To: hr@opm.gov
From: Timothy Noah
Subject: What I did last week
Dear Elon Musk,
Last Saturday, you sent an email from the foregoing address demanding that every federal employee (about two million people) inform you, in five bullet points, how they spent the previous week. “Failure to reply will be taken as a resignation,” you announced on Twitter. Trump backed up that threat Monday. “What he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’” Trump said. “And then, if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired.”
Cabinet officers treated these threats as the lunatic rantings of a senile commander in chief and his ketamine-fancying enabler—which they are—and advised federal workers not to respond. You don’t even run the Department of Government Efficiency, according to a White House filing in a lawsuit brought by state attorneys general against DOGE. You also don’t run the Office of Personnel Management (which sent out that email at your behest). Indeed, you possess “no actual authority to make government decisions,” according to Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration. Speaking in Miami two days later, Trump contradicted that: “I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.” That White House of yours has some message-control problem!
What I hope we’re seeing, Elon, is the beginning of the end of your government career. On Monday, even the Office of Personnel Management advised government managers to “exclude personnel from this expectation at their discretion,” even as you tweeted that “subject to the discretion of the president,” a second email would be sent and “failure to respond a second time will result in termination.” Failure to respond a second time won’t result in diddly. Shame on you for scaring federal workers by pretending that it will.
Instead of federal employees answering hr@opm.gov—which I gather is an email account set up exclusively to transmit your petty harassment—I’d like to see ordinary citizens crash it with a tsunami of messages telling you how they spent their last week. Or loading it up with other spam. That email address, again, is hr@opm.gov.
The New Republic used to have a feature called Washington Diarist, which then-editor Michael Kinsley, a raging Anglophile, modeled on the Diary features in British magazines and newspapers. I wrote a fair number of these, but that was way back in the 1980s, so don’t fault me if I’m rusty. Here, in five bullet points, is my last week:
- On Saturday I set up a Trump Sieg Heil Tracker on my Substack newsletter, Backbencher, to archive every instance since January 20, 2025, in which a Trump official or prominent Trump supporter got caught on video throwing a Sieg Heil salute. You, of course, kicked off this trend at an inauguration rally. Later you denied you intended a Nazi salute. The Anti-Defamation League, cravenly, backed you up, even though you once accused the ADL of promoting “de facto anti-white racism.” Later, after a boycott got started against X for allowing pro-Nazi posts, you visited Auschwitz and said you’d been “naïve” about antisemitism. Still later, you threw that Sieg Heil salute at the Trump rally. It was pretty unmistakable. Writing in Die Zeit under the headline “A Hitler Salute Is a Hitler Salute,” Lenz Jacobsen wrote, “There’s no ‘probably’ or ‘similar to’ or ‘controversial’ about it. The gesture speaks for itself.” Why am I bringing this up now? Because at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend, speaker after speaker mimicked your Sieg Heil, typically after repeating “My heart goes out to you,” which is what you said before your Nazi salute. I counted four Sieg Heils at CPAC; there may have been more. After Steve Bannon threw one, Nick Fuentes, who has told Jews to “get the fuck out of America,” had to admit: “It’s getting a little uncomfortable even for me.”
- On Monday I finished a lengthy piece for a forthcoming print issue of The New Republic. That’s how I spent most of last week, actually, and the week before that. Journalism is a deeply satisfying trade, but describing how it’s done is boring (“I make phone calls, I read stuff, I go over my notes”), so I’ll leave it at that. I don’t want to give away what the article’s about, but you won’t like it.
- On Saturday I saw Kunene and the King, written by and starring John Kani, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here in Washington, D.C. The play riffs on King Lear, with Lear an aging white South African actor now dying of cancer and Cordelia a male nurse trying to keep him off the booze, played by Kani. They argue about the long shadow of apartheid and who’s to blame for continuing poverty and crime under Black-majority rule. South Africa is your nation of origin, right? And I know you have an interest in white nationalism. You should see the play! I last saw Kani onstage 50 years ago in a Los Angeles production of his play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead. It was on tour, after playing in New York and winning Kani a Tony. On Kani’s return to South Africa, police showed their pride in their cultural ambassador by beating and stabbing Kani and leaving him for dead. Kani lost an eye in the incident. You, Elon, would have been about 5, so you’re off the hook.
- Monday night I saw Peter Beinart, a former New Republic editor, speak at my neighborhood bookstore about his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. The book is excellent (also short), and I strongly recommend it. Among its points is that in the 1970s the accepted definition of antisemitism largely shifted from “prejudice against Jews” to “recognition of Palestinians as human beings.” One consequence (this part is me, not Beinart) is to let antisemites who support Israel firmly enough entirely off the hook for their Jew-hating, a tradition that began with Richard Nixon. Disappointingly, Beinart, a devout Jew, said he isn’t getting many invitations from synagogues to discuss his book, even though Jewish people are famously in love with disputation. Beinart drew a big crowd at Politics & Prose bookstore, though, and faced only one foul-mouthed heckler, who failed to make her beef clear before being escorted out. Her bile was directed not at Beinart but at his interlocutor. I don’t know whether the heckler was a MAGA devotee or a DOGE enthusiast, but she was certainly rude enough to be.
- I started reading The Mirror and the Light, the concluding novel in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and the court of King Henry VIII. A dramatization starring the great Mark Rylance will be televised next month, and I liked the previous two books too much to allow the third to be spoiled for me. Like its predecessors, the final installment does a brilliant job conjuring the dangers of working for a monstrous chief executive. For further reading I recommend Lawrence Stone’s memorable New Republic cover essay “Terrible Times” (link works only for TNR subscribers), in the issue dated May 5, 1982. This was a review of the collected letters of Henry VIII’s uncle Arthur Plantagenet (a.k.a. Viscount Lisle) and his family. It says a lot about this essay that I remember it 43 years later. Stone evoked brilliantly “the most ferocious period of arbitrary and bloody tyranny in English history.” Sound familiar?
That’s my week, Elon. I did some other stuff too, but you limited me to five bullets. Can I keep my job?
All best,
Tim
