Elon Musk Reveals Next Targets in “Corporate Takeover” of the U.S.

Elon Musk told some of his biggest investors Wednesday that he’s looking to fully take over the federal government.

In a meeting with Morgan Stanley, the tech billionaire reportedly likened his influence over the federal government to a “corporate takeover.”

“To understand the federal government, it is like a corporate takeover at scale, but one where the company is actually in much worse shape than any commercial company could ever be,” Musk said at the conference, reported CNN’s Hadas Gold.

Musk then went on to say that “logically we should prioritize anything that can reasonably be privatized,” including public services such as the postal service and Amtrak.

Last month, officials with the United States Postal Service flagged that the Trump administration was looking to dissolve the organization’s governing board and place it under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick. Experts believe doing so would likely violate federal law.

The USPS is practically as old as the country, and oversees the myriad shipping demands of the American public, supporting trillions of dollars in commerce.

It also “generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations,” according to USPS’s website.

Still, that hasn’t prevented America’s public mail system from becoming a favorite target of the president. In 2020, Trump argued that the postal service should be dismantled to prevent voting by mail.

Meanwhile, Musk’s role in hacking and slashing federal spending has come under increased legal scrutiny, forcing the Trump administration to announce last week that it was Amy Gleason, a low-profile, first-term Trump official with experience in health care tech, rather than the high-profile billionaire who was leading the Department of Government Efficiency. Meanwhile, Musk has been officially titled a “senior adviser” to Trump.

That title offers him “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” the administration claimed, and leaves Musk with no formal responsibilities to run DOGE as either an employee or an administrator, but as a mere employee of the White House.

However, a Freudian slip by the president during his joint session address Tuesday confirmed what DOGE employees and Justice Department attorneys had seemed to understand: that DOGE is actually “headed up by Elon Musk.”

In early February, Morgan Stanley positioned itself to offload upward of $5.5 billion of its outstanding debt in X. Musk had tapped the bank to help him acquire the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022, but the investment has since lost the bulk of its value. In 2023, Musk admitted that the site had lost 90 percent of its value under his stewardship.

China is ready to fight back in Donald Trump’s trade war, or any war for that matter.

On Tuesday, Trump spurred global financial chaos by imposing 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, and doubling tariffs on Chinese goods from 10 to 20 percent.

“If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” the Chinese Embassy wrote, in a post on X, following the announcement.

Trump claims the tariffs will force China to stop the flow of fentanyl to the United States, but China has already retaliated with its own tariffs—kicking off a trade war guaranteed to hurt American consumers.

“Chinese officials have failed to take the actions necessary to stem the flow of precursor chemicals to known criminal cartels and shut down money laundering by transnational criminal organizations,” a fact sheet accompanying Trump’s tariff announcement reads.

Beijing immediately took retaliatory action against the United States, imposing 15 percent tariffs on U.S. agricultural imports. Canada too has imposed 25 percent retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports, joining China and Mexico in their hostility toward Trump.

A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, Lin Jian, condemned the president’s decision at a press conference Wednesday and urged the U.S. to “return to the right track of dialogue and cooperation.”

“If the U.S. truly wants to solve the fentanyl issue, then the right thing to do is to consult with China on the basis of equality, mutual respect, and mutual benefit to address each other’s concerns,” Jian said. “If the U.S. has other agenda in mind, and if harming China’s interests is what the U.S. wants, we’re ready to fight till the end.”

Democratic Representative Al Green’s protest during Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night went too far for his Republican colleagues, who are now calling for his censure. 

The far-right House Freedom Caucus posted on X Wednesday that it plans to introduce “a censure resolution against Rep. Al Green today.” Other Republicans not in the caucus, including Representatives Troy Nehls and Dan Newhouse, have also indicated that they plan to introduce a resolution to censure Green. 

The effort will likely have the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said Tuesday night that Green’s actions were “absolutely shameful. He should be censured.”

“It’s a spectacle that was not necessary. He’s made history in a terrible way, and I hope he enjoys it,” Johnson told The Hill.

Green says he plans to accept the consequences, saying that he shouted at the president “because Medicaid is so important to my constituents.”  

“If I broke the rules, then I have to be prepared to suffer the consequences. You don’t break the rules and then demand that you be treated as though nothing ever happened,” the Houston-area congressman told Axios. 

Green’s fellow Democrats in the House are backing up their colleague, with a leading House member and a centrist from the party telling Axios that they don’t expect anyone from the party to vote for the censure. Green isn’t backing down either, having already said earlier this month that he plans to introduce articles of impeachment against Trump. 

“Let them bring their sanctions. Bring them on,” Green said.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede hit back at Donald Trump’s outlandish threat to acquire the Danish territory “one way or the other.”

In his address to Congress Tuesday night, Trump gave conflicting messages to the citizens of Greenland. While he claimed to “strongly support” Greenlanders’ “right to determine [their] own future,” and promised to keep them safe and make them rich, the president also restated that the United States would succeed in acquiring the territory.

“We need it really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” Trump said.

The president said that his administration was “working with everybody involved to try to get it.”

Despite what Trump claimed Tuesday, it seems that neither the leaders of Greenland nor Denmark are actually playing ball with his wild imperialist threat. Egede shut down Trump’s comments in a post on Facebook Wednesday, written in Greenlandic and Danish.

“Kalaallit Nunaat is ours,” Egede wrote, using the Greenlandic term meaning “Land of the People,” or the “Land of the Greenlanders.”

“We don’t want to be Americans, nor Danes; we are Kalaallit. The Americans and their leader must understand that. We are not for sale and cannot simply be taken. Our future will be decided by us in Greenland,” Egede wrote in the post.

Meanwhile, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said that Trump’s reference to Greenlanders’ right to self determination was the most important part of the speech—especially with the parliamentary elections approaching next week. He stressed that it was important for the election to proceed “without any kind of international intervention.”

But Trump’s outrageous threats to acquire Greenland have become a hot-button issue on the island, and while his attempts at outreach have ranged from frivolous to ineffectual, his rhetoric about making the territory the “fifty-second state” has already electrified the independence movement there.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen insisted that Greenland was not for sale in a television interview after Trump’s address. Last month, Trump made a startling phone call to Frederiksen and was reportedly “aggressive and confrontational,” threatening tariffs against the country unless it does exactly what he wants—flying in the face of his false promises about self-determination.

Despite the fact that leadership hardly seems interested in handing over control of the mineral-rich territory to the U.S, that hasn’t stopped Republicans from letting their imaginations run away with them. Last month, Republican Representative Buddy Carter of Georgia filed a bill to rename Greenland “Red, White, and Blueland.”

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham scoffed at Republicans’ plan to steer clear of in-person town halls after being confronted by angry protesters.

At a private meeting Tuesday, Representative Richard Hudson, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, advised House Republicans to hold virtual town hall meetings or Facebook live events instead so they could moderate feedback from the audience—a feeble attempt to avoid anybody who disagrees with them.

“I thought that was lame. Look, the Tea Party showed up at the Democrat town halls, and we complained that we were thrown out,” Ingraham said on air Tuesday evening. “So now you’re going to say don’t show up—I say let them show up. Let’s see exactly who these people are. When you engage them in conversation … they can’t back up what they are saying with real arguments.”

In recent weeks, Republican town halls have been bombarded by angry constituents, Democratic and Republican alike, who are frustrated with Trump and Elon Musk’s chaos-inducing assault on the government.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who supports the halting of in-person town halls, tried to claim that the protesters were being paid by Democrats.

“Now I’m not saying everyone in these town halls that you’ve seen on television were not from the local area, but look, there are people who do this as a profession,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday. “They’re professional protesters. So why would we give them a forum to do that right now?”

The strategy has been slammed by Democrats, and now by Fox News. Ingraham’s take? Let them argue, paid or not.

“Let’s go … First Amendment, baby.”