Trump Has Disturbing Response to DOGE’s Massive Overreach of Power

Donald Trump doesn’t care that Elon Musk and his nerd squad have access to the private information of millions of Americans.

During a press conference Friday, Trump was asked about the Department of Government Efficiency’s unfettered access to trillion-dollar payment systems such as the U.S. Treasury Department, as well as the personal information of millions of Americans, including their Social Security numbers, home addresses, and bank account numbers.

“Why does DOGE need all of that?” asked one reporter.

“Well, it doesn’t, but they get it very easily,” Trump admitted. “I mean, we don’t have very good security in our country, and they get it very easily.”

Trump appeared completely unbothered by the massive intrusion on the privacy of U.S. citizens—in fact, he seemed to suggest it was the fault of government agencies for not better concealing this information from Musk’s goons.

Trump rambled on, describing how DOGE needed to audit certain investments the government had made because they were “obscene, dangerous, bad, very costly.”

Concerns over DOGE’s “insider threat” have only grown in recent days, as they take over agency after agency, acquiring access to more troves of sensitive information. Trump has already said he couldn’t care less about Musk’s conflicts of interest, and the White House said that the DOGE czar would self-determine what projects were appropriate for him to work on.

As DOGE continues to extend its reach, members of Musk’s team are simultaneously being revealed to be a group of twenty-something failsons.

Musk announced Friday that he would be rehiring the DOGE employee who was fired over a range of racist posts because, as he wrote, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” Still, on X, Musk waged war against the journalist who reported on the posts in the first place, so it’s considerably more likely that, to him, there was nothing to forgive.

Additionally, Bloomberg reported Friday that another one of the 19-year-old wards on Musk’s DOGE team had been fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing company secrets with a competitor. Seems like the perfect person to have access to a trove of sensitive information, right?

Shocking: The 19-year old DOGE goon with a questionable résumé who goes by “big balls” online was fired from his last real gig for leaking company information online.

Bloomberg is reporting that Edward Coristine was fired from cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for “leaking internal information to the competitors.” Now Coristine has access to the most sensitive internal information there is, the federal government’s, and he has no confirmed clearance that legitimizes that access.

“I can confirm that Edward Coristine’s brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” a spokesperson for Path Network told Bloomberg on Thursday.

“I had access to every single machine,” Coristine wrote on Discord just weeks after being fired. But he swore he “never exploited it because it’s just not me.” He also posted that he had done “nothing contractually wrong” at Path Network. The comments were made in a Discord channel dedicated to one of Path’s competitor companies.

Several people who knew Coristine said they were confused as to how he ascended to such a consequential position and nervous as to how he’ll handle the enormous responsibility that comes with it, given that he could not handle it at Path Network.

This all comes as DOGE strikes an antagonistic chord with the federal government, taking over government buildings, telling federal employees to stop showing up to work, and locking out elected representatives.

“Your data has been breached. Donald Trump gave unvetted teenagers access to your most private information,” Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell wrote on X. “We are fighting now in the courts. And, shortly, Democrats will use our votes—in government funding bill—to stop this madness and secure your data.”

Musk, DOGE, and Coristine have yet to comment.

The Department of Energy on Friday tried to clarify why one of Elon Musk’s DOGE underlings was granted access to the department’s I.T. systems despite opposition from its general counsel and cybersecurity offices. 

CNN reports that Luke Farritor, 23, whose previous work experience consists of an internship at Musk’s company SpaceX was granted access by Energy Secretary Chris Wright Wednesday. The department’s legal counsel and chief information offices, which govern I.T. and cybersecurity, “said this is a bad idea,” according to a source who spoke with CNN, given that Farritor hadn’t received a standard background check. 

“He’s not cleared to be in DOE, on our systems. None of those things have been done,” said the unnamed source. 

While Farrior was only granted access to basic I.T., including email and Microsoft 365, according to CNN’s sources, the report still rang alarm bells as the agency is in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal, among other aspects of American energy policy and production.

In response to the uproar, Wright sought to discourage speculation that Farrior or anyone else associated with DOGE had access to U.S. nuclear secrets.  

“I’ve heard these rumors. They’re like seeing our nuclear secrets. None of that is true at all,” the energy secretary told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan Friday. 

But Trump administration officials haven’t been honest with the level of access given to Musk’s DOGE cronies. One of his young software engineers, Marko Elez, had administrator privileges with the country’s most vital payment systems governing trillions of dollars in disbursements, allowing critical code to be rewritten, despite Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claiming Elez only had “read-only” access. Elez resigned this week over racist social media posts (but already may be rehired). Meanwhile, a U.S. district court on Thursday limited DOGE’s privileges in government agencies.

Right now, DOGE’s activities are stretching, if not outright breaking, federal law over government functions and positions that are supposed to be governed by Congress. But the only bulwark against Musk and Trump’s overhauling of the federal government is the courts, as federal law enforcement is in the president’s crosshairs.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has decided to play ball with the Trump administration in efforts to stop the Russian invasion.

On Monday, Trump announced that if Zelenskiy wanted to keep getting U.S. military aid, Ukraine would have to fork over some precious rare minerals.

“We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earth; we want what we put up to go in terms of a guarantee. We want a guarantee, we’re handing them money hand over fist, we’re giving them equipment, [the European Union is] not keeping up with us,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “We have an ocean in between, they don’t. It’s more important for them than it is for us … so we’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things.”

On Friday, Zelenskiy agreed to Trump’s demands.

“If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” he said, according to Reuters. “The Americans helped the most, and therefore the Americans should earn the most. And they should have this priority, and they will. I would also like to talk about this with President Trump,” Zelenskiy continued, trying to explain that he actually wasn’t just giving Trump access to all the valuable rocks he wanted but instead was offering a joint agreement.

The majority of Ukraine’s mineral deposits—holding metals like titanium and uranium—are now in Russian-controlled territory, as Putin has gained more and more Ukrainian soil as the war has dragged on.

“We need to stop Putin and protect what we have: a very rich Dnipro region, central Ukraine,” Zelenskiy said.

Trump and Zelenskiy are expected to talk sometime next week.

Donald Trump wants you to believe that he’s totally nonplussed by Time magazine’s February cover, which features Elon Musk—not the president—behind the Resolute Desk.

During a press conference Friday alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Trump tried to play it off as if he were totally unbothered by the cover, insinuating that he wasn’t aware that the popular American news magazine (which named him “Person of the Year” in December) was still around.

“Is Time magazine still in business? I didn’t even know that,” Trump said when asked for a reaction to the provocative cover, sparking laughter from the room.

But Trump’s cavalier attitude to the magazine’s focus belies the fact that he spent years pining for it to name him “Person of the Year.” In fact, Time’s decision to feature Steve Bannon on the cover in the early days of Trump’s first term effectively ended his romance with his top strategist.

Bannon was, much like Musk, at the epicenter of Trump’s universe at one point, serving as the forty-fifth president’s chief White House strategist in the first year of his term. But the former host of The Apprentice abruptly fired him in 2017 following a series of controversies in which Bannon openly contradicted Trump and began to encroach on the MAGA limelight.

The pattern appears to be repeating with Musk. Reports emerged Friday that even Trump loyalists in and outside of the administration have found themselves suffering under the billionaire’s sudden seizure of the executive branch.

Last month, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles openly refuted Musk’s outsize influence on the administration, telling Axios that anyone who wants to be a “star” would have no place on her team.

“I don’t welcome people who want to work solo or be a star,” Wiles said at the time. “My team and I will not tolerate backbiting, second-guessing inappropriately, or drama. These are counterproductive to the mission.”

One of Elon Musk’s allies, Tom Krause, is going to be installed in a senior position in charge of America’s critical payment systems.

Krause, a Silicon Valley executive with ties to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will become the financial assistant secretary of the Treasury after clashing with David Lebryk, the previous secretary, over illegally ceasing payments on foreign aid.

Lebryk had served in the Treasury Department since 1989, becoming its longest-serving career official. He was serving as acting head of the department until Scott Bessent’s confirmation as treasury secretary last week, and refused to allow Musk’s cronies to have access to the federal payment systems distributing trillions of dollars every year, operated by the Bureau of Fiscal Service.

Bessent has tried to downplay the level of access that Musk’s DOGE henchman have in the Treasury Department, claiming that it was only at “read-only” levels. In reality, one of Musk’s software engineers, 25-year-old Marko Elez, had been given administrator privileges allowing the code governing those vital payment systems to be rewritten. A federal court halted that access Thursday, and Elez has resigned after racist social media posts, although Musk and JD Vance have floated rehiring him.

The Treasury systems at stake distribute funds for thousands of vital functions that millions of Americans depend on, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, federal salaries, payments to government contractors, grants, and tax refunds. Now all of that will be overseen by Krause, who will certainly be acquiescing to Musk’s demands to unilaterally stop payments that he and the MAGA right disagree with. Is any of this legal? In Trump’s presidency, the law isn’t likely to be enforced.

One of Donald Trump’s biggest donors is looking to the Supreme Court to limit tough press coverage of the MAGA leader’s administration.

Republican megadonor Steve Wynn filed a petition with the nation’s highest judiciary on Friday to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, a landmark 1964 decision that raised the standards required for a plaintiff to win a defamation lawsuit against a media organization.

The bench unanimously found, at the time, that it wasn’t enough for reported information to be found false for a plaintiff to win a suit. Instead, Justice William Brennan Jr. argued that in order to win a defamation case, public figures must prove that journalists published details with “actual malice”—as in, a gross recklessness or disregard for the truth.

Wynn’s case against press protections comes with its own baggage. In 2018, the casino mogul sued the Associated Press for defamation after the newswire reported that two women had accused him of sexual assault in the 1970s.

Wynn resigned as chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts that year, just two weeks after  The Wall Street Journal reported that the billionaire had paid out a $7.5 million settlement to a hired manicurist he allegedly raped.

“After she gave Mr. Wynn a manicure, she said, he pressured her to take her clothes off and told her to lie on the massage table he kept in his office suite, according to people she gave the account to,” the Journal reported at the time. “The manicurist said she told Mr. Wynn she didn’t want to have sex and was married, but he persisted in his demands that she do so, and ultimately she did disrobe and they had sex, the people remember her saying.”

The Nevada state Supreme Court ruled against Wynn in November, with Justice Ron Parraguirre writing that “one of the most recognized figures in Nevada” needed to show “clear and convincing evidence to reasonably infer that the publication was made with actual malice.” Wynn’s request Friday to the Supreme Court is an effort to overrule that decision.

“Sullivan is not equipped to handle the world as it is today—media is no longer controlled by companies that employ legions of factcheckers before publishing an article,” Wynn’s attorneys argued in their petition. “Instead, everyone in the world has the ability to publish any statement with a few keystrokes. And in this age of clickbait journalism, even those members of the legacy media have resorted to libelous headlines and false reports to generate views.

“This Court need not further this golden era of lies,” they wrote.

Evangelicals are finally getting fed up with Donald Trump’s bad-neighbor behavior, according to an NBC News report published Friday.

Trump received sweeping support from evangelicals in the 2024 presidential election, securing the votes of about eight in 10 white evangelical Christian voters, according to AP VoteCast, which surveys more than 120,000 voters. Trump secured a similar margin in 2020.

His appeal to Latino evangelicals helped him to make inroads among Latino voters, who also supported him with surprising force in the most recent election. Trump’s shockingly ineffectual sidekick Vice President JD Vance has his own ties to the Christian nationalist movement.

But since Trump entered office, some evangelicals are struggling with the incoherent inhumanity of the president’s policies.

Reverend Gabriel Salguero, the president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, said he had been meeting with lawmakers about how Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to shutter USAID would undermine their work benefiting vulnerable children and families abroad.

Salguero pointed out the clear connection between gutting international aid and cracking down on immigration.

“If we’re concerned with immigration, shouldn’t we also be concerned about how foreign aid helps people stay in their country and flourish?” Salguero told NBC News.

Salguero said that Trump’s actions sent an “inconsistent message,” as they sought to limit both documented and undocumented immigration. He said pastors like him were “trying to seek clarity” on the president’s immigration policy.

At the Gathering Place, the Orlando, Florida, church where Salguero serves as pastor, he said he has witnessed the strife of mixed-immigration-status families, fearful from Trump’s orders ending birthright citizenship and allowing ICE agents to pursue those they suspect of being undocumented in schools and places of worship.

“We need to deal with criminals and violent criminals in ways that keep our community safe. We support that,” Salguero said. “On the other hand, they’re passing memos and executive orders that are way beyond that scope.”

He also pointed out an inconsistency with Trump’s claim that his immigration policies are meant to target violent criminals.

“If it’s true that the administration is worried about violent criminals, why did they pardon over a thousand people who acted violently in the Capitol?” he asked, rhetorically. “Why then try to rescind the Fourteenth Amendment, depriving children of birthright citizenship? They’re not violent criminals; they haven’t been born. They have a right to be citizens.” Salguero noted that he is a registered independent and does not endorse candidates.

Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, also pushed back against Trump’s order allowing immigration enforcement to extend into churches.

“Should churches be law-abiding? Absolutely. Should they be cooperating with agencies to ensure that criminal influences are dealt with? Absolutely,” Kim told NBC News. “But by and large, those communities that are experiencing fear and not going to church is far beyond the very small portion of the immigrant, undocumented criminal segment.”

Despite the widespread support from evangelicals, this rift is hardly surprising given the Trump administration’s distinctly America First interpretation of the Good Book.

Last month, Vance fell into religious crosshairs after he said that it was Christian to “love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.”

Podcaster Rory Stewart called Vance’s comment “a bizarre take on John 15:12-13—less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love.”

John 15:12-13 says, “This is my commandment: Love one another as I have loved you.”

Elon Musk and JD Vance think that a deeply racist 25-year old-deserves to have a second chance in a significant position in DOGE.

Former SpaceX software engineer Marko Elez was working for DOGE to supposedly expose fraud in the Treasury Department. He resigned this week after his hateful tweets from 2024 were brought to light by The Wall Street Journal.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” an account obviously connected to Elez wrote in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” one post read. In July, he said, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” And in December, the account pushed for repealing the Civil Rights Act and shared: “I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask.”

But Musk and Vance think that Elez should have another shot at taking a wrecking ball to the federal government.

“Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote on X, quoting a Musk poll asking his followers if Elez should return.

“We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever,” Vance continued. “So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.

But a journalist did not ruin a “kid’s” life; his own vile views did. Elez isn’t some silly little kid; the tweets were from just a few months ago, meaning the youngest he could have been is 24 years old.

And racist tweets are racist regardless of how “ironic” they appear to be or how young the person who wrote them is—especially when they have a job that impacts millions of people.

The new cover of Time is sure to infuriate President Trump. 

The February 24 issue of the magazine depicts Elon Musk as president of the United States, sitting on the Resolute Desk, which is used by U.S. presidents in the Oval Office of the White House. 

Trump has long coveted being named “Man of the Year” by the magazine, complaining when he didn’t receive the honor in 2015 and rejoicing when he did in 2016 and 2024. Trump reportedly had a fake cover of himself on the magazine hanging in five of his golf clubs, The Washington Post reported in 2017. 

Seeing Musk stealing the limelight on the next cover will surely get under Trump’s skin, especially since a similar feud contributed to the undoing of the president’s former adviser Steve Bannon during his first term. In February 2017, exactly eight years ago, Bannon was also on the cover of Time and referred to as “The Great Manipulator,” adding to Trump’s reported annoyance with his chief strategist at the time. 

By the summer of that year, Bannon had left the White House, and Trump publicly disowned him in January 2018 after the book Fire and Fury revealed that Bannon had criticized Trump’s children. Is Time hoping that something similar will happen to Musk? The tech mogul was already irritating White House aides in the first week of Trump’s presidency, and now is reportedly driving Trump’s inner circle and Republicans in Congress crazy with his takeover of the federal government. 

The tech mogul and fascism enthusiast is rapidly losing popularity with Americans, even Republicans. Trump also hates to share the spotlight with anyone. A Trump-Musk split isn’t out of the realm of possibility.