The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Elon Musk has now reached the "why bother with democracy when you can just buy it" stage of wealth. NPR notes he’s dropped over $400 million on Republican causes for the midterms — more than Bloomberg and Soros gave Democrats combined — while his companies have feasted on more than $30 billion in federal contracts, subsidies, loans and tax credits. Truly a heartwarming story of the government investing in small business, then watching that small business turn around and fund the politicians who’ll keep the gravy hose on full blast.

On the side, Musk’s SpaceX casually restricted Ukraine’s access to Starlink, knocking drones out of the sky in an active war, because nothing says responsible global leadership like letting one guy’s vibes determine battlefield communications. This is the same guy who oversaw DOGE, the Trump-era wrecking ball that dismantled USAID, a congressionally created foreign aid agency, and replaced it with whatever half-baked techno-libertarian fever dream he was having that week.

Historian David Nasaw calls Musk’s setup an “unholy alliance”: he hoovers up public money, then uses it to bankroll the politicians who protect him — a perpetual motion machine of oligarchy. Another historian tries to reassure us by saying, don’t worry, J.P. Morgan was worse. Comforting! Democracy may be in a “death spiral towards oligarchy,” but at least this time the robber baron is live-tweeting it and selling flamethrowers.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk unilaterally slowed a military-grade version of Starlink used by Ukraine, crippling drones in an active war zone because he decided they were being used to "kill people" in violation of his terms of service. Kyiv panicked, U.S. officials were confused, and somewhere in Mar-a-Lago, the actual president of the United States was apparently fine outsourcing foreign policy to his favorite unstable tech oligarch. Musk then hopped on a call with Trump to discuss this little private veto of U.S. and Ukrainian military strategy, because who wouldn’t want battlefield decisions run through the guy who can’t keep a website online during a Taylor Swift album drop.

This is the same Musk who dropped a quarter of a billion dollars to help re-elect Trump in 2024, then magically received billions in no-bid Pentagon contracts, access to government data, and his very own "Department of Government Efficiency" chainsaw to hack away at USAID and any other agency that annoyed him. Now he’s the single biggest donor of the 2026 midterms, pouring roughly $445m into keeping Republicans in charge, while also shoveling at least $168m into Texas super PACs backing walking indictment Ken Paxton — a man whose idea of public service involves Dubai parties with his extramarital girlfriend and alleged $300m healthcare fraudsters.

When he’s not rewriting U.S. foreign policy by throttling satellites, Musk is using X to beam weaponized lies to 242 million followers, like the fabricated story that Democrat James Talarico was secretly in a mental health facility. Security footage shows Talarico at home; the only real breakdown is America’s political immune system as one billionaire and one wannabe strongman fuse into a single, rage-tweeting shadow government. Reich’s conclusion is simple: defund Musk, break up his monopolies, tax his hoard, and stop letting a guy with a meme addiction and a persecution complex decide what happens on NATO’s front line.

Until 2029, though, we’re stuck in the Trump–Musk co-presidency, where a private citizen can threaten to cut off a key wartime communications system and then accuse critics of "stealing companies" and call for them to be jailed. Authoritarians used to seize the means of communication; now they just get no-bid contracts and a friendly call from the Oval Office.

Republicans spent months begging Trump to stop openly saying the quiet part about their data center love affair — that they’re fully aligned with Big Tech and its AI energy hogs, and anyone who objects is “backwards and poor.” With two weeks to go before Election Day and suburban voters noticing their electric bills, Trump has now executed the world’s laziest pivot: a Truth Social post where he just unilaterally “mandates” that data centers make their own electricity and pay local communities mysterious “dividends.” Policy, but make it MLM.

While Senate Republicans like John Thune, JD Vance, and Ohio’s walking conflict-of-interest Jon Husted scrambled to craft fake-tough talk about tech companies covering grid costs, Trump was busy assuring his billionaire tech buddies that Daddy Government would never get in the way of their server farms. Only now — after Husted face-planted trying to pass a Ratepayer Protection Act that was basically a campaign bailout — has Trump decided he too believes in this magical world where data centers conjure their own power and shower locals with cash just for existing. No regulatory framework, no enforcement, just vibes and “MAKE DEALS!!!”

The Trump White House even tried to get tech and utility companies to sign a pledge not to spike electricity costs for AI, because nothing reins in corporate excess like a strongly worded promise to the guy handing out tax cuts. Republicans spent years killing serious AI regulation and cuddling up to tech oligarchs; now they’re shocked voters don’t want to subsidize server farms that drink power like JD Vance drinks his own hype. So Trump’s solution is pure Trump: pretend he can command the grid by posting through it, slap a casino word like “dividends” on a corporate payoff scheme, and call it “GREAT FOR THE U.S.A.”

American democracy, that scrappy little experiment in self-government, has now been fully converted into an in-app purchase. Elon Musk just dropped $158m into the Senate Leadership Fund and another $10m straight into a pro–Ken Paxton PAC, because if there’s one guy you want to elevate to the world’s most powerful deliberative body, it’s the indicted Texas attorney general whose brand is basically “have you tried being more corrupt?”

Republicans admitted months ago that backing Trump’s handpicked chaos muppet Paxton could cost up to $200m, so naturally the solution was to call the world’s richest man and shake him like a money tree. Paxton is struggling against James Talarico, a progressive who somehow committed the unforgivable sin of funding his campaign with mere tens of millions raised from actual donors instead of one bored oligarch trying to speedrun Citizens United.

Musk has now shelled out about $366m this cycle alone – more than he spent helping Trump in 2024 – despite solemnly promising in 2025 that he was going to dial back the political spending. As always, the only thing more flexible than Republican principles is a billionaire’s definition of "less." His PAC helpfully warns that if Democrats win, America might become "socialist, woke and borderless" – unlike the current model, which is oligarchic, lawless and paywalled, where Senate seats are essentially venture investments for tech barons and indicted officials, and voters are just the branding.

Rural and suburban voters who used to treat the GOP like a family heirloom are suddenly discovering they do, in fact, have a breaking point: it’s when their town gets turned into an industrial air conditioner for Amazon’s AI. A new YouGov/Economist survey finds that Americans living within about a mile of data centers are swinging hard toward Democrats this cycle, jumping from 54% to 61% Dem since May, while the rest of the country barely budged. Apparently, nonstop fan noise, black-smoke gas turbines, and no actual jobs is not the heartland renaissance people were promised.

The boom in “hyperscale” data centers—most of them in red states—has been moving faster than local zoning boards, environmental reviews, or basic human consent. Developers grab land, plug in a few hundred megawatts, and tell residents to enjoy their new 24/7 industrial neighbor. A new tracking site has counted at least 268 local opposition groups in 37 states and more than $260 billion in planned data centers already canceled this year. Both parties are suddenly discovering their inner populist on the issue, except Trump, who helpfully announced that towns who resist will be “backwards and poor” and should just let data centers “reign.” Nothing says “man of the people” like threatening your voters with poverty if they don’t agree to be a cooling system colony.

Republicans, having spent a decade screaming about coastal elites destroying small-town America, are now struggling to explain why it’s actually good when tech giants show up to siphon off local water, blast out noise pollution, and hire approximately four guys and a Roomba. A few GOP hopefuls are frantically backpedaling—like the Alabama candidate who called data center fears “bullcrap” in July and is now running on strict regulations—but the party still can’t string together a coherent message on why living next to a diesel-powered cloud bunker is freedom. As one Ohio activist put it, both parties are complicit; voters will deliver the only language politicians understand on November 3. The cloud may be decentralized, but the backlash is very, very local.