The Americans claim that their attempt to humiliate the Ukrainian president in the White House yesterday was about peace. On that premise, nothing they said makes any sense.

The attempted mugging of a visiting president was about the world war that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance have chosen. If we attend to what Vance and Trump said yesterday, we can work our way to the unreason of American policy, and to the chaos that will follow.

JD Vance opened hostilities against Volodymr Zelens’kyi with a claim about negotiations with Russia, treating them as a formula that will magically end the war. Zelens’kyi had said, calmly and correctly, that negotiations with Russia have been tried before and have not worked. The Russians have betrayed every truce and every ceasefire since their first invasion in 2014. And that first invasion of course violated a number of treaties between Ukraine and Russia, as well as the basic principles of international law. Zelens’kyi ran for president in 2019 as the peace candidate, promising to negotiate with Putin to end what was then a war that had been ongoing for five years. Russia did not respond to these overtures, except with contempt, and then with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

But underneath, all three tell the same story. Political parties are important. More specifically, party systems matter. How many parties you have. How they’re elected. Where they’re elected from. They’re how politics are organized — guiding how democracies operate, how politicians behave, and who ultimately ends up in power. The party system you have is a big factor in whether your democracy survives.

We have to switch to a system like the one Germany uses — we need to go from “one” to “more-than-one” winner in at least some of our legislative elections.

For some of the benefits of what that switch to proportional representation would look like — including but not limited to allowing multipartyism — I recommend this piece by New America’s Oscar Pocasangre: Eight reasons to champion proportional representation for the U.S.

Donald Trump is a vehicle for Musk and Thiel to implement their radical ideas of replacing accountable governance with an unaccountable techno-monarchy

What are the ideas, ideologies, and motives animating this reactionary libertarianism that seeks to delete liberal democracy and replace it with its opposite? Mike Brock, an industry insider who helped build Cash App among other ventures, unpacks this worldview in a long but engrossing essay that he penned for his own Substack, Notes From the Circus. We present to you an edited version below. He has been marinating in this worldview at the highest echelons for over a decade and intimately understands its intellectual genealogy, extreme faith in technology, and terrifying, illiberal, futuristic vision for America and the world.

A shadow revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside Elon Musk’s DOGE, teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. In short, democracy is being deleted and replaced by AI models and proprietary technology—Musk’s claims about transparent, open-source governance notwithstanding. It is a coup, executed not with guns but with backend migrations and database wipes.

This coup, however, isn’t a spontaneous one—it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis and worked its way from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance. And it has been driven by the idea that democracy, being not just inefficient but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress, is itself an obsolete technology that must be “disrupted.”

A hot startup that grew overnight into a billion-dollar behemoth is racing with established tech giants for supremacy in a new market that everyone expects will unlock a future of abundance and profit.

Flashback: That sounds like a description of OpenAI vs Google et al., but it’s actually an account of the “browser wars” at the dawn of the web 30 years ago — when Netscape vied with Microsoft to control the software people would use to access the internet.

Why it matters: In 1996 or 1997, a couple years after forward-looking tech leaders first realized that “owning” the web browser would be a prize, Google — the company that would ultimately win the race — didn’t even exist.

Today, as AI giants and challengers vie to build a better chatbot and seize mindshare and market share, there is similarly a good possibility that the winning bot (assuming there is only one) has not yet been invented, and the company that will make it has yet to be founded.

That’s why tech’s superpowers, despite their immense wealth and influence, have been running scared.

The Americans claim that their attempt to humiliate the Ukrainian president in the White House yesterday was about peace. On that premise, nothing they said makes any sense.

The attempted mugging of a visiting president was about the world war that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance have chosen. If we attend to what Vance and Trump said yesterday, we can work our way to the unreason of American policy, and to the chaos that will follow.

JD Vance opened hostilities against Volodymr Zelens’kyi with a claim about negotiations with Russia, treating them as a formula that will magically end the war. Zelens’kyi had said, calmly and correctly, that negotiations with Russia have been tried before and have not worked. The Russians have betrayed every truce and every ceasefire since their first invasion in 2014. And that first invasion of course violated a number of treaties between Ukraine and Russia, as well as the basic principles of international law. Zelens’kyi ran for president in 2019 as the peace candidate, promising to negotiate with Putin to end what was then a war that had been ongoing for five years. Russia did not respond to these overtures, except with contempt, and then with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

For those who don’t know much about government, the idea of Elon Musk as a serious tech guy who could shake up how the public sector work was appealing. Even people who do know a lot about government were hopeful.

Such hopes now look naive. Musk is not just ignorant about what government does, he chooses to celebrate and make decisions based on that ignorance, defaulting to accusations of fraud to explain things he does not want to understand. He is not interested in fixing government, but in destroying key parts of government, and that takes no great skill.

This is not just a point about competing political philosophies, but about state capacity, and specifically tech skills in government. Musk is not just destroying core government functions, he is also destroying the actual tech capacity of government. Because there are, in fact, skilled technologists who work in government. They are not enough of them, and they lacked power to make big changes. They worked mostly in the US Digital Service and 18F, both created in 2014 after the failure of healthcare.gov. And now they are mostly gone.

It’s easy to see what’s happening but hard to intuit what comes next.

What does seem clear is that Trump is putting an end to the foreign policy the United States has pursued since the end of World War II. Indeed, his worldview seems to rest on two assumptions that run directly counter to the way in which, for all the serious differences between them, every president since 1945 has thought about America’s role in the world.

The first is that Trump has a fundamentally zero-sum view of the world. America’s relationship with allies like Japan or the United Kingdom has been based on the assumption that both sides would benefit from the partnership. In particular, America would provide its allies with a security guarantee; in return, it would enjoy international stability, reap the benefits of free trade, and have huge sway over the rules governing the world order. Even if the United States might be a net contributor in the short run, expending more for its military budget than its partners, these alliances would over the long run serve the country’s “enlightened self-interest.”

Trump, by contrast, seems to believe that every deal has a winner and a loser; since American allies in Europe or East Asia are not unhappy about the current arrangements, this must mean that it is his nation that’s the sucker. Hence Trump’s determination to use his leverage over America’s longstanding allies to extract as much short-term gain as possible. Europeans perceive this as a mob boss asking for protection money; Trump is likely thinking of himself as a businessman renegotiating a rotten deal.

R.I.P. The American Century

There is some debate about when the period of U.S. international leadership often described as “The American Century” began. Most frequently, people assert it commenced in the wake of the U.S.-led allied victory in World War II. Others, who see it as referring to the gradual rise to preeminence of U.S. power on the international stage might set the date earlier. Some might point America’s entry into World War I. Others might even suggest it began with the period of expansion that commenced near the turn of the century during the presidency of William McKinley and immediately afterwards that of his successor, Theodore Roosevelt.

There will likely be less disputing when the American Century died, however. While our decline began with ill-considered military debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan during the first two decades of this century (and with domestic policies that favored the rich, increased inequality and therefore division within our society, and the general sense of lazy entitlement that marked the checkered leadership tenure of the Baby Boom generation, our period of global leadership, the product of generations of great sacrifice, vision and commitment, was undoubtedly pronounced dead on February 28, 2025.

On that date, this past Friday, America’s worst president, a man who has already contributed enormously to the country’s decline, Donald Trump, effectively announced his government’s formal abandonment of the principles, values, allies and institutions that were essential to our global leadership role. While he had attacked those foundations of American leadership throughout his first term in office, seeking to withdraw into a gated community vision of America’s role, and while he has accelerated his assault on that leadership role since reassuming office in January (see below for more on this), his pre-meditated ambush of Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office was a public confirmation that America had renounced its role as leader of the free world. Instead, it was more clearly communicated than ever before that Trump had chosen for us—with the support of his administration acolytes and the MAGA colony of worms on Capitol Hill—a new role as a satellite nation of Russia and a vassal state of its dictator Vladimir Putin.

But underneath, all three tell the same story. Political parties are important. More specifically, party systems matter. How many parties you have. How they’re elected. Where they’re elected from. They’re how politics are organized — guiding how democracies operate, how politicians behave, and who ultimately ends up in power. The party system you have is a big factor in whether your democracy survives.

We have to switch to a system like the one Germany uses — we need to go from “one” to “more-than-one” winner in at least some of our legislative elections.

For some of the benefits of what that switch to proportional representation would look like — including but not limited to allowing multipartyism — I recommend this piece by New America’s Oscar Pocasangre: Eight reasons to champion proportional representation for the U.S.

Donald Trump is a vehicle for Musk and Thiel to implement their radical ideas of replacing accountable governance with an unaccountable techno-monarchy

What are the ideas, ideologies, and motives animating this reactionary libertarianism that seeks to delete liberal democracy and replace it with its opposite? Mike Brock, an industry insider who helped build Cash App among other ventures, unpacks this worldview in a long but engrossing essay that he penned for his own Substack, Notes From the Circus. We present to you an edited version below. He has been marinating in this worldview at the highest echelons for over a decade and intimately understands its intellectual genealogy, extreme faith in technology, and terrifying, illiberal, futuristic vision for America and the world.

A shadow revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside Elon Musk’s DOGE, teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. In short, democracy is being deleted and replaced by AI models and proprietary technology—Musk’s claims about transparent, open-source governance notwithstanding. It is a coup, executed not with guns but with backend migrations and database wipes.

This coup, however, isn’t a spontaneous one—it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis and worked its way from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance. And it has been driven by the idea that democracy, being not just inefficient but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress, is itself an obsolete technology that must be “disrupted.”

The proper locus of shame is Trump and Vance. I’m ashamed that they, along with Elon Musk, are now leading our nation. I’m also ashamed that their Republican lackeys in Congress are enabling and encouraging them. I’m ashamed that Democrats in Congress are so supine.

Yet I urge you not to give in to the sort of resignation or cynicism that believes nothing can be done — that we are powerless and have no choice but to watch our nation and everything it has stood for be hijacked by Trump, Vance, and Musk.

We have enormous power and many choices. When the American people understand what is happening — as they are beginning to — no Republican in Congress will be safe. Even now, majorities of independents and Democrats, and even some 30 percent of Republican voters, believe we must stand with Ukraine.

The U.S. plays the game of diplomacy and international institutions because we built it. These institutions weren’t imposed on us—we created them. They are extensions of our influence, tools we can use to structure global stability in ways that benefit us. They reduce the costs of us maintaining a system that benefits us in ways that most Americans won’t appreciate until they’re gone.

Could we leave? Sure. And we’d quickly find ourselves in a world where other powers—China, Russia, the EU—step in to write the rules instead.

But know this, once we’re on the outside, we don’t get to complain about the results. Even with all of our power, it will be considerably more difficult to fight against the machinery, and Americans have become very accustomed to an international order that effortlessly bends to their will.

That’s the real reason we stay. Not out of altruism, not because we’re suckers, but because it’s in our best interest to set the rules rather than be ruled by them.

President Trump and Vice President Vance had quite the day the other day — screaming at Volodymyr Zelensky because he wouldn’t grovel at their feat and, by extension, those of Vladimir Putin. Nor was Zelensky ready to agree to a Trumped-up peace deal without a real U.S. security guarantee. Trump’s claim that the presence of U.S. mining companies in Ukraine would keep Putin at bay was risible.

Zelensky told the duo (Why was Vance there? Did Trump need backup?) the obvious — you can’t bargain with Putin from a position of weakness and Ukraine’s sovereignty was not theirs to sell down the river. After losing so many and so much for so long, Zelensky wasn’t playing ball without understanding the end game.

As Trump became more and more apoplectic, claiming Putin had all the cards (The U.S. has no cards?), and wailing about WWIII, Zelensky got Trump to show his real hand — an end to U.S. support for Ukraine and an end to U.S. participation in NATO. In so doing, Trump killed the fantasy that his actions will differ from his words.

For Trump, dictatorship isn’t a choice—it’s a survival strategy.

Power isn’t about doing the right thing—it’s about staying in control. The first book in the TLM Book Club, The Dictator’s Handbook, lays out why leaders, whether democratic or autocratic, follow the same ruthless playbook: reward your coalition, eliminate threats, and never, ever trust the people.

But the reality of power doesn’t care about theory. As The Dictator’s Handbook makes clear, leaders don’t act in the public interest because they are good people. They act in ways that maintain their power, and if they don’t, they don’t stay in power for long.

By the end of class, they understood why dictatorship isn’t a choice—it’s the natural order of power when constraints don’t exist.

As the egg shortage shows, the corporate world is a Soviet-ized mess, and everyone knows it. It’s time to actually make our systems work again.

None of these arguments are wholly wrong, and there are things we can learn from Trump, Musk, Klein, Lowrey, et al. But as I’m looking into markets, it seems like the real way forward is to re-examine the underpinnings of American business, and rejigger the relationship between finance and production so we’re doing real things again instead of lying about them. We have to build institutions, not tear them down.

There are plenty of business leaders, like Tim Sweeney at Epic Games, Michael Beckham at Simple Modern, Blake Scholl at Boom Supersonic trying to do so, working to re-shore and innovate, or pharmacists, doctors, grocers, et al trying to serve their communities. There are even people in private equity who get the problem. I know and talk to people across many industries, from electric utilities to mail management software. Ultimately, it’s time to rebuild American business, and there are a lot of people who want to do so.

Over the past two days, almost everyone I know has been talking about Trump’s disastrous meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about it is a conservative or a centrist. Absolutely no one thought the meeting went well. A couple of people said that Zelensky should have been less combative and more obsequious; no one praised Trump’s or JD Vance’s actions. Everyone is uneasy. Some are downright scared.

The MAGA apparatchiks are out in full force on social media, bellowing “America First!!”, praising Trump for what they think was a show of strength, and denouncing Zelensky at maximum volume. Republicans whom Trump has cowed into submission admitted the meeting was a disaster, but blamed the Ukrainian leader for failing to show Trump proper respect. But deep down, everyone who isn’t fully in the tank for Trump knows that this was a dark moment in American history.

In short, there’s now an incredible amount of uncertainty about U.S. policies, policies that have a huge impact on both individual Americans and U.S. business. And this isn’t uncertainty about what will happen over the next few years, it’s acute uncertainty about what will happen in the next few weeks and months.

Where is this uncertainty coming from? That’s easy: The U.S. government is currently under the control of a deeply ignorant, vengeful megalomaniac with zero impulse control. And it’s not just Elon Musk: Trump shares the same characteristics.

If you don’t believe me about the ignorance, look at the way Trump is hyping the possibilities of U.S. investment in Russia. Even if there weren’t issues involved with doing business in a country where people who displease the dictator have a tendency to fall out of windows, does Trump realize that the European Union, which he is insulting and threatening with trade war, has 9 times Russia’s GDP? Which business relationship is more worth cultivating?

I can’t take it any more… saving tax dollars is nonsense.

My point in all of this is that money is a promise. It’s not magic. It’s not something special. It works because we all believe in it. It really pays for nothing. It’s a symbol of our collective productivity.

However, the federal government is the only one that issues it. That makes them very special.

States work the way you think it work. They do have to collect coins, borrow for real, have actual bank accounts, and write checks. Your state functions like you do, just on a massive scale. States can (and have) gone effectively “bankrupt.” It’s not called that, but they can default on their debts. States technically cannot go “bankrupt,” because the federal bankruptcy code doesn’t allow for them to bankrupt themselves. However, states have defaulted on their debts to their citizens. For example:

CNN Poll: Public remains negative on Trump ahead of address to Congress
March 2, 2025

The American public’s view of Donald Trump’s presidency and the direction he’s leading the country is more negative than positive just ahead of his first formal address to Congress since returning to office, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

The survey finds that across three basic measures of Trump’s performance on the job – his approval rating, whether he has the right priorities and whether his policies are taking the country in the right direction – the negative side outpaces the positive.

Overall, 52% disapprove of Trump’s performance in office, with 48% approving, about the same as in a CNN poll in mid-February. The poll was completed before Friday’s angry exchange in the Oval Office between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and does not reflect public opinion on that

Elon Musk’s rule by poll
Derek Robertson, Digital Futures Daily 2/25/25

To rally support for his effort to impose an email questionnaire on federal employees, Elon Musk resorted to one of his favorite tactics: posting a poll on X.

“Should all federal employees be required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished last week?” Musk asked Sunday morning, inviting his 200 million-plus followers to voice their approval or disapproval.

None of these things are true of Musk’s polls on X, which are seen only by X users (and primarily his own 200 million followers). Anyone can respond, including non-Americans and bots. The polls are conducted on a platform that he alone controls, making decisions about who sees the poll, when and where they see it, and how it’s worded.

And he ignores the answer if he feels like it: In December 2022 a clear majority of X users told him that he shouldn’t govern the platform, to which he responded by saying that he would limit who could vote in polls going forward to paid subscribers (a promise on which he seemingly did not follow through).

Smerconish Polls

And their own supporters will be among the biggest victims

I often encounter generally well-informed people who are surprised to learn that Medicaid is a much bigger program, in terms of the number of people covered, than Medicare — 69 million versus 48 million. The perception that Medicare is much more important may reflect the fact that Medicaid still costs taxpayers less than Medicare. This is partly because older people have higher health costs than the young adults and children who make up much of the Medicaid population. But it’s also because Medicaid is quite cost-efficient; more about that shortly.

There’s also, let’s be frank, a perception that Medicaid is politically unimportant, that conservatives can safely target it for cuts, because it’s mainly a program for inner city people of color. But that was never as true as people imagined and is definitely not true now. Again, consider West Virginia. It’s one of America’s most rural states and overwhelmingly — 90 percent — white. Yet as we’ve seen, it’s deeply dependent on Medicaid.

Trump and Musk’s fraud trope is distinct in three ways
First, Musk’s fake fraud claims are different from the past because he has built, and now is able to leverage, a propaganda machine to feed the fraud narrative. Ronald Reagan was an extraordinarily effective communicator, but Musk makes him look like an amateur. Musk can use DOGE to generate false claims about fraud, and how much money DOGE can save by tackling it. He then pushes those claims on his social media platform. The President and right-wing media obligingly repeat the claims. It is an integrated production function that converts conspiracy theories into government policy, and then conventional wisdom in MAGAland.

Second, as we describe below, the scale and scope of the programs they’re targeting are fundamentally different from the past. It’s not just to gut programs that benefit marginalized populations. They’re targeting a broad swath of government programs, including popular policies that benefit most Americans, and using the fraud trope to justify extreme and illegal actions, like shutting down entire agencies. This fits with a worldview that government is fundamentally corrupt, and must be captured and radically refashioned.

Third, the motivation is not really about shrinking government, rather it’s about state capture. The strategy is simple. Claim there’s fraud, dismantle the institutions that prevent fraud, and then capture public dollars for yourself. As Musk himself recently noted: “it’s like, really easy to take advantage of the federal government. Very easy.” He should know. His companies have received at least $38 billion from government subsidies, loans and contracts. Their value, and his personal net worth, have ballooned since the election.

But the Musk/Trump betrayal of America’s international principles is having an unintended result: Europe’s democracies, which as a group remain one of the world’s economic superpowers, are rousing themselves to fill the vacuum.

Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy, each by itself, has greater economic resources than Russia does. Collectively, they have vastly greater weight than Russia. Moreover, the war has placed the Russian economy under severe strain. Yet, for most of Europe, the cost of aiding Ukraine has been barely noticeable. And if Merz’s remarks are any indication, Europe may soon be prepared to do considerably more.

A trade war with Europe means going head to head with an economy more or less the same size as our own, at the same time that we’re having fights with all our other trading partners. And the Europeans are not going to be in a conciliatory mood. Did I mention that Tesla sales in Europe fell 45 percent last month?

The landscape of American innovation is indelibly shaped by where liability lies, and where it does not. Innovative technologies are very often the technologies whose tort liability exposure, for one reason or another, is limited. The COVID vaccine? Waiver. SpaceX rocket launches? Waiver. Cell phone towers? Waiver. Internet communications and social media? Waiver. Other innovative business models, such as ridesharing services, were designed in part to minimize tort liability exposure.

Most important of all, though, is software, which for the most part enjoys a miraculous existence, seemingly unbothered by the liability rules that hold back everyone else in our economy. But this has been changing before powerful AI came to the market—and AI may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Software developers—and especially AI developers—may not be free from tort liability for much longer.

Software has been the primary driver of American innovation and growth for at least the last two decades. Tort liability could bring that dynamism to a dramatic halt. The AI community must face this problem head on. Here are some thoughts about how to do so.

On top of all these executive orders and firings, Trump is reportedly planning to ask Congress to cut science funding by a substantial amount:

[T]he White Houses’ first budget request of Donald Trump’s second term could be a fiscal reckoning for America’s government scientific enterprise. The National Science Foundation, a cornerstone of the country’s research infrastructure with its annual $9 billion purse, might face particularly savage cuts…intelligence from within the administration suggested the agency’s budget could be slashed by up to two-thirds, potentially shrinking to a mere $3 billion.

As the U.S. under Donald Trump retreats from international institutions, the World Bank and other multilateral development banks might have good reason to fear losing their most important backer. Could that be the end of the rules-based global economic order – or a step toward a new establishment dominated by China?

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a China-led institution launched nine years ago to fund infrastructure and development projects, has operated largely within the norms of existing financial institutions. If Washington withdraws from the world’s multilateral financial institutions, the AIIB could step in to fill the gap – and, in doing so, reshape global economic leadership.

A deeper look at AIIB reveals a paradox. While the institution was created by an illiberal government, it has positioned itself as a champion of multilateral cooperation, following international development standards and cofinancing projects with the World Bank and other major financial institutions.

With a growing portfolio of projects and a membership spanning 110 countries containing more than 80% of the world’s people, the AIIB’s influence is already significant. And as Tamar Gutner of American University explains, the Trump administration could leave the AIIB claiming the mantle of global financial leadership.

• Why it matters: Trump and his administration are doing this systematically, gleefully and unmistakably. But as we’ve written before, this unprecedented shift could set the precedent for future Democratic presidents, too.

🔭 The big picture: Trump frames this as payback for what he calls incompetent, left-wing coverage, and the White House says it’s expanding access to new voices and outlets. The White House Correspondents’ Association says he’s tearing “at the independence of a free press in the United States.”

• The end result is twofold: much tighter control over media, and new tools and tactics to punish critics.

It’s pretty easy to persuade a large minority of the public of something, but the people you persuade are almost certainly going to be people who would vote for you anyway. Convincing high-value persuasion targets is a lot harder. And there can be huge second-order downsides to convincing your supporters of things that are not actually true. It may feel savvy to support sloppy, misleading, or inaccurate work from your own side, but it’s often counterproductive.

I don’t think that makes a ton of sense. Regardless, though, it doesn’t match what’s actually happening with DOGE, which is that Musk is promising people their benefits will go up even as Republicans enact multi-trillion dollar tax cuts.

If you take the misleading tweets seriously, deportations will boost the economic fortunes of American citizens. The fact that this is not actually true is something that Republicans should think about, but don’t seem to be.

Two of them are real. The third, not so much.

There’s the actual business, which brings a product to market and monitors success by comparing revenues and expenditures. Actual businesses are generally evaluated based on their capacity to bring in more revenue than they spend in a given year.

Then there’s the imaginary business of building the future. Imaginary businesses aren’t evaluated on their profitability. They are judged on growth, on their ability to convince investors that today’s pricy growth will unlock unlimited future profits.

The imaginary business determines the company’s stock valuation.

I still think this is basically right, but the more I have examined the history of Silicon Valley, the more it seems incomplete.

The amendment I would offer is that there are effectively three distinct types of money that have fueled Silicon Valley’s rise to dominance. There’s (1) government contracts, (2) direct product revenues, and (3) there’s investments and financial speculation.

Germany’s presumptive new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, faces challenges both at home and overseas following his conservative alliance’s election victory on Feb. 23, 2025.

A strong showing from the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) – which Merz, in line with other mainstream German parties, refuses to countenance as a coalition party as part of an unofficial “firewall” against extremism – will make forming a functioning government tricky.

But in the moments after the election results, it was the future of the European Union and its relationship with America that was his immediate focus: “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”

To understand why that is such a concern for Germany now and what “real independence” from Washington means, The Conversation U.S. turned to Garret Martin, an expert on U.S.-Europe relations at American University, for answers.

What prompted Merz’s ‘real independence’ line?

Presumably it was a response to a series of recent announcements and actions by the Trump administration that have shocked the German political establishment. This includes the sudden revelation that the U.S. would negotiate directly with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, but seemingly without the Europeans or Ukrainians involved. That development went down like a lead balloon in Berlin, especially considering Germany’s significant financial support of Kyiv since 2022.

Moreover, the German establishment has also frowned at a series of recent declarations by members of the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he harshly criticized Europe for allegedly undermining freedom of expression, provoked clear pushback from German leaders. Trump, for his part, hardly endeared himself to his German allies when he denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator.”

How would this ‘real independence’ be achieved?

Defining what “real independence” means and being able to implement such a drastic change in transatlantic relations will be a tall order. If by “real independence” Merz means that Germany would no longer rely on the U.S. for its security, then that would require several major steps.

Merz would first need to convince his likely coalition partners, the Social Democrats, that this is the right goal. After all, German governments are bound by very detailed coalition agreements. Second, Merz would need to significantly increase German defense spending. As it stands, Germany’s annual defense budget is slightly over US$90 billion, or 2% of its GDP. But a recent study by the economic think tank Bruegel suggests Berlin would need to increase its budget by $145 billion annually to defend Europe without the assistance of the U.S.

But to achieve this, Merz will likely need to increase defense spending by such a level that it will contravene the country’s “debt brake.” This 2009 constitutional rule essentially caps the annual deficit that the government can take on. But overturning this mechanism would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the German Parliament. Merz’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union party won 28.6% of the vote – and even with the support of the country’s main center-left party, the Social Democrats, Merz will fall short of the parliamentary votes needed.

Finally, “real independence” would also require convincing other European Union partners to join him down that path. Assuming that the Trump administration continues its current trajectory and further undermines NATO, the EU would have to step in to become a more prominent security actor for the continent. It might also require, as Merz hinted, that the United Kingdom and France be ready to share their nuclear weapons, since the U.S. may not be trusted anymore to defend NATO countries.

All of these steps would cover “real independence” only in the security sphere and not touch other crucial policy areas, such as trade and energy. And that would be an equally tall order given the level of economic ties binding Germany to the U.S., as well as the looming threat of tariffs.

What does this mean for German-US relations?

Merz’s “real independence” statement would have been noteworthy coming from any German chancellor. But it is even more striking when one considers the fact that Merz is a committed transatlanticist who deeply admires the U.S. and counts Ronald Reagan as one of his role models.

At 69, Merz came of age during the final years of the Cold War, when the U.S. played a key role in enabling German reunification. He worked for years for Atlantik-Brücke, a lobbying group pushing for closer transatlantic ties. And he has, by his own account, traveled more than 100 times to the U.S.

Independence will not likely mean a complete divorce between the U.S. and Germany – the ties binding the two countries, whether economic, cultural or political, run too deep. However, we can expect that Berlin will not hesitate to take a more combative approach toward Washington when necessary, so to protect German and European interests. As Merz pointed out, it is clear that the Trump administration does “not care much about the fate of Europe.”

What does this signal for Merz’s view of Germany’s position in the EU?

Merz’s win will certainly lead to important shifts in Germany’s position in the EU, and could be a major boost for a union in need of leadership. His predecessor, Olaf Scholz, was hampered by a weak economy, divisions within his coalition and indecisive leadership in Europe. Moreover, poor relations with French President Emmanuel Macron also stalled the Franco-German partnership, normally a key engine of leadership in the EU.

Merz certainly plans to take a very distinct approach toward the EU than his predecessor. His calls for “real independence” will certainly be very welcome in France, which has long called for Europe to be more responsible for its own security. As such, it opens up the possibility of far closer ties between Paris and Berlin than we saw in recent years. Moreover, Merz, with his more hawkish position toward Russia, could be counted on to provide greater support for Ukraine.

The Russian lies told for foreigners return to that basic premise of non-existence. Ukrainians want to be Russians — because they do not exist. The Ukrainian government is illegitimate — because there is no Ukrainian nation that could have elected it. We will call the Ukrainian government or Ukrainians “Nazis” — not because that has any basis in reality, but because that would justify eliminating them. We will claim that Ukraine is an element of a conspiracy — if it is real, Ukraine is not.

The claim that somehow Russia had to invade Ukraine because of NATO also comes down to the notion that Ukraine does not exist. The story starts from the premise that only NATO has agency, that only NATO can act. Russia is therefore blameless in whatever it does, and Ukraine is simply a pawn. In this telling, the problem is that NATO was going to endlessly “enlarge” or “expand.” But that is not what happened. NATO was not an issue in Ukrainian politics before 2014. Ukraine could not have joined NATO back them because of military agreements with Russia that made this impossible. In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine anyway. Then Ukrainians, sensibly enough, decided that joining NATO might be a good idea.

Forget that. How about the capital being employed? There better be something new. I mean, we’re talking now for the just a top handful of companies doing $300 to $500 billion in capex [capital expenditures] annually. I mean, AI isn’t like the internet, which made things more capital efficient and raised returns on capital.

So far, AI is doing the opposite. It is a massively capital-intensive business. Someone joked that the top tech companies are now looking like the oil frackers did in 2014, 2015, where more and more capital is chasing arguably a variable return.

Translation: these days tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on equipment and buildings (the capex he’s talking about), so it’s not like the internet boom, which didn’t involve large-scale spending. And he’s doubtful about whether future returns will justify the current levels of AI spending.

The Far-Right Is Winning. Democracy Is Dying. Will Anyone Fight Back?

Is this the moment democracy starts to fade?

If so, how did we get here? And more importantly—why now?

The Failure of Neoliberalism

For nearly fifty years, Western democracies relied on neoliberalism, an economic model that promised stability, efficiency, and prosperity. It seemed to work for a while.

Markets were unleashed, governments cut taxes, and businesses were given free rein. Leaders across the political spectrum—from Reagan and Thatcher to Clinton and Blair—took it as gospel that free markets, deregulation, and globalization were the keys to success.

What’s neglected? Where can you make a difference?

From the Effective Altruism world, I learned about the Important, Tractable, Neglected (ITN) framework for evaluating potential charitable causes.

The idea is that you want to focus on things that are a big deal. But you also want to focus on causes where your efforts are likely to make a difference. And you want to focus on problems that aren’t getting the attention they deserve, which often means things that lots of people are not already focused on. The important aspect is obvious, but tractable and neglected I think cut against a lot of people’s basic instincts — it’s generally more fun to participate in an ongoing conversation than to try to change the subject.

If you are represented by GOP members of Congress, it would be constructive and useful to show up at town hall meetings and give them a piece of your mind. It is always constructive to write or call your member of Congress, regardless of party.

• Apple plans to greatly expand chip and server manufacturing in the U.S., plus skills development for students and workers across the country.

Why it matters: Apple’s announcement — which the company calls its “largest-ever spend commitment” — is precisely the kind of win President Trump has been looking for with his push to move manufacturing back to the U.S.

• Apple’s new investment — much of it in red states — lets Trump say to other companies: Apple can do it. Why can’t (or won’t) you?

It started with a handful of demonstrations that’s since grown over 65 cities. But can these rallies actually take down Tesla?

It started with a smattering of demonstrations outside Tesla showrooms in places like Maine, Massachusetts, New York, California, and Colorado. But as Musk continues to blaze a path of destruction, the number of protests has exploded. There are currently 65 events listed on TeslaTakedown.com, extending through the end of March. There’s even a growing number of overseas events.

Bluesky proved useful in spreading the word. It’s already teeming with Twitter refugees who fled after the social platform was Musk-ified and turned into X. Donovan started using the hashtag #TeslaTakedown to encourage others to protest outside showrooms in their communities. Soon enough, the hashtag was picked up by Alex Winter, a documentary filmmaker and actor famous for his role in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its sequels. Winter set up a website, TeslaTakedown.com, to serve as a one-stop shop for anyone interested in demonstrating.

Here are 3 reasons why the German results are not as simple — or as pro-Trump — as the president is suggesting:

1. Merz and the Christian Democrats are very much an establishment party. (This is Angele Merkel’s party!) And Merz has been kicking around the party for decades. He is a wealthy businessman who is very much not an outsider. This would be like if Mitt Romney got elected. Like, not exactly a radical promising to shake up the system ala Trump.
2. Vice President JD Vance and DOGE head Elon Musk both publicly advocated for the far right AfD party. While AfD did get its highest percentage of the vote ever, it will be left out of the governing coalition in Germany as Merz has pledged to never work with it or its leaders. (Like I said, this guy ain’t Donald Trump for Germany!)
3. In remarks after winning, Merz made clear that he wants to bring Germany further away from the U.S., not closer. “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” Merz said.“This [U.S.] administration are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

So anyway, here’s a sketch of what I think the Dems will need to do. My three basic ideas are:

1. Present a sane alternative to Trump’s inflationary policies
2. Defend democracy and freedom of speech against Trump/Musk overreach
3. Ditch the progressive baggage of the 2010s, and focus on the common good

Most of these approaches have been used successfully by Democratic politicians in the recent past — most notably by Bill Clinton in 1992. In fact, recapturing the spirit of 1992 is a good general summary of how Dems ought to think about how to recover from the disaster of 2024.

We — the vast majority of people in the United States — do not want to live in a dictatorship. Yet we now have a president and a regime bent on an authoritarian takeover of America and on joining the other major authoritarians of the world.

As he tries to consolidate power, we must protect the institutions in our society still able to oppose Trump’s tyranny — independent centers of power that can stop or at least slow him. Not this Congress, tragically, but federal courts and judges. Many of our state governors and attorneys general, state legislatures, and state courts. Perhaps even our state and local police. Hopefully, our communities.

Ultimately this will come down to our own courage and resolve: To engage in peaceful civil disobedience. To organize and mobilize others. To fight against hate and bigotry. To fight for justice and democracy.

Elon Musk holds an outsized influence in the new Trump administration.

As head of his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the world’s wealthiest man has enjoyed nearly unfettered political power in slashing and refashioning the federal government as he sees fit. And it has quickly become clear that he has the president’s ear on issues beyond that brief.

But on one topic, Musk stands somewhat apart from others in the coterie of aides and advisers around Trump: China. In contrast to the many hawks in the new Trump cabinet who call for a hard-line approach on China, Musk is a striking outlier.

As an expert on China-U.S. relations who has monitored Musk’s views on China, I don’t find his long history of espousing pro-Chinese sentiment surprising, given that he has sought throughout to get a business hold in the country.

But those entanglements are worth scrutiny, given Musk’s role in the Trump administration at a time when one of America’s biggest foreign policy challenges is how to manage its relationship with Beijing.

Musk’s journey to the East

For years, Musk has had significant business interests in China, with Tesla’s Shanghai factory, Tesla Giga Shanghai, playing a crucial role in the company’s global operations.

Notably, Tesla was the first foreign automaker permitted to establish operations in China without a local partner, following a change in ownership regulations. The Shanghai factory was constructed with the support of US$1.4 billion in loans from Chinese state-owned banks, granted at favorable interest rates.

Between 2019 and 2023, the Shanghai government also provided Tesla with a reduced corporate tax rate of 15% – 10 percentage points lower than the standard rate.

The cost advantages of manufacturing in Shanghai, which include lower production and labor expenses, have further cemented Tesla’s reliance on the Chinese market.

Given that Musk’s wealth is largely tied to Tesla stock, his financial standing is increasingly dependent on the company’s fortunes in China, making any potential disengagement from the country both economically and strategically challenging.

Tesla’s continued investment in China underscores this dependency. On Feb. 11, 2025, the company opened its second factory in Shanghai — a $200 million plant that is set to produce 10,000 megapack batteries annually. It’s the company’s first megapack battery factory outside the U.S..

This investment deepens Tesla’s presence in China amid a new wave of U.S.-China trade tensions. On Feb. 1, the Trump administration imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese imports, prompting Beijing’s retaliation with tariffs on American coal, liquefied natural gas, agricultural equipment and crude oil.

A Chinese fan

It remains unclear to what extent Musk’s financial interests in China will translate to real influence over the Trump administration’s policy toward Beijing. But Musk’s long history of pro-China remarks suggests the direction he wants the administration to move.

During his visit to Beijing in April 2024, Musk praised the country, noting also: “I also have a lot of fans in China – well, the feeling is mutual.”

His admiration appears to hinge in part on how he views business and labor practices in China. In that vein, Musk has criticized American workers as lazy and has faced U.S. labor law disputes, while simultaneously praising Chinese workers for “burning the 3 a.m. oil” under an intensely repressive labor system.

In numerous posts on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which he owns, Musk has also praised China’s infrastructure and high-speed rail system, lauded its space program, applauded its leadership in global green energy initiatives and urged his followers to visit the country.

Musk has also opposed U.S. efforts to decouple from China, describing the countries’ economies as “conjoined twins,” despite a sizable part of the foreign policy establishment in the West viewing decreased dependency on China as necessary for security interests amid rising geopolitical tensions.

On the issue of Taiwan, the most dangerous flashpoint in U.S.-China relations, Musk has compared Taiwan to Hawaii, arguing that it is an integral part of China and noting that the U.S. Pacific Fleet has prevented mainland China from achieving reunification by force.

Musk further suggested that the Taiwan dispute could be resolved by allowing China to establish Taiwan as a special administrative zone, similar to Hong Kong.

His remarks were shared and welcomed by China’s then-ambassador to the U.S., who, in a post on X, emphasized China’s so-called peaceful unification strategy and advocated for the “one country, two systems” model.

Trump’s back-channel envoy?

The big question going forward is how Musk’s financial stakes in, and stated admiration for, China will translate into attempts to influence the U.S. administration’s China policy, particularly given Musk’s unconventional advisory role and the strong faction of anti-China hawks in Trumpworld.

Given Musk’s approach to China, it’s hard to see him not trying to use his influence with the president to push for somewhat warmer relations with Beijing.

If such counsel were heeded, it’s easy to envision Musk leveraging his deep ties to China, particularly his close personal relationship with China’s current second-ranking official, Premier Li Qiang, who was the Shanghai party chief when Tesla’s factory was built. In the scenario, Donald Trump could tap Musk as a back channel for diplomacy to ease U.S.-China tensions and facilitate bilateral cooperation when needed.

To this point, it was, perhaps, telling that it was Musk who met with China President Xi Jinping’s envoy to Trump’s inauguration, Vice President Han Zheng, on the eve of the event.

But it’s far from certain that Trump wants that diplomatic role for Musk, or that other voices won’t win out with regard to Beijing. In his first term, Trump launched an unprecedented trade war and tech blockade against China, fundamentally reshaping U.S.-China relations and pushing the U.S. toward something of a bipartisan consensus to counter Beijing that has existed for several years.

Trump’s tariff moves and second-term picks for top trade and commerce roles, like Peter Navarro and Jamieson Greer — who played key roles in the trade war against China during the president’s first term — suggest that Trump’s commitment to further decoupling from China remains strong.

Furthermore, Musk’s business interests and personal wealth tied to China could leave him vulnerable to Chinese influence. By leaning on Musk’s close ties with Trump, China could use his dependence on the Chinese market as a bargaining chip to pressure Trump into making concessions on issues of major strategic importance to Beijing.

China has a history of coercing foreign companies reliant on its market into making compromises on matters concerning its national interests. For instance, Apple removed virtual private network apps from its app store in China at the government’s request. Similarly, Tesla could face comparable pressure in the future if Beijing wants to use Musk as a cudgel to influence policy in the Trump administration. Notably, as the head of DOGE, with access to sensitive data from multiple agencies, Musk could find himself caught between U.S. security scrutiny and China’s strategic targeting.

So long as Musk retains the influence with Trump that he holds now, it’s conceivable that his pro-China sentiments will translate into attempts to influence government policy. Yet even if this is to be the case, whether those efforts succeed will depend on the president and his other advisers, many of whom are seeking an aggressive front against Beijing and are likely to view Musk as an impediment rather than ally in that fight to come.

Donald Trump and House Republicans promised to lower costs for American families. But the new House Republican budget, which the House will consider this week, will raise costs for families across Northern Virginia and rip health care away from millions of Americans, all to pay for tax breaks for Elon Musk and his billionaire friends.

Beyond that, Democrats can’t control federal contracting.

What Democrats can do, though, is address the extremely large explicit and implicit subsidies that Tesla receives both from the federal government and — most importantly — from blue states where Democrats govern.

I want to be clear: I am not saying that Democrats should shift their policy toward electric cars just to stick it to Elon Musk. What I am saying is that there are many questions one can raise about the merits of Democrats’ current policy approach to electric cars. The whole framework deviates massively from a technocratic optimum of “subsidize nothing, finance roads with a vehicle miles traveled tax, and impose an extra tax on gasoline to cover the pollution externalities.”

A hot startup that grew overnight into a billion-dollar behemoth is racing with established tech giants for supremacy in a new market that everyone expects will unlock a future of abundance and profit.

Flashback: That sounds like a description of OpenAI vs Google et al., but it’s actually an account of the “browser wars” at the dawn of the web 30 years ago — when Netscape vied with Microsoft to control the software people would use to access the internet.

Why it matters: In 1996 or 1997, a couple years after forward-looking tech leaders first realized that “owning” the web browser would be a prize, Google — the company that would ultimately win the race — didn’t even exist.

Today, as AI giants and challengers vie to build a better chatbot and seize mindshare and market share, there is similarly a good possibility that the winning bot (assuming there is only one) has not yet been invented, and the company that will make it has yet to be founded.

That’s why tech’s superpowers, despite their immense wealth and influence, have been running scared.