Somehow Musk’s protestations got dumber.
(Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Right-wing agitprop has screamed bloody murder ever since Judge Paul Engelmayer issued a temporary restraining order ordering Elon Musk’s merry band of morons to refrain from playing around with Treasury Department data, specifically sensitive personally identifiable information, for SIX DAYS to allow the parties to fully brief the matter. Musk keeps insisting DOGE is just an innocent audit to expose corruption. A lot of people are parroting this claim because Dunning-Kruger is real and it’s spectacular.
Though if DOGE were conducting a good faith audit… why would this order be controversial? Audits don’t collapse if they wait another week into a four-year term. And yet Musk and his cronies responded to the order with the same trademark anxiety as a coke dealer hovering over a toilet with an industrial-grade plunger while cops bang on the door.
After spending a couple days complaining that judicial oversight cannot apply to the executive branch — and leaning into Carl Schmitt’s literal Nazi ideology for good measure — Musk took a break from watching someone else make his Diablo IV character famous and stumbled upon a new theory to blast the TRO: judge shopping.