Elon Musk’s DC power grab hasn’t been the Tesla-stock jet fuel investors were expecting.

Tesla shares have fallen more than 40% since January — erasing all of the “Trump bump” that briefly saw the stock gain more than 90% after Election Day. Musk, whose wealth is overwhelmingly linked to his Tesla holdings, has personally lost $121 billion from his net worth over the past three months.

So what happened? Why hasn’t Musk’s rapid ascent into oligarch territory helped rescue his “baby” (as President Trump called Tesla during the pair’s bizarre ad-like press conference last week on the South Lawn)?

There are two main reasons:

Tesla sales are cratering around the world, and…
Its CEO isn’t doing anything to stop it.

While Musk is holed up in the EEOB looking for ways to break the federal government, Tesla’s core business is in crisis......

A CNN poll last week found that 53% of Americans have a negative view of Musk, while roughly 60% say he has neither the right experience nor the right judgment to make the kinds of sweeping cuts his “department” is carrying out.....

Prices on pre-owned Teslas are falling at more than double the rate of the average car, according to research by CarGurus. Used cars overall have fallen 2.7% year over year, while used Teslas have declined 7.3%. A used Cybertruck, Tesla’s head-scratching experiment in car design that looks like it was based on a dare, is worth a whopping 58% less on the resale market......

Musk has made his name synonymous with Tesla — a fact that served them both well when Tesla seemed unstoppable and Musk became the world’s richest person.

But Tesla no longer seems unstoppable, and Musk no longer seems stable. That could prove a toxic pairing.

I took a minute to highlight the errors of fact and judgment in Karoline Leavitt's latest offensive against U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg.

As it turns out, the list wasn't short.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump broke new ground, calling for U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s impeachment, not because the jurist did something wrong, but because he issued a ruling the president didn’t like in an Alien Enemies Act case. A day later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt kept the offensive going during a briefing with reporters.

It reached the point, however, in which the presidential spokesperson had to be fact-checked in real time.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lkqprhu5xs2j
https://x.com/factpostnews/status/1902415885417005113
......As for the suggestion that Boasberg’s record is one of a Democratic “activist,” reality tells a very different story.

But if that weren’t quite enough, NBC News’ Garrett Haake took a moment to remind Leavitt that Boasberg was first made a judge by George W. Bush — who, if memory serves, was not exactly a far-left Democratic partisan — before Obama elevated him to the federal district court. (What’s more, it’s worth noting for context that Boasberg was also appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who has also never been mistaken for a liberal ideologue.)......

The other way is to note that courts keep enjoining Trump’s provocative and legally dubious moves because — wait for it — Trump keeps pushing provocative and legally dubious moves, far more than his predecessors from either party.

As lawyer David R. Lurie summarized, in response to Leavitt’s curious argument, “Maybe, just maybe, it is an indication that Trump — a convicted felon — habitually breaks the law.”

As for the president’s remarks from last week in which he suggested criticizing judges should be seen as “totally illegal,” apparently the White House has moved on from that rather quickly.

Problem: Trump calling for the impeachment of a federal judge who's done nothing wrong.

Bigger problem: House Republicans unveiling *four* impeachment resolutions targeting federal judges who've done nothing wrong.

Less than one day later, Trump crossed a line he’d never crossed before: On heels of a Justice Department speech in which he suggested criticizing judges should be seen as “totally illegal,” the president called U.S. District Judge James Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic,” a “troublemaker” and an “agitator.” Trump concluded, “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”....

To the extent that reality still has meaning, none of the targeted judges have done anything to suggest they’ve gone “rogue.” But even if Trump has come to the opposite conclusion, the answer to his question is simple: As Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts reminded Trump, he can simply appeal rulings he believes were wrong.

But no matter how serious the White House is about judicial impeachments, it’s not up to Trump or his team to execute such a plan: Presidents have literally no formal or procedural role in the process. Rather, that power rests with Congress — where a group of far-right Republicans apparently interpreted Trump’s appeal as a directive. Axios reported:

Just hours after President Trump called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans over the weekend, House Republicans introduced a measure to do just that. ... Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) said Tuesday he is introducing articles of impeachment against Boasberg, arguing he “overstepped his authority, compromised the impartiality of the judiciary, and created a constitutional crisis.”

The Texas Republican’s impeachment resolution was unveiled with five co-sponsors: Republican Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona, Buddy Carter of Georgia, Mike Collins of Georgia, Barry Moore of Alabama and Andrew Clyde of Georgia......

House GOP leaders, of course, already have their hands full, and they don’t seem overly eager to launch impeachment crusades against judges who’ve done nothing wrong, and who’d never be removed by two-thirds of the Senate.

What’s unclear, however, is just how much effort the president intends to invest in this, and what Republican leaders on Capitol Hill will do if Trump decides this is a real priority. Watch this space.

With that in mind, consider Tesla Inc., which is in the middle of what might be politely described as a vibe shift. The company has long enjoyed a massive advantage among the predominantly left-of-center car buyers who make up the American market for electric vehicles. First, because it was pretty much the only game in town for zippy, attractive EVs, and then, as more competition emerged, because owning a Tesla had already become a status symbol for a certain kind of affluent progressive. Until recently, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk had enthusiastically encouraged that association, branding himself and his company as bold, brash innovators fighting climate change.

And, well, Musk—whose massive public profile as the face of Tesla has always been one of the company’s main value propositions for investors and car buyers alike—isn’t doing that anymore. He’s swung the whole operation to the hard right, positioning Tesla as an antagonist to pretty much its entire customer base.

That base has gotten the message: Cybertruck owners have found their vehicles defaced with everything from spray paint to dog feces, and embarrassed drivers of less controversial Tesla models have taken to adding bumper stickers or magnets to their cars to make clear they purchased them before they knew about Musk’s politics. Tesla showrooms and Superchargers have attracted “Tesla Takedown” protests across the US, and a handful of suspected arson incidents of the company’s cars and facilities have also been reported. Sales numbers and registration rates for new Teslas have fallen around the world in 2025: Sales are down 45% across Europe; in Australia, the Electric Vehicle Council estimates a sales drop of 70% over the previous year; in China, shipments of domestically manufactured Teslas have plunged 49%.......

There’s little indication that Musk will simply be able to switch his product from one ideological market to another of equal size, having now remade Tesla into a symbol of sneering anti-progressivism. Some Tesla watchers posit that all of this will be little more than a bump in the road toward some masterful gambit that will make the company’s traditional customer base irrelevant—perhaps the advent of self-driving robotaxis, which Musk has promised for years are just over the horizon.......

Fundamentally, though, Musk seems to have made a similar error with Tesla that he made a couple of years ago with one of his other businesses, Twitter. In that instance, he stripped the blue verification checkmarks that the social platform’s old regime had given out freely to public figures and journalists, viewing them largely as markers of elite status within the platform’s petty little social hierarchy. (We were, to be fair, very annoying about the blue checks.) Under Musk, anyone who wanted their blue check back would have to pay a monthly fee to the company, and anyone who wanted one for the first time could also buy in. The company’s leadership seemed surprised when relatively few people volunteered to pay, but they shouldn’t have been. The verification marks had been changed from a symbol of professional status into a symbol of fealty to Musk, which meant they weren’t valuable to the same people anymore.

Brands decide to pursue new types of customers all the time, but usually they do so consciously—they find a target market and court it, often after assembling some kind of proof that they might be able to foment a particular type of demand among a new set of buyers. That’s why soda brands launch healthy beverages, for example, or why Louis Vuitton recently announced plans to introduce a line of color cosmetics. These companies know that some of the goodwill they’ve built up among the public can be transferred to new products, if done carefully—the meaning remains stable, but it’s contained in new vessels. What Musk is trying to do with Tesla, knowingly or not, is something different. The cars are the same, but he’s changed their meaning to satisfy a much smaller audience: himself.

In a normal administration, Mike Flynn would be kept at arm's length.

In the Trump administration, his record of radicalism isn't disqualifying and he's been rewarded with a new appointment.

At a Mar-a-Lago event last month, the president said he’d offered Flynn “about 10 jobs.” Evidently, the two men settled on one. The New York Times reported:

Mr. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and a national security adviser to Mr. Trump during his first term, was named to the oversight board of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in New York. Mr. Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during a wider investigation into contacts between the first Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials. Mr. Trump later pardoned Mr. Flynn.

.....As the Times’ report noted, Flynn is perhaps best known for having been fired early in Trump’s first term after getting caught lying to the FBI about his covert communications with Russian officials. Years later, as regular readers might recall, Flynn allegedly plotted with the president in the Oval Office after Trump’s 2020 defeat, exploring ways to overturn the presidential election. According to the Jan. 6 committee's investigations, the retired general reportedly raised the prospect of seizing voting machines, deploying U.S. troops, and declaring martial law as part of the anti-election scheme.

In the months and years that followed, additional evidence of Flynn’s radicalism emerged. In 2021, for example, he appeared to endorse a military coup. Months later, the retired general suggested people may be exposed to Covid vaccines by way of salad dressing. He soon after made the case that the United States should have a single religion.

Flynn has also talked up the bizarre “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory, suggested unnamed people were “putting components of robotics into us” by way of Covid shots, and similarly shared an odd idea related to “5G technology” and a “pathogen” that he said might be hidden in vaccines.

In a normal administration, someone with a record like this would find that his phone calls go unreturned. In this administration, the president singles out Flynn for praise and rewards him with an appointment to the oversight board of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

What might not be obvious, however, is that this wasn’t the first time Roberts sent a rhetorical shot across the president’s bow.

In 2018, Trump derided a ruling from a jurist the Republican described as “an Obama judge.” In response to a question from The Associated Press, the chief justice took issue with the comment.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them,” Roberts said. On the day before Thanksgiving, he concluded, “The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for."

More recently, as 2024 came to an end and attention shifted to Trump’s second inaugural, Roberts issued a public warning about threats to the judicial system.

In an annual year-end report, the chief justice wrote, “Within the past few years, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”

Again, Roberts didn’t call out anyone by name, though the only prominent political voices who’ve made comments along these lines have offices in the Trump West Wing.

If recent history is any guide, Trump will likely soon start whining about the chief justice by way of his social media platform. At least we’ll know why.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans were gobsmacked on Tuesday upon hearing that a prominent Republican official had shown respect for the United States Constitution.

Across the country, U.S. residents expressed shock and disbelief that a member of the GOP had openly validated the rule of law.

“At first I thought it was a hoax,” said one American, echoing the views of many. “Then I was like, maybe it’s a different John Roberts? It’s a pretty common name.”

At the White House, a furious Donald J. Trump said that the Constitution “isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on,” noting, "When I was stealing documents I never even considered taking it."

In his harshest rebuke of the 238-year-old document, he alleged, “The Constitution has treated me very unfairly.”