On X, Musk polled his followers on whether Elez should get his job back; not surprisingly, most voted yes. Vance also weighed in, writing, “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.” Trump agreed. And so, according to Musk, Elez will be returning to government.
It is clearly absurd for Vance to insist that Elez is at once a “kid” who should be forgiven for things he wrote last year and a man who deserves a major role restructuring the federal government. But his argument isn’t supposed to make sense; Vance is asserting his freedom from the need to justify the administration’s actions according to pre-existing standards. Under the new standards, diversity is taboo, and racism is not. This stark reversal of values is a signature of the Trump restoration.
Elez, after all, is not the only member of Musk’s coterie who dabbles in far-right trolling. As Reuters reported, in just the last few months Gavin Kliger, a young engineer who helped shut down U.S.A.I.D., has boosted social media posts by the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the rabidly misogynist influencer Andrew Tate.
Nor is bigotry a bar to high-level jobs elsewhere in the administration. Darren Beattie had to leave a job as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration for speaking at a conference that included white nationalists. Four months ago, he wrote on X, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” He’s now been appointed acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy, one of the State Department’s top jobs, sending a worldwide message about who represents Trump’s America.
The Trumpist right believes that the social justice causes of the last decade or so, including MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the trans rights movements, constituted a Maoist-style cultural revolution. The goal of Musk, Vance and their allies, evidently, is a counterrevolution as sweeping, cruel and arbitrary as the one they imagine they’ve suffered. Last year Vance, in an interview with my colleague Ross Douthat, said of liberals, “These guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there’s no law, there’s just power.” The suggestion that Democrats were taking cues from that infamous Nazi jurist was pure projection — a sign, in retrospect, of how Vance himself would behave in office.
