Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

In a recent interview, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an offhand comment that encapsulated a lot for me. Ramaswamy spoke with Ezra Klein about the possibility of tens of thousands of government workers losing their jobs if Donald Trump is re-elected. This would be a healthy development, he argued. This could be done, he said, by reinstating Trump’s Schedule F order — which stripped certain officials of their job protections so they could be fired more easily — and by establishing a Government Efficiency Commission headed by Elon Musk. Ramaswamy said Trump should get rid of 75 percent of federal government employees “on day one.” It’s up for debate, he argued, whether some of these people would eventually be rehired. “That is certainly not the character of what Elon did at Twitter, and I don’t think it will be the character of what the most important part of this project will actually look like, which is the reduction and de-bureaucratization. ”

Ramaswamy’s call to Twitter is significant. In 2022, after taking over the social network, Musk infamously purged Twitter, laying off 80 percent of his employees in the first six months. He then made a series of management decisions that ultimately plunged the company into further financial distress. As I listened to Ramaswamy and heard the respect in his voice as he cited the billionaire’s tenure, it was clear that he sees it as a blueprint for the Trump administration. If Musk is named federal layoff czar, it likely won’t be because of his electric cars, rockets, or internet-transmitting satellites, but because he has made the dream of draining the swamp a reality, albeit on a smaller scale. Musk’s purchase of Twitter isn’t just a Republican success story; it is the template for the MAGA federal government. Even Musk’s mother said this in a recent interview with Fox News: “He’s just going to get rid of people who don’t work, don’t have a job, or don’t do a job well, just like he did on Twitter…” He can do it for them too Government do.”

Musk’s argument for gutting Twitter was that the company was so overstaffed that it was running out of money and only had “four months to live.” Musk was so to the point that employees I spoke to at the time had serious concerns that the site might crash or fall into disrepair during major news events. “I firmly believe that if Musk does what he promises, it will be an absolute shitshow,” a trust and security engineer at another tech company told me in 2022. Musk did Fire most trust and security staff, as well as those responsible for curation and “human rights” and the machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team. The purge of these people particularly pleased some right-wing commentators, who viewed Musk’s firings as a long-overdue removal of woke bureaucracy within the company. “Nothing of value has been lost,” one MAGA account tweeted following news of the layoffs.

Read: I watched Elon Musk destroy Twitter culture from within

Twitter didn’t self-destruct as my sources had feared (although parts of it did happen, perhaps most memorably when Musk tried to host Spaces events with Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis), only it resulted in a glitch came). Aside from minor glitches, the site functioned primarily during elections, World Cups, Super Bowls, and world-historical news events. But Musk’s cuts have not saved the platform from major financial difficulties. His chaotic management strategy for Twitter included rebranding the site as to transform. The end result was disastrous for the company’s bottom line. Shortly after the takeover, advertising revenue plunged 40 percent, and the bleeding hasn’t stopped. X is estimated to have lost about 52 percent of its U.S. advertising revenue last year. A recent Fidelity report suggested that the company may have lost nearly 80 percent of its value since Musk bought it (arguably for far more than it was worth). If this continues, some have speculated that Musk may have to sell some of his Tesla shares to keep the company afloat. Musk’s financiers also have massive loans on their balance sheets The Wall Street Journal has called it “the worst takeover for banks since the financial crisis.”

None of this seems to matter to Trump and Ramaswamy. What matters is that Musk has turned X into a political weapon in the service of the MAGA movement. X has, as I wrote last week, become an excellent vector for amplifying far-right narratives and talking points; It poisons the information environment with unconfirmed rumors and conspiracy theories about election fraud. The far-right faithful don’t care that his platform has occasionally labeled pro-Kamala Harris accounts as spam, temporarily banned journalists and restricted accounts that tweeted the word Cisgenderand complied with foreign government requests to censor speech. Republican lawmakers also don’t seem to care that Musk is using his platform to help Trump win, even after nearly a decade of outrage over tech platforms’ alleged bias against conservatives. Their silence on Musk’s clear bias coupled with their admiration for his activism suggests that they are aware of the way Musk has managed to take a popular communications platform and turn it into something they control and against their political enemies can use, really appreciate.

This idea is no different from the vision expressed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the conservative policy proposal to transform the federal government in a second Trump administration. Project 2025 is a dense, often radical, and unpopular set of policy proposals that, as my colleague David A. Graham notes, “dismantle the Department of Education and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cut Medicare and Medicaid, ban pornography, and establish a federal government “Abortion restrictions, the repeal of some child labor protections, and the possibility that the president could fire tens of thousands of federal career employees and replace them with political appointees.” In other words, if Trump were elected and decided to make the project a reality in 2025, his government taking an existing piece of bureaucratic infrastructure, stripping it of many of those who can control its power, and then using that power for ideological purposes and against their political enemies.

The parallels between this element of Project 2025 and Musk’s Twitter are clear. They should also be alarming. The federal government is not a software company and should not be run as such. There may be bloat in our departments and agencies, but officials work every day on technical problems that are critical to a functioning country — like censuses, storm tracking and pandemic preparedness. Simply firing these people with abandon (and replacing others with political appointees) could have serious consequences, such as stifling disaster relief and increasing the likelihood of corruption.

Also consider financial dynamics. Last week, Musk said in a virtual town hall that the Trump administration’s second-term agenda – which includes tax cuts, federal budget cuts and tariffs on imports – “will necessarily involve some temporary hardships” but will ultimately lead to longer-term consequences would prosperity. “We need to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk added. The line is similar to his justification for Twitter’s layoffs, which he described at the time as “painful” and necessary for Twitter to balance its budget. But Musk bought the platform without knowing how he could turn it into a profitable business. His main interest appears to be prioritizing shitposting and trolling rather than finding advertisers or implementing his ideas of turning X into a WeChat-style commercial app. Musk never seemed interested in understanding the mechanics of a social network, or the complexities of content moderation, or even the ins and outs of the First Amendment. His indifference to the cause for which he was ultimately responsible was matched only by his desire to use it as a personal playground and political weapon.

Before Musk officially took over Twitter, the tech oligarch at least feigned an interest in running the company with an eye toward actual governance. “For Twitter to earn the public’s trust, it must be politically neutral, which basically means it annoys the far right and far left alike,” he tweeted in 2022. Trump, however, has made no effort to deny the vengeful targets of those closest to him government and how he plans to, in the words of New York Times Columnist Jamelle Bouie called for “merging the office of president with itself” and “reconstructing it as an instrument of his will, to be used for his friends and against his enemies.” In other words, he plans to apply Elon Musk’s Twitter playbook across the country.