What did Donald Trump do today?

He let Elon Musk run wild with the basic levers of government.

Trump's mega-billionaire patron, Elon Musk, has spent much of the last two days dramatically expanding the extent of his personal control over the mechanisms of government. This morning, with attention focused on the National Transportation Safety Board as it undertakes two major air accident investigations, it suddenly announced that it would be communicating with the public exclusively through Twitter (officialy known as "X"). 

Musk owns Twitter and has struggled with a mass exodus of users after he slashed its staff down to a fraction of its previous size. The decimation of the technical staff led to the site simply breaking, while Musk's decision to abandon most forms of content moderation has forced advertisers to abandon the platform in droves for fear of their products appearing next to—among other things—white supremacist or child sexual abuse material content. (Musk is suing his former advertisers on the theory that, in effect, businesses are not allowed to choose to withhold advertising dollars from him.)

Making Twitter an official state media organ of the United States would, at least in the short term, help keep media outlets from abandoning it as well. But it would also allow Musk or Trump administration officials to effectively prevent individual reporters from receiving "public" information by banning them from the platform. Musk routinely punishes people who hurt his feelings by suspending or banning their Twitter accounts.

Musk has installed people who are apparently meant to be part of his so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" in many government agencies to carry out these kinds of instructions. Over the past few days, they succeeded in gaining access to the basic payment system of the United States Treasury. This gives Musk and anyone he has brought with him access to extremely sensitive information on everything from individual taxpayers' employment histories and Social Security data, to the details of government contracts with companies he is in competition with. 

It also gives him the ability to unilaterally make the United States government default on its payment obligations. Virtually all of Musk's wealth originates from government contracts with companies he has bought, or taxpayer subsidies for the products he sells.

In a post to Twitter yesterday, Musk claimed that he would start freezing payments—he didn't say for what—and called people critical of his seizure of the Treasury system "grifters" and "terrorists."

There is no public information about who is carrying out these "DOGE" operations, except that they are not real government employees. Some of them are apparently SpaceX employees, while others may be people who responded to an open call that Musk posted on Twitter for unpaid volunteers with a grudge against government workers. 

There is also no evidence that the people involved have been given security clearances, or have passed even routine background checks, or are even necessarily American citizens. Musk himself is ineligible for a security clearance: he abuses the drug ketamine and is dependent on foreign governments, in particular China's, to prop up his enormous wealth.

Trump, for his part, has made no recent statements about Musk's actions at all. It's not clear if he is personally aware of what Musk is doing, or understands what it means.

Why does this matter?

• Unelected billionaires who aren't even real government employees shouldn't have this much power over the people of the United States.

• Even people who wanted Donald Trump in office were not voting for Elon Musk.

• It's bad if a president doesn't know, doesn't care, or can't do anything about what people are doing in his name.