What Elon Strange Trip It's Been

Goodbye to Heil, Weekend Whats, Feel Good Friday

You had me at Heil. Actually, after ruining my social media addiction to Twitter and spoiling the Tesla brand, I couldn't stand Elon before he heiled. Now that's he's supposedly departing his official government duties, we'll start to see two kinds of stories in the media. The first kind of story will be the result of pent up leaks, like today's NYT (Gift Article): On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. "Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall." This hardly seems like new news. And it definitely doesn't qualify as surprising news. Can you imagine running several of the largest companies in the country and the country itself without shoveling handfuls of drugs down your gullet? I can barely write NextDraft without consuming enough coffee to redefine meth as a sedative. (And I don't even want to get into what I have to take to get over writing NextDraft. At this point, my psychiatrist writes out so many prescriptions he's implemented a surcharge for ink.) The second kind of Musk story we'll see is the more important kind; a reflection on the enormous damage he did. Michelle Goldberg sums that part up pretty well in the NYT (Gift Article): Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death. "Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad PR for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children ... If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he’s engendered. Musk’s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty, and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he’s seen for the rest of his public life." (Spoiler Alert: It probably won't.) I said we'd see two kind of stories following Musk's departure from government. The truth is we'll soon be seeing a third kind. The stories that explain how he never really left at all.

+ "Musk’s failure to follow through on his boasts, though, should not detract from a clear-eyed assessment of the extraordinary amount of damage he succeeded in wreaking. The wise men are laughing Musk out of town, and I get it. His 'performative vandalism,' as Jonah Goldberg put it on CNN, was in some respects just a pernicious, highly dangerous new variant of a Washington perennial: the pol who makes promises he cannot keep. But it is hard to think of any other unelected official who has done so much harm to the U.S. government in such a short period of time. The fact that the deficit may get even bigger at the end of the day only worsens the injury." The New Yorker: Elon Musk Didn’t Blow Up Washington, but He Left Plenty of Damage Behind.

+ Even one guy with a lot of money and a ketamine tsunami coursing through his veins can't do this kind of damage alone. The destruction of agencies, and especially of foreign aid, has been a team effort, and one, that whether we like it or not, now represents America. ProPublica: Death, Sexual Violence and Human Trafficking: Fallout From U.S. Aid Withdrawal Hits the World’s Most Fragile Locations. "'It is devastating, but it’s not surprising,' Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and member of the National Security Council during Democratic administrations, told ProPublica. 'It’s all what people in the national security community have predicted. I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world ... It keeps me up at night.'" (The only thing that keeps Elon up at night is the Adderall.)

2

A Bully Market

"During the Biden years, Trump liked to say that 'the world is laughing at us.' Now it really is." Dana Milbank in WaPo (Gift Article): The bully gets punched in the nose. Part of this article focuses on the comical (unless you invest, hold, use, or like money) tariff negotiations. But as I mentioned yesterday, the tariff chaos is less about TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) and more about CHALUPA (Congress Has Acquiesced Like Unbelievably Pathetic A**holes).

+ Trump Accuses China of ‘Violating’ Its Trade Agreement With the U.S., Laments Being ‘Mr. Nice Guy.' (Is this claim about China rooted in reality or a reaction to the TACO claim? Don't bother trying to answer that. The story will change before you have the chance...)

3

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

OK, let's lighten things up a bit with one of the great ledes in recent memory. "A pair of hikers in New York called emergency services to report that a third member of their group had died, but when a park ranger responded to rescue them it turned out they were just high on hallucinogenic mushrooms." (The good news is that no one actually died. The bad news is that these two hikers are now running DOGE.)

4

Weekend Whats

What to Movie: Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play a couple of spies who also happen to be a married couple in Black Bag on Peacock.

+ What to Watch: "As she wrangles three teens, an aging father and vulnerable kids from her social services job, Pørni somehow finds time for everyone — except herself." I'm only one episode into the Norwegian show Pernille on Netflix, but I can already tell I'm gonna watch all five seasons (in part because watching TV nonstop is my way of coping with everything else in this newsletter, and in part because you can tell how good it is right from the start).

+ What to Read: "The widow’s most important, and perhaps unusual, request was that the building sit exactly on the nations’ common border. Inside, black tape representing the boundary ran along the hardwood floors, a symbol not of division but of the enduring friendship between the two lands. Then one day, the leader of the country to the south threatened to annex his neighbor to the north." Nowhere was the friendship between the US and Canada more clear than in a library that shared a common border between the two countries. And now, nowhere is our stupidity more clearly on display. NYT (Gift Article): The U.S.-Canada Border Runs Through This Library. That’s Now a Problem.

5

Extra, Extra

Zip Code of Conduct: "It undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending." Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting from The Supreme Court decision to "allow the Trump administration to temporarily pause a humanitarian program that has allowed nearly half a million people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the U.S. and remain here legally for two years." (Feel safer?) Meanwhile, welcome to the new America: Children zip-tied at San Antonio immigration court in new crackdown.

+ Crack a Smile: "Despite decades of data proving its efficacy at protecting teeth from decay—particularly children's teeth—two states have now banned the use of fluoride in public water, and communities around the country have followed suit or are considering doing the same." RFK Jr.’s fluoride ban would ruin 25 million kids’ teeth, cost $9.8 billion.

+ Poking for Likes: White House targets Harvard again with social media screening of all foreign visitors to school. (Our bureau of tourism has its work cut out for it.)

+ Health Check Your Work: In part due to faulty use of AI programs and in part because of a predilection for lying, the White House Health Report Included Fake Citations. (Maybe the real news here is that this headline also suggests that a White House report included some real citations, too.)

+ Despite and Malice: "President Trump has nominated 30-year-old conservative lawyer Paul Ingrassia, to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a government ethics office, despite Ingrassia's ties to multiple antisemitic extremists." (Are we sure despite is the right word here?)

+ Ball Huggers: "Could the final frontier following the short-shorts explosion be straight dudes wearing briefs on the beach without blinking an eye?" GQ: Are Straight Guys Ready for Speedo Summer? (Don't ask me, I wear jeans on the beach.)

+ The Glide of Frankenstein: The amazing video of the Chinese paraglider getting sucked into a cloud was a little too amazing. It was AI generated. (I choose to believe that all of 2025 so far is AI generated.)

6

Feel Good Friday

"In a world first, NHS England will offer patients with lung and breast cancer access to 'liquid biopsy' tests to help speed up their access to treatment." NHS offers ‘revolutionary’ blood test for cancer in world first. (Science is good.)

+ Faizan Zaki wins Scripps National Spelling Bee a year after coming in 2nd. The winning word: Éclaircissement. (A French word describing the bloating caused by too many desserts.)

+ Alaska man survives after being trapped face-down in creek by 700lb boulder.

+ Copenhagen was just named the happiest city in the world. The top US city was NY coming in 17th.

+ Experience: I’ve made the longest chain of chewing-gum wrappers in the world.

+ New urinal designs could prevent up to 265,000 gallons of urine from spilling onto the floor each day.

+ There are upsides to refusing to bend the knee. One of them is that you can get a minute-long ovation for a speech after just saying the word, Welcome.