Move over, Haley Stevens: There’s a new competitor for the most pathetic reaction to plummeting political fortunes. Elon Musk, the former Trump administration member and the world’s richest man, has seen the midterm election forecast for conservative candidates, and he’s responded by petulantly playing with his toys.

The X owner started “Anakin-posting” on Monday. The purely online phenomenon finds far-right and MAGA nerds recasting Star Wars’ Anakin Skywalker, the man who will become Darth Vader, as a tragic hero and paragon of traditional values. A typical post uses generative AI to reframe the “Star Wars” films’ genocidal space monk as a masculine, hyper-conservative, attentive father. Musk’s post shows Anakin, as played by actor Hayden Christensen, sitting on a throne surrounded by his children, Luke and Leia, and his wife, Padme. The AI illustration has pulled liberally from all three trilogies, placing the adult faces of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher on the children. Natalie Portman’s Padme appears to be wearing her makeup and crown from “Black Swan.” The Sith first family is surrounded by 1970s-era storm troopers and 2010s imperial guards.  

“This is what they stole from us,” Musk captioned the computer-generated photo of his sci-fi fan fiction.

For the unfamiliar, Anakin was a member of an order of space knights. As a young man, he began having prophetic dreams of his wife dying in childbirth. Consumed by ambition and anger, and desperate to avoid the fate he envisioned, he was manipulated by several elderly politicians into betraying his chivalric order, killing many of his fellow knights and slaughtering an entire school full of squires for fear of retribution. Unable to save his wife, and grievously injured from a battle with his former mentor, he became a running dog of a fascist empire that aimed to rule the entire galaxy. 

Right-wing young men have warped that story through the established MAGA lens of “returning to tradition,” picturing a world where having the conviction to kill a bunch of toddlers is celebrated. 

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The typical example of “Anakin-posting” expresses rage at a stagnant economy or lack of prospects by sharing images of Christensen’s Anakin looking stoic. MAGA influencers like Jack Posobiec have added a dash of intergalactic racism, sharing images of a young Anakin surrounded by literal aliens to hint at a pro-segregationist message. Others have reimagined Anakin’s mentors as chiding liberal scolds, grafting pink hair and a keffiyeh onto Obi-Wan Kenobi. In the pathetic galaxy of Gen Z men, anything from mid-century magazine ads to a Disney-owned sci-fi epic for children can be a stand in for their cultural grievances. 

Enough time has passed between the prequels and the present that Anakin can be presented as a brooding badass. The primary criticism of the movies at the time concerned Christensen’s portrayal of Anakin as a whiny child throwing a deadly tantrum. The knotty and boring political intrigue subplots of the films have been forgotten, making it easy to gloss over Anakin being a stooge for politicians playing a game beyond his ken.

Musk, in particular, does have reasons to empathize with the “Star Wars” villain. After believing he had found a way to reshape the government toward his own ends via DOGE, he was booted when the program proved deeply unpopular. Seeing visions of a blue wave washout, he used his financial superpower to try and avoid what appears to be an oncoming loss. Separated from the levers of power and now half a billion dollars poorer, Musk has been forced to play-act a scenario where he won. His image-generating toy gave him the happy ending that politics, relationships and wealth couldn’t.

But all the AI bots can’t undo the facts of Anakin’s story. He was ultimately killed by the evil emperor he served, dying in front of the son he abandoned. His “return to tradition” was a last-minute awakening, when he was forced to confront all the harm he had done and the miserable life he had led. Now there’s something for Musk to aspire to. 

The post Elon Musk is using Anakin Skywalker to cope with the midterm forecast appeared first on Salon.com.

Ramaswamy Is Very Disappointed That Everyone is Talking About His Ad and Not ‘Policy’

Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign has stopped running the ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother denouncing her as a liar.

The ad repulsed voters, especially after they learned the backstory: Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, had not been in touch with her daughter since her husband, Acton’s stepfather, was accused of raping Acton in the 1970s, when Acton was 12 years old. Arthur and her husband then fled to avoid a trial.

One internal poll, described by Axios, found that voters who were aware of the ad disapproved of it 2-to-1 and found Ramaswamy falling behind in the polls as a result of it.

Earlier this week, Trump continued to defend Ramaswamy.”Vivek was treated very unfairly,” he said. “He had the mother of his opponent say that her daughter was a liar. I said, ‘why can’t I have an opponent like that?’ She said worse than that. Horrible things about her own daughter. And the press — the fake news — criticized him.”

Ramaswamy tried to claim his campaign had not pulled the ad.

“It ran to completion, and we put up four other ads,” he claimed, speaking to the press yesterday.

The campaign had set aside $4 million for it, according to the Columbus Dispatch, but only spent $1 million.

Ramaswamy then tried to shame a reporter for asking about it. “For all of the discussion around 30 second ads, I would love, even for this final close, for this campaign to really be about policy.”

Black Workers Flee Government; Administration Tries to Replace Them With Young Right-Wingers

• More than a year ago, TPM’s Layla A. Jones was flagging troubling numbers in federal jobs data, showing the impact that DOGE and other Trump efforts to remake the federal government were having on Black workers. Black Americans are overrepresented among the federal workforce.
• A Washington Post report yesterday followed up on this story, finding that about one in five black workers has left the federal government during Trump’s second term.
• Between late 2024 and September 2025, “the estimated number of Black people working for the government fell by 30 percent,” The Post reported. “By comparison, reported federal employment declined by 4 percent among all other races included in the survey.”
• On Thursday, TPM published a story by Bex Heimbrock on the Trump administration’s recruiting efforts. Office of Personnel Management head Scott Kupor has been touring the country with Turning Point USA aligned influencers, including Benny Johnson, seeking to recruit young — and presumably deeply conservative — college graduates. “What I really want to see is more people like ‘Big Balls,’ or Ed,” said Kupor, referring to former DOGE staffer Edward Coristine.

It seems like a million years ago now, but there was a moment back in 2024, in the heat of that weird presidential campaign, when everyone was talking about the radical blueprint for Donald Trump’s restoration. Project 2025 was so extreme, in fact, that his campaign had Trump disavow it publicly. He usually said that he hadn’t read the plan and didn’t intend to, but at times he went further. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, 2024, Trump said, “Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25 . . . They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right, and they come up — I don’t know what the hell it is, it’s Project 25 . . . and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme, seriously extreme.”

Trump probably wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t read it, but his advisers obviously believed he should keep his distance from the plan, which didn’t poll well, and when people found out what was in it, they were appalled. Project 2025 was a far-right manifesto, filled with the kind of pie-in-the-sky fantasies that denizens of conservative think-tanks had been churning out for decades in the hopes of influencing Republican administrations. 

One such organization, the Heritage Foundation, had been publishing “Mandate for Leadership,” its so-called policy guide, since 1981 and updating it as necessary. But Project 2025 was different from the group’s previous effort. This time, the Heritage Foundation had organized a formal transition operation, created training sessions, personnel lists and a day-one playbook for Trump to hit the ground running with a flurry of executive orders and personnel changes. 

This effort was largely guided by its co-author, Russell Vought, who served in the first Trump administration as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Having worked for years for the Republican Study Committee in the House, a group of far-right members dedicated to social conservatism, tax cuts and the destruction of the federal safety net, Vought was an experienced bureaucrat with a specific vision: to shrink the federal workforce and bring as much power under the direct auspices of the president as possible. As a self-described Christian nationalist, he also believed that the U.S. should espouse fundamentalist Christianity, and that the country has no obligation to engage in global initiatives that do not directly benefit its own people.

Vought was an active member of a group formed after the 2012 election called Groundswell, which included an eclectic group of influencers and activists such as Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and far-right political operative Steve Bannon, who had come to believe that Republicans needed to be much more radical in their methods and their goals. Seeing the federal workforce as nothing more than sinecures for dangerous liberals, Vought and his comrades planned mass firings under new rules such as Schedule F, which would reclassify thousands of federal workers as at-will employees, making them exempt from civil service protections. And if they could not be fired, he would make their lives so difficult that they would quit. As Vought famously explained:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

Vought believed that the way to secure a mandate for this agenda, even under Democratic presidents, was to cut the federal workforce so massively that the government would be unable to function beyond the most basic services. We will have to see just how well that works out for them in the future. But the destruction is already monumental.

In the months after Trump returned to the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wreaked havoc on the federal government. Thousands were fired and departments were shuttered, leaving chaos everywhere. That’s the tech-bro style. 

But Vought is a different breed. He is a patient and methodical destroyer. Vought believes that we are living in a “post-constitutional” time in which the “precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years” must be thrown off. And even while Trump’s presidency appears to be on the verge of collapsing from the weight of historically low poll numbers, Vought is quietly accomplishing his mission of comprehensive deregulation mostly under the radar. 

On Tuesday, the administration ended Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, effectively allowing them to be bullied and discriminated against in America’s schools. But since this is a man who joyfully prescribes “trauma” as a political tactic, it’s not entirely surprising that his crusade would eventually reach schoolchildren.

Vought’s influence is also being felt on Capitol Hill. As the chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has made her role a centerpiece of her reelection campaign. For years, she has argued to Mainers that her value lies in the seniority and influence she yields. But Collins should think again: One of Vought’s primary strategies for securing the unitary executive is through confrontation with the legislative and judicial branches. That conflict is currently playing out in the courts. But under a supine GOP congressional majority that has been willing to cede the powers granted to them by the Constitution, he is winning — and making more moves. 

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According to the New York Times, an Oval Office meeting grew heated when Vought attempted to have the president rescind National Institutes of Health grants to universities that did not align with the MAGA agenda. Trump was on board with the idea, since it would have targeted Harvard University, an institution he sees as his enemy. After fierce pushback from members of both parties, the pair pulled back. But that reprieve could be temporary; conventional wisdom says they are likely to try again after the November midterms are over, when Vought’s new initiative to confront Congress begins in earnest.

Then, on Wednesday, Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., blocked a Democratic bill that would have stopped Vought’s recent pocket rescission of $810 million in domestic spending previously approved by Congress. (In a statement released days before the vote, Collins decried the move.) The money had been earmarked for programs focused on immigrants, refugees, civil rights, climate change and children. Johnson said the issue will likely have to be decided by the Supreme Court, which approved Vought’s rescissions in 2025 because they pertained to national security. These funds do not, but it won’t be surprising if the Court’s conservative majority, which has been largely sympathetic to the unitary executive theory, finds another reason to allow it.

If Vought and the administration were to win at the Supreme Court, Congress might as well just go part-time to approve presidential appointments, name post-offices and pass one big pile of money for the presidential monarch to spend as he pleases. Article I of the Constitution will be effectively dead.

Under Vought’s leadership, the damage to the federal government is already overwhelming, and it’s unclear if a Democratic congressional majority or administration will be able to fix it. But then, that’s part of the plan too. Trump’s presidency may be faltering, but Vought’s dream is being realized every single day.

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