge and attention leads to others taking the reins, making him something like an observer of what his own regime is actually doing.

And for foreign leaders, that means that a promise from Donald J. Trump might not actually be worth that much.

MAGA call for genocide

If I spent my column inches in this newsletter highlighting every instance of MAGA racism, I wouldn’t have space to do anything else. But this week a figure close to the president hit a new low, and it’s worth noting.

Earlier this week Trump went to tour ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, a new prison in Florida which is going to house people destined for deportation. The prison gets its name from the alligators that surround it in the Everglades, a region of flooded grassland in Florida which is also home to pythons. The prison is supposed to be extra secure because nobody is going to want to escape and run right into an alligator. And so MAGA influencer and Trump confidant Laura Loomer had this to say:

Joking about undocumented immigrants getting eaten by alligators is of course very bad. But that’s not even what this is. Sixty five million is, according to the last census, the number of Hispanic people living in the United States. So this is an explicit call for genocide.

Genocide often begins with dehumanizing rhetoric. By portraying a certain category of people as less than human and fit only for inhumane treatment, you slowly accustom others to the idea that they can be eliminated.