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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.
We just hit the 100-day mark in Donald Trump's second presidential term this week, and a lot of things have happened. Verge Policy Editor Addy Robertson has been running stories about the impact of those 100 days on the site all week. It's a great package, and we'll put links to all those stories in the show notes. And I wanted to have Addy on the show to talk about six big themes, six big stories we've been following here at The Verge to see what has and hasn't gone the way we might have expected.
Up top, we have a couple of the biggest and most obvious. First, the tariff situation has thrown a wrench in basically the entire global economy. It's not really clear day to day what tariff rates the US is even demanding from countries around the world. And that's leading to a lot of unpredictability, which is not really what you're looking for in business. Then there's something I have been paying a lot of attention to, the way FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission against the First Amendment.
If you're a Vertcast listener, you know that I think Brendan is an unserious, censorious hack, and that's putting it mildly. Addy commissioned a story running down all of the things Brendan has done and what he might do, and you'll hear us talk about that a little bit as well. Then there are some things that felt like they would be a big deal, or at least Trump made sound like would be a big deal, and which haven't really come to anything. The Kids Online Safety Act, or COSA, seemed like it was about to become law, and then didn't.
And the TikTok ban is something that Trump came up with during his first term, that Congress passed a law about, that Biden signed into law, that the Supreme Court signed off on, and which Trump has now decided simply shouldn't happen. But there's still no deal that would actually allow TikTok to operate in the United States. There's just promises from the attorney general not to enforce the existing law.
That's a problem, and it's unclear what will happen next. And of course, tying it all together is Doge. Elon Musk's pet project has torn a swath of destruction through the federal government since January. And you'll hear Adi and I talk about not only what he's destroyed, but also the scarier, bigger project that Doge might be building, a comprehensive surveillance state.
For as much as Addy and I get through in this conversation, there's a lot going on that we didn't have time to discuss. It would have taken us hours to get through everything Trump and Elon have upended in just three months. So we didn't really talk very much about immigration or everything that's happening with science, research, and public health. And that really does highlight the scale of the problem. We're only 100 days in, and there's so much going on at once, and it's so destructive that it's basically impossible to keep up.
So we're going to focus on these six issues, but rest assured, there's much more coverage on TheVerge.com. Okay, the first hundred days of Trump 2. Here we go. Addy, welcome back to Decoder. Hi. It's always great to have you on, even if maybe we're not talking about things that aren't so great.
The 100-day benchmark feels like the first big milestone for a presidency. We're talking the day before that milestone. People will hear this episode the day after. So first, tell us why we care about the 100-day mark. Obviously.
Obviously, the 100-day benchmark has always been a thing for presidencies. In part, just this is where you can start seeing the executive orders that were signed on day one bear fruit. You can see things move through the court system. You can kind of get at least a little bit of a scale of not only what presidents have promised to do that they are following through with, but how the rest of the world reacts to that. Trump term two has massively accelerated all of this.
There was a moment where I was looking at the 100 days package and just going, how is anyone going to even know that it's 100 days? We feel like we just cover this constantly. But I do think there's a really unique opportunity here. It feels unique because the scale of change feels very high. But then sort of underneath it, the efficacy of some of the change is uncertain or medium, except in the case of tariffs, in which it already seems very high. But across the rest of some of the things we're going to talk about,
He's not legislating a lot. He's not making new laws. He's just saying a lot of things, and people are taking it very seriously. Is that how you see it? Right. A lot of the reason why we see this change so fast is that absolutely everything he does is an executive order, even the things that clearly are not legal as executive orders. And many of these things, yeah, they're being taken seriously, even though in any kind of functioning system, they wouldn't be like saying that you're going to eliminate birthright citizenship, which is just –
everyone agrees who is serious, a really baseline element of the Constitution. There is also an element, however, where the other branches of government have just let him do this, that say tariffs are not by and large supposed to be a thing the president can do. The reason he can do them is because there is this last ditch power that has been granted that he has pushed the very limits of.
That seems like the story of the Trump administration, right? The expansion of presidential authority, of executive power. I want to get into the specifics of what he's done and what he's accomplished in 100 days. But if that's the unifying thesis, right, the expansion of executive power, how do you think that's going?
I think it's not necessarily clear yet, but I think that what is clear is that the thing you can do with unilateral power is you can destroy things. I think that's a lot of what this package is about, is about the things that have been lost and about the scope of things that have been done that really are not him or anyone else building a thing so much as them just trying to tear a thing down and to stop a thing from existing. Yeah.
I think that's going to bring us right into Doge and what Doge has accomplished in the government, what Elon Musk has been trying to do in the government. You had to narrow down a list of what you wanted to focus on for this 100 Days package. What did you pick?
Yeah, I had a list of probably a few dozen things, and I ended up narrowing them down to the things that we've had reporters that have been really covering these things closely, and we've been hitting the beat-by-beat narratives. And now we had an opportunity to tie those things together a little bit more. There's the FCC and Brendan Carr, which any of our podcast listeners will probably remember.
There is the things that seemed like there were going to be a really huge deal coming into the administration. There was TikTok, which had been banned and the ban was set to go into effect right as he took office. And there was the whole tariff promise that he had made. One of those things turned out to be a non-issue so far. One of those things turned out to be bigger than almost anyone expected.
And then there is child safety, which is something that seemed like it was poised to be big but has not turned out really the way people believed it might. And then there is the federal disaster response and the way that this sort of removal of all of these safeguards and all these programs has really caused global damage. That's a lot of stuff that is squarely in Verge Zone. A lot of the reason for that is tech companies are –
deeply wrapped up in most of those topics, obviously with TikTok, but Brennan Carr and the FCC directly regulate the internet in various ways. They directly regulate broadcast in various ways. We've talked about that on the show before. Do you see the tech industry's influence on this Trump administration as being materially different than in the first Trump administration or under Biden?
The Trump administration, one, was just very vocally opposed by a lot of Silicon Valley. That he started, obviously, with the Muslim ban, which was this just very –
at that time, seemed unprecedentedly draconian immigration enforcement. And there were all of these companies coming out with these statements saying, look, immigration is actually important to us. The H-1B program for high-skilled immigrants is very important. There was a very clear antagonism where Trump believed that all of these platforms were rigged against him. They were...
Not during his tenure, but at the very end of his presidency, willing to ban him and take a sort of during his presidency stance against a lot of things that he supported. There were like there were crackdowns on covid misinformation and disinformation. There was crackdowns on QAnon.
All of that is basically gone during Trump too. Silicon Valley very prominently supported him. The big tech billionaires were at the inauguration. They've been either clearly scared or they have thrown in their law with him wholeheartedly in a way that seems genuine. And we're not even touching Doge, which I think there's just absolutely nothing like this really in the history of Silicon Valley.
One thing I'm going to keep coming back to is whether that's been worth it for these companies, and in particular for this handful of billionaires, because so far it doesn't seem like it has been. And I think the place where it seems the messiest is actually where we should start with tariffs. Trump has obviously imposed a huge amount of tariffs on a wide variety of countries, most notably China, which is a huge number. By the time people are listening to this, it will be a different number, so I won't even say a specific number. But that's going to affect –
every single part of the tech industry from finished iPhones to components that come in to every part of the auto industry to the chip industry. Our story there is called America's Living in Tariff Limbo. What do you think that means exactly and how do you think this wraps up? It's
I have heard these referred to as strobe light tariffs. No one knows, including it seems like sometimes people inside the administration, whether a tariff is on or off, no one really understands why these things have been done. Based on the day, it can either be because we have to remove the trade deficit and start becoming a massive industrial powerhouse, or it can be something where we're trying to
get these countries to agree to something else. The tariffs that dominated the early cycle, which were Canada and Mexico, were about a fentanyl problem that I don't think anyone on Earth was worried about existing between Canada and the U.S. at a major scale.
And that there's just not really an off ramp for. I think there was this sense before Trump took office that we were going to see a bunch of orderly creation of leverage and then this horse trading that there were going to be tariffs on China. And that was going to create the situation where Tim Cook was going to be going to the White House and there would be a.
exemption for his products, and then that would give them a leg up over competitors. And yeah, we've seen people try to do that. But I think that the response has been so utterly chaotic that it's not even clear, like, okay, electronic tariffs are on. No, wait, they're off. No, no one knows if they're on. They're going to be back. And I think that really the theme of Mia's piece there was that while all of this is happening and all of these kind of games of
pseudo chess are being played out. There are a bunch of real companies, a bunch and a bunch of real people who are just hit with this huge uncertainty who actually really are living on the brink of if you're a company, you're a small company, you just you might not exist. You can't go and call up Trump and ask him for an exemption. And you don't even really know if you can build your business because you don't know what's going to be happening in a month.
And that if you're just a normal person, you don't understand what should I be buying? What should I prepare for? What do I think maybe won't be on sale in America in, again, weeks, months, who knows? And that this is just really doing a huge amount of damage that is, I think, clearly visible even before we are recording this, before really there are any clear impacts on huge varieties of consumer goods.
And it's just a nightmare. It's a mess. The goal of the tariffs in the most reductive way, or at least the most consistently expressed way, is to bring manufacturing back to the United States. That's what Trump keeps saying, whether or not that's possible or even desirable. Open question.
But the thing that really strikes me is that he seems to want heavy industrial manufacturing. And you're talking about a lot of small companies, right? Tabletop game companies are being driven out of business. Small gadget companies show up on the Verge cast and say maybe their costs are going to go too high. Is there any sense, at least in the coverage so far, that the White House can see that problem? Or are we entirely focused on nickel refining or car manufacturing or –
big flashy industries. I really think that a bunch of this is not on Trump's radar because it feels like
Yeah.
It just really seems like there's this huge obliviousness. There's a part where legislation solves that, right? Congress is supposed to do foreign trade and tariff setting. Trump is using this emergency wartime power to claim that there's all kinds of emergencies that justify the tariffs. Have you seen movement there? Because that seems like, OK, there's a bunch of lawsuits from businesses and states. Maybe that will get him to back down.
And then there's also maybe pressure from big tech. Have you seen any of that add up into meaningful attempts at change or halt even?
I think this is where the strobe-like tariff is. It's kind of both a cause and effect there, which is that during the period where Trump announced what he kind of falsely called reciprocal tariffs, and there was just going to be this massive, extraordinary number on almost every manufacturing powerhouse, suddenly there was a bunch of movement. There were people in Congress going, look, we should actually just revoke the statute that's letting him set these tariffs. There was momentum behind it.
And then he announced what he called the pause, which was not actually really a pause. It was reducing a bunch of the rates to an additional 10%, which is still a huge deal. And I think that every time that happens, there's this kind of pullback where a bunch of people, people in the stock market, people in Congress think, oh, well, maybe this is the end of it. Maybe we don't have to actually do something anymore.
And I think to some extent it's responsive to like the stock market was just in freefall after the big tariff announcement and then he pulled back. But I think there hasn't been this sustained recognition that this kind of rational, sane policy is not actually on the table. Like we're just seeing a bunch of flailing. And I don't feel like that urgency has really sunk into people who have the power to change things.
If you want evidence of the stock market is mostly a vibes-based situation, the reaction to different tariff announcements seems as clear as can be. I suspect the audience has been inundated with tariffs coverage. Let's talk about the other stories in the package. We've been talking about the FCC a bunch here at The Verge. I've just issued personal challenge after personal challenge to Chairman Brendan Carr, who I think desires censorship power over Americans, in particular in the media.
Why do you think the changes to the FCC are important? Are they recoverable? Do you think an agency like that can go into regulating speech and then come back to being the agency that holds spectrum auctions? The FCC is a really interesting agency because under Doge, a bunch of consumer watchdog agencies have just gotten gutted and have basically forfeited their mandate to protect people.
But they have mostly worked through inaction. The FCC is interesting because it has basically retained its autonomy under Brendan Carr, but Brendan Carr has just used it as a sword in a way that I don't think most of the other agencies have. Carl Bode's essay on this is really good. I think that
Weirdly, that actually makes me in some ways more optimistic than I am for agencies like the CFPB, because while Carr has been using the FCC in ways that I think are really terrible, like ways that just clearly he believes he does have censorship power, that also does at least make me think that if someone takes over the FCC again, he has preserved it as an agency that's capable of doing things. And if there is any silver lining, I think it's that.
Carr is an interesting character. He tweets a lot. He talks a lot. He issues proclamations about opening investigations that he may or may not have the power to begin. What steps has he taken that are real and what are just sort of posturing?
A lot of the things he's done are posturing, but that still makes them extremely effective. The main weapon he's used is that there is a regulatory authority to block mergers and a bunch of companies want mergers and basically press outlets are owned by these conglomerates that then he can pressure in order to censor. And so even if there's not like
news distortion case to be made against CBS for it airing an interview of a presidential candidate, which there's just not. He clearly is saying a thing that's nonsense, but backing it up with an amount of power that gets it to do what he wants.
Yeah.
Yeah, and you can see already CBS, Paramount trying to merge with Skydance, caving in some ways, big and small, to Carr's authority to try to get that merger over the line. Carr also oversees the internet and broadband generally. It seems like he just wants to hand a bunch of that infrastructure to Elon Musk and Starlink. Is that moving forward or is that just more sops to the administration?
I think it's not clear at this point. I certainly think it's a thing he could be dedicated to.
The question is kind of how well he's going to be able to keep his eye on the ball for that and how much he is actually receptive to public pressure around, say, Elon Musk specifically. The thing that strikes me there is that AT&T and Verizon and all the rest are very good at lobbying. And they're very good at getting the FCC to do what they want. And it might not be as easy for Elon to just insist that everything become Starlink because the FCC was captured before. It was corrupted before.
In one very specific way. And it doesn't seem like Brendan has changed that. He's changed everything else, but he's left the essential corruption around broadband deployment and regulation of telecoms pretty much alone.
And also just look, rural broadband matters a lot to Americans. It is not the major market for telecoms. It is not the place where I think they make all of the money. But they are clearly interested in protecting their really lock over the broadband ecosystem. So, yeah, that makes sense. We have to take a quick break here. We'll be back in a minute.
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Read more on the latest trends and C-suite insights at disruption.alexpartners.com. Disruption.A-L-I-X.Partners.com. Did you hear the new Mega Millions jackpots are going to be higher than ever? How high? Like really high. As high as the top of this helipad? Higher! This hot air balloon is high enough, right? Higher! Higher than this 14,000 foot mountain?
Still higher. Okay, we're in space. How much higher can the Mega Millions jackpot get? There's really no telling. The bigger, better, new Mega Millions from the California Lottery. Play today. Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim. Welcome back. I'm talking with Verge Policy Editor Addie Robertson about a few key stories from Trump's first 100 days in office. Addie just ran a big package of stories that are running this week.
We just walked through the situation with Brendan Carr and the FCC, which honestly I could talk about forever. But it's time for us to move on to some of the other weirder outcomes we've seen in the past few months. For example, there was a constellation of bills about child safety on the internet that just keep coming and going.
We've covered a lot of child safety bills over the years. Claiming that a piece of legislation will protect children is a way to get around the First Amendment problems that seem to plague a lot of content moderation bills in the United States. You're going to regulate content, you run into the First Amendment, you need to state some reason that overcomes the First Amendment. We're protecting the children. That's everyone's favorite. It's just our go-to move. This is to protect the children so these people can't say what they want to say.
We thought there was going to be a big push here, right? That we'd see a spate of child safety bills. We'd see COSA, which we'd covered a lot. It seems to have completely fizzled out here in Trump, too. Why do you think that's happened? Yeah, we've...
Again, there's a possibility that between the time we're recording this and the time we air it, something will have happened. But so far, yeah, we haven't really seen COSA reemerge yet, even though it keeps being expected. I think that part of the reason probably is independent of Trump. It's just that weird failure of it last year that just proved that it could get right over to the cusp and there still would be this –
block of, in this case, Republicans that were, I think, rightly worried about the possibility for censorship.
And then beyond that, I think that we were talking about Silicon Valley's kind of turn toward Trump that, say, meta was really public enemy number one among Republicans online for a very long time. And Mark Zuckerberg is working about as hard as he can to change that. And so to the extent that child safety really was ever about child safety, it's still going to progress. But I really think there was this big ulterior motive that is now not nearly as urgent.
The pushback from meta has always been, don't put this on us, put this on the platform vendors, put this on Apple and Google. So iOS and Android have a bunch of controls in them for parents at the system level that block whatever parents want and whatever apps you want. We've heard Mark Zuckerberg say this several times now. Has that version of things gotten any traction?
I think that at a larger, non-specific legislation in the federal government scale, absolutely. That seems like something that there is a bunch of lower level consensus around, that it is seen as something that really big companies and there's, this is social media, but there's also sort of the adult content side of this, that that industry has, I think,
shown more acceptance of. As Lauren Finer notes, a bunch of this is still happening at the state level and we're working our way through the courts there. So I think that at a large scale, child safety is still 100% coming and the Supreme Court is going to play a really big role in it.
At the federal level, it feels like people have just not really worked out how to do things, that these bills just keep getting rewritten. And there's someone in Lauren's piece who says, look, maybe they'll actually finally decide on one specific piece of the puzzle and try to solve that. And that piece will have fewer speech ramifications. But I think we just haven't seen that so far. And the thing that's closest to passing is the Take It Down Act, which includes provisions that
are sort of child safety related and that for reasons I have explained on this podcast, I think is very dangerous. We'll link to that episode that Addy did with us about the Take It Down Act in the show notes. I want to just come back to the thing we started with. Trump could just sign an executive order that's like, kids can't use cell phones. And that's about the level of regulatory thinking evinced in most of his executive orders so far.
He could just say it is now legal to show porn to a 13-year-old signed on this day Donald Trump. And he would just do it and he's done it for all kinds of things. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America because he wanted to.
Why hasn't he done that here? Why are we waiting on this drawn-out legislative process? Not only that, but as Lauren points out, there was even an update to an FTC rule COPPA that was going to try to codify more protections for children online, and then he just suspended this regulatory action. I admit I don't necessarily have a real unified theory of it. I'm curious if you have one, but it feels like in some ways it might just be –
Yeah.
think is just the existence of queer and trans people. So it's possible that some of that has gotten diverted there. I would not be surprised if this does happen, though. I don't have a theory either. It strikes me as such a win, particularly for the MAGA base to say, we're going to start requiring platforms to have fundamental family values. And you can just say it, you might end up in court, ends up in court all the time.
And yet he's content to let this endless drawn-out process happen in Congress. And the only thing I can come up with is he knows that it's not a winner. It's not like a billboard winner, right? You can't put that up on the local news the way you can with Gulf of America. And that's the thing that he wants. I also saw – I saw a bunch of jokes that just actually that is the point at which people realize, no, wait, a lot of people watch porn. That's actually –
Actually trying to create a huge crackdown on that is the point at which a bunch of people realize, wait, this is impinging on a thing that I constantly do. Although that does not stop states. So who knows? Say what you want about Trump. He knows when the limits of his political power have been reached. They're much higher than I think anybody wants them to be. But he knows where the limit is. And I took porn away from a lot of people might might be that limit. This whole question of what's the law and do laws matter and who should write them, I think, brings us directly to TikTok.
The TikTok ban, one of the weirdest aspects of the first 100 days. The law was passed by Congress. It was signed by Joe Biden. It went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said it was constitutional. Trump paused it. The pause ran out. He paused it again. We were told J.D. Vance would fix it. J.D. Vance then decided to insult everyone in China.
China told him to cut it out. Like, I have no idea what is going on with TikTok. And I don't know if China will allow ByteDance to even sell it at this point. Is TikTok just doomed to exist in this liminal state forever?
It is one of the weirdest stories of the last five years because no one wanted to do this before Trump. Trump just manifested the idea of banning TikTok. And now five years later, he's completely just ignored a law that is just about as bipartisan and Supreme Court vetted as you could possibly imagine. And I really think that he's just hoping everyone forgets about it.
Well, at some point it's going to expire again, right? He just gave it another, what, 75 days? He gave it another 75 days after the initial 75 days expired in early April. And it really does seem like, based on some of our previous reporting, it was close to a deal and we were maybe going to see some kind of probably –
not actually very meaningful thing that was very similar to what everybody thought we were going to get four years ago, but that would at least kind of nominally meet the criteria. And then the China tariffs happened. And yes, like you said, there's just no incentive for China to back down now. Yeah, there's the tariffs. And then J.D. Vance referred to the people in China as peasants. And I suspect all of that means no one wants to just cave on TikTok without resolving all of the rest.
Yeah. And I think, as Tina Spees mentions, just people do actually like TikTok. And if TikTok gets banned on Trump's watch, and to be clear, by banned, we mean Apple and Google no longer think it's safe to work with them, because that's what the bill, what the law did is say that you get just hit with these absolutely ruinous fines. I think that if TikTok goes dark on Trump's watch, that is a thing he genuinely believes is both the loss of a huge channel for him and is a thing that is just a massive ding on him.
And so I think he genuinely just is going to keep extending this thing over and over and over again and maybe hope things calm down. The mechanics of TikTok remaining available in the United States are Trump says, I'm not going to enforce the law for 75 more days. I'm directing the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to tell everyone she's not going to enforce the law. She sent letters to Apple and Google and
Oracle and whoever else is a TikTok service writer or runs an app store that TikTok and ByteDance apps are in. They just believe her, right? There's nothing else beyond that. She sent them a letter. Apple says, okay, we believe you, Pam. What happens if she changes her mind? I mean, in theory, you could go to court and say, look, if the Department of Justice promised that we needed to do this thing because we weren't going to be prosecuted, this should create some kind of legal circumstance in which we should not be prosecuted. But really,
I feel like the best way out at this point and probably the likeliest way out beyond extension is Congress. There has been repeatedly a we should repeal this law proposal made. And it's a pretty it's a pretty good idea because, in my opinion, this law should not have been passed. And it's possible also that they're just waiting on that for Congress to basically just give the OK to the thing they've been doing and make it legally acceptable at that point. There's just a part of it says at some point they're going to face a shareholder lawsuit.
If you're an Apple shareholder, you have to say, hey, at least show us the letter that says we won't be on the hook for this ruinous fines. We haven't even seen the letter. This has been a really fascinating experience in seeing what happens when there is a clear legal case, but no one who's interested is actually in to file a lawsuit.
There are all kinds of people that in theory could have sued and said TikTok is selling our user data to China. This is a clear national security threat. Why is Trump not enforcing this law? The Supreme Court wants, you know, people to enforce laws. But if you're on TikTok, you want to continue to be on TikTok. If you're a company and you're benefiting from really good
selling things on TikTok or you're benefiting from having TikTok on your app store because it's a big draw for your phones, you just really don't have that much of an incentive. If you're a shareholder, you're also probably not going to want to make an enemy of the Trump administration, which is the whole other factor here, which is that, yeah, sure, probably some of it's trusting Pam Bondi. Some of it's also probably you don't want to become public enemy number one for Trump by being the guy who says we don't trust Pam Bondi.
I feel like as we see the poll numbers, that might move. I can't say for certain, but I know big institutional investors don't like carrying a bunch of risk in their portfolios. And a declining stock market and lower poll numbers combined with a bunch of risk might change that calculation. We have to take another short break. When we come back, it will be time for us to talk about Doge. We'll be right back. Right now, the Home Depot has spring deals under $20.
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Welcome back. I'm talking with The Verge Policy Editor, Addy Robertson, about the way a whole bunch of tech-related policies have or haven't gone, as we expected, in Trump's first 100 days. Now, of course, there's one more thing to talk about. Elon Musk and Doge. So far, we've talked about things that are in the realm of American politics, or American politics as we understood them. I think now it's time to talk about Doge. We reported a lot on Doge, our...
Colleagues and competitors at Wired have reported a lot on Doge in excellent ways. It does seem like the first chapter of Doge has come to some kind of close. Elon's got to go fix his own stock price. How would you characterize Doge?
that first chapter? I think that it is probably an unprecedented amount of destruction of the American public infrastructure and of America's ability to provide for people in its country and across the world and an attempt to destroy trust in the idea of government that will affect us in probably ways that we only fully recognize years from now and whose full effects we really haven't seen yet.
There's been a lot of stories that are on the order of Doge showed up at Shake Shack and then the Shake Shack is gone. Like that's how I would describe every version of the Doge story so far. Doge shows up at USAID, USAID is gone. Doge shows up at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is gone.
Have they accomplished anything else other than just tearing things down? Well, there are investigations that they probably benefited Musk's companies a lot. So that is an important thing. The other thing that at least allegedly they have done is centralize a bunch of data into
or at least work towards centralizing a bunch of data in a way that will make surveillance much easier. And they have, I think, also just normalized the idea of threats and corruption. Liz's piece just starts with this part where they allegedly, according to court documents, go in and they find a public security contractor that had their contract suspended with the U.S. Institute for Peace and
And they threatened allegedly to cancel all of their other government contracts if they didn't let them into the building.
I think that's just a level of broken trust and a level of just absolutely blatant extortion that goes far beyond you go to the Shake Shack. The Shake Shack gets shut down. It's also demonstrating that just you cannot trust anyone in the government, that you can't trust that the government is going to continue functioning. You can't trust that the systems that are meant to keep it functioning will keep working. To what end is...
is all of this corruption. Is it just to benefit Elon? Is it to radically remake American government in some way? What's the point?
It depends on how far up the ideological ladder you go. Gabby Del Valle has been writing about the long conservative project to get rid of the administrative state that she's tied it to Curtis Yarvin, who is someone who has influenced J.D. Vance, who called it retire all government employees. The idea being that you just have to destroy the civil service that is not loyal to purely the president. Right.
So there's that element. And then below that, I think there's just the craven understanding that if you destroy the government, you create a lot of private business opportunity, that you can just create this mass privatization and this mass real reliance on these unelected billionaires to provide the services that people once believed the government would give them.
A lot of what we're talking about here falls in that second bucket, at least to my mind. Yes, there's the corruption and the destruction of the administrative state, but there's also just the pure reduction in state capacity and then its replacement in the private industry. That is dramatically unpopular. I would not say that the private healthcare industry has the greatest reputation in America right now.
Can you pursue this without the support of the public? It's unclear. I mean, they definitely think you can because they have this great man theory of history where really normal people are NPCs and they don't actually think at all. And you just have to like go in and go to war, which they I think.
fully believe in. It does seem, however, as Liz's piece points out, that they are really actually incredibly reliant on public opinion and that the moment they get criticized for a thing, sometimes they double down, but they tend to back off and either try to pursue that thing in secret or pretend that they never meant to do it at all. We've covered this aspect of it a lot on Decoder, but obviously this has taken a huge toll on Elon's reputation.
Do you think he's gone or is he just receding into the shadows? I think there's no way that he's gone from the government in part just because his businesses have been so entangled with the government for so long that that would genuinely destroy some parts of his business. SpaceX is a government enterprise basically.
It does seem, however, like he really does not want to be identified with Doge anymore. I think that he definitely has every reason to believe that it has been a huge drag on Tesla that, yeah, it has made him unpopular. I think he's still I think he is maybe genuinely a little confused at how unpopular it made him.
But I think we probably will still be seeing him behind the scenes. And I think he also won't be able to resist going and doing this sort of Tesla infomercial with Trump stuff if Trump is willing. It does seem like Trump has probably cooled on him a bit, especially after the defeat in Wisconsin where he was just – this was the future of Western civilization. I'm going to give millions of dollars. Wait, no, actually it was just a pawn on the board. I sacrificed it. Never mind. Yeah.
No evidence, by the way, that trying to hawk Teslas at the White House resulted in any bump in sales. So if you're thinking about your digital marketing strategy, maybe take that one off the board. I think it's also just not a great strategy to be like, yeah, we're going to investigate people who vandalize our cars as hate crimes. Not just because that's a bad thing to do, but because that just cements in people's minds that the thing Teslas are associated with are people hating them so much that you have to have a special branch of the Department of Justice to investigate them.
The last story here in the package, a little bit under the radar, important to a lot of people because there is an increasing number of climate-related disasters across the country and world. But it seems like our federal emergency response systems are receding, our weather detection systems are receding. Justine Calmer wrote about this. What's the status there?
Justine wrote about two programs that are related to agencies like USAID, which was one of the earliest victims of Doge, the Famine Early Warning System and Flash Flood Guidance System, both of which are these systems that just worked worldwide in order to prevent these really obvious disasters. And at this point, they're existing either in a state of crisis.
Yeah.
And yeah, these are the things that are easy to slip under the radar, but they are unambiguously good things that did not cost us that much money that are being destroyed in part because I think a bunch of the people here at the top just don't actually believe that things can affect people's lives. And they don't because they have never been in a situation where they are dependent on a single service for their lives. They just don't imagine that that can happen.
They don't care. Blowing it during an emergency is one of the fastest way for a politician to just see their reputation crater, not showing up to the site of disaster, politically fraught in many cases. Why take this risk? This seems like easy stuff to keep on the board.
One answer is that it just clearly they weren't paying attention to a lot of this. There's that very famous press conference where Elon says, well, actually, wait, we stopped Ebola funding. That was bad. We brought that back. I think they did just put a bunch of people in here who were incredibly overconfident in their ability to understand the government because they've spent their lives believing the government is this sad shadow of Silicon Valley and they're efficient, obviously. So I don't think a lot of this was intentional. I think...
to the extent it was intentional, there is this idea that America should purely be run by like a business. And by that business, they mean Twitter. And by Twitter, they mean it should just run this bare bones operation that makes money. And I think there's this deep sense of cynicism also that people, yeah, maybe they say they care, but they don't really, and they probably will never know. That cynicism is real. It's
I think the people of America are starting to feel it. They're starting to react to it. We're not even 10% into this administration. We're already seeing mass protests. We're seeing Republican legislatures get yelled at in town halls. The midterms are a long way away. It's like 18 months away from when we're talking. How do you think this is going to play out into those 18 months?
The way that I really don't want to see it play out that I think there's a plausible path toward is that all of this really early destruction kind of peters out that Elon Musk does take steps back from Doge, Doge stops just completely gutting agencies, but it does so after it's just knocked the Jenga blocks out of the bottom of the American project. And that, so they step into the shadows and then all of the really urgent calls to do something about
kind of fade away. And then we see the consequences six months or 12 months or 18 months down the road. Everything starts to fall apart. And by that time, we've had midterms, but it falls into the lap of whoever comes next. And so no one ever manages to really convincingly tie these two things together in a way that creates the momentum that we'd need to rebuild what we've lost.
I think that's a really bad scenario. I think it's a scenario that sends us back years or decades. And unfortunately, I feel like it's a thing that's very easy to make happen. I think that we saw that kind of with COVID, that we saw this absolute disaster that saw just a huge loss of life and that exposed these really obvious weak points. And then the immediate urgency of it faded completely.
And no one really changed the things that we needed. And instead, we came out of this with this new sense of cynicism that actually nothing can be done. There's a sense I get from Democrats, maybe even more progressive Democrats, that actually the cleansing fire is good, that wiping away a bunch of weird, ossified government institutions is good, that this will create problems.
the conditions for radical change because no one will want to go back to what appears to be agreement of how things were broken before. And now we've cleared the decks and you can come in with bigger change. Do you think that's possible? With the exception that, look, like radical change is,
In the sense that you burn everything down means that a lot of people die and that even if you build up from the ashes, those people are dead. We saw that with COVID. A bunch of things never come back. I think that's the kind of radical change we don't want. I think the radical change we do want would be something like the New Deal where you're not trying to destroy everything that's gone before, but you realize that a bunch of things have broken and we needed them and we have to build them back up.
And we're willing to believe that the government should actually provide services and that we have to work to provide services. We don't sort of think that it's grudgingly, yeah, OK, this is this thing that clearly happens behind the scenes. But how taxes? I think that people have to actually really believe in it. I think that they have to push politicians to believe in it and to just proudly own. Yes, this thing will cost money and we do it because we think it's right and it will help people. And if there's anything that comes of this, I really hope it's that.
Well, I think that is good of a place to end it. Addie, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you. I'd like to thank Addie for taking time to join Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or blue sky. We also have a TikTok for as long as Pam Bonney decides TikTok is legal. And we're on Instagram as well. Check them out. Both accounts are at decoderpod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.