Sleazebag Wars
In Donald Trump's White House, Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, and Leonard Leo vie for galactic supremacy
Start with the obvious: Donald Trump is a creature of the criminal underworld, devoid of empathy, entirely transactional, beholden to no one and nothing save his disgusting id impulses, and so self-centered Narcissus himself would look up from the lake and be like, “Bruh, what’s wrong with you?”
During his first term, there was a class of West Wing employee who signed on hoping to constrain Trump from the shittier angels of his nature: Mattis, Kelly, Coats. But in 2025? Anyone working in his current administration who didn’t recognize these awful truths about him from the get-go is either a lunatic, an idiot, or both.
So why have so many sane, smart people held their noses and entered the Trump fray? Ulterior motives. They think, not without reason, that Donald is a gullible chump they can exploit for their own purposes. Stephen Miller, for example, is there because he wants to rid the nation of brown-skinned immigrants he thinks are sub-human. Kristi Noem is there because she enjoys law enforcement cosplay. Kash Patel is there because he wants to score front-row seats at UFC events. RFK, Jr. is a lunatic. Karoline Leavitt is an idiot. Pete Hegseth appears to be both, while also being sloshed 24/7 and completely reliant on his wife to make all major decisions not involving how much pomade to put in his hair.
More consequential to national policy that the aforementioned individuals—and more useful for resistance purposes—are the various ideological…factions, let’s call them…operating in Trump’s orbit. While their objectives overlap to some extent, these groups do not have identical agendas.
Back in the fall, the various factions set aside their differences and rowed in unison, propelling Donald to the Promised Land. But four months into the Redux, the rifts between the various groups are starting to show. They have begun to pull POTUS in different directions. To succeed, the resistance must identify these opposing forces, widen the fissures between them, fan the flames of their enmity, and allow their internecine battles to draw-and-quarter the Trump agenda.
Just this week, we’ve seen evidence of these fissures. Indeed, some of the Trump courtiers are literally showing their battle scars.
Let’s look at three of the factions:
Creepy Tech Bro Accelerationists
(Elon Musk)
Musk has had a bad week. He announced he was leaving government (which, like most things that come out of his ugly pie-hole, is not actually true). He weathered a wave of negative publicity regarding his singularly unlikeable personality, his defective sense of humor, his inability to play well with others, his rampant drug use, and issues with his bladder. When Katie Miller—wife of Stephen Miller, the fash-iest fascist in D.C.—left her West Wing job to work for Musk full time, the Beltway rumor mill went into full swing, intimating infidelity or even (checks gag reflex) throupling.
If all that weren’t enough, Musk suffered a black eye—his right eye, specifically, suggesting a left-handed assailant. When asked about it, he claimed his son, the same five-year-old booger-eater he’s been toting around like a human shield for months, socked it to him—an unlikely explanation that not even the White House press corps fell for. If not “Little X,” then who punched Elon? A furious Scott Bessent? A jealous Stephen Miller? One of his 35 baby mamas? Maybe he was hit by debris falling from the failed SpaceX launch?
To be sure, we have not seen the last of this skipping dipshit. As the always farseeing Dave Troy explains,
And of course, DOGE is still operating under [weirdo Project 2025 mastermind Russell] Vought’s direction, with a current focus on cutting military spending. Vought also said in an interview that he would consider using impoundment to force DOGE cuts and bypass Congress. While some have argued that this would be a violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 which limits Presidential authority to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, Vought argues that the act allows for “pocket recissions” — last-minute budget cuts at the close of the fiscal year that can override Congressional authority. So more DOGE cuts are likely, with or without Congress.
And even as Musk “left government” — at exactly the mandated 130 day limit for a special government employee — he did so with Trump saying that he “isn’t really leaving” and presenting him with a golden key to the White House. Musk is obviously on good terms with both Trump and Vought; one may even wonder if Musk is ‘unofficially’ their boss.
And for all the fun we’ve had at his expense, Elmo has blood on his hands, and lots of it. Michelle Goldberg wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this week entitled “Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death”—and that is not hyperbole. She cites a Boston University model estimating that, as I type this, 310,445 people have already died, mostly by starvation—just due to loss of U.S. funding for global health. That’s roughly the population of Pittsburgh. Nature ran a study extrapolating the total number of DOGE-cut-related deaths globally over the next 15 years at 25 million—again, just due to loss of U.S. funding for global health. That’s roughly the population of Florida.
That these humans didn’t live in the United States doesn’t make their preventable deaths—caused directly by Elon Musk and his enabler Donald Trump—any less horrifying. As Don Moynihan, a professor of policy at the University of Michigan’s Ford School, wrote, “Nature ran a piece finding that 25 million people could die as a result of ending USAID. This puts Trump and Musk in the category of the most brutal leaders of the 20th century in terms of unnecessary lives lost.”
It is telling that, other than Trump—who owes his election victory to Musk’s munificence—the only person in the White House that can stand to be in the same room with Elon for any length of time is Stephen Miller’s wife, who can absorb toxicity like some MAGA Dark Phoenix. And as the indefatigable Jim Stewartson points out, the
rumors of romantic involvement between Katie Miller and Elon Musk may hide an even worse reality. Katie Miller will be an unofficial conduit between two of the most dangerous Nazis since the original. She will be unencumbered by a role in the White House and will be free to share information, receive money, and meet with whoever she wants—and pass that information or favors directly to her husband who is the driver of much of Trump’s unconstitutional racist attack on American citizens and immigrants.
We’re not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. As Musk exits stage right, his South African countryman Peter Thiel waits in the shadows, compiling for his Palatir Technologies company a database to end all databases that may as well be called the Death Star.
Even so, Elon leaving Washington in disgrace—bruised, kite-high, and universally loathed—definitely created a disturbance in the Force. Can the rift between Musk and the other Trump consiglieri be exploited?
Dark Enlightenment “Intellectuals”
(Curtis Yarvin)
I went down the neoreactionary, or NRx, rabbit hole in November 2023, producing a two-part series on the so-called Dark Enlightenment movement.1 I wrote:
Curtis Yarvin is arguably the most influential NRx thought leader— “the alt-right’s favorite philosophy instructor,” as a BBC journalist once called him. The grandson of Jewish American Communists, the son of a U.S. diplomat, and himself (like Kaczynski) a math prodigy, Yarvin graduated from Brown University in 1992—just two semesters after most kids his year, myself included, graduated from high school—and was at UC Berkeley when he dropped out to work as a programmer.
With funding from Peter Thiel—the Frankfurt-born tech billionaire who hovers Sauron-like over the Dark Enlightenment universe—Yarvin formed his own start-up, Tlön Corp, to expand upon Urbit, the decentralized computer network system of his invention. (To my tech-ignorant ears, Urbit sounds a lot like Pied Piper from HBO’s Silicon Valley, and Yarvin bears enough resemblance to Martin Starr’s inspired character on the show, Guilfoyle, to make me wonder if he was one of its inspirations.)
From 2007-2013, Yarvin wrote rightwing political commentary at Blogger, under the (rather unappealing) pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” He now produces a Substack called Gray Mirror. The New Right magazine IM-1776 describes him as a “self-described ‘monarchist’…often credited as the founder of ‘neoreaction’” who has “long been one of the leading writers and intellectual figures on the dissident Right.”
What they call the “dissident right,” I call “fascists who fancy themselves geniuses.” As I see it, Yarvin’s work, along with the work of his NRx compeers like Michael Anton, comprises a pseudo-intellectual veneer masking the selfishness, cruelty, hatred, and delusions of grandeur that underpin the Peter Thiel wing of the alt-right. Curtis Yarvin is the lipstick on the fascist pig.
Lo, the legacy media has finally discovered “the alt-right’s favorite philosophy instructor.” Yarvin gave an interview to the New York Times Magazine, complete with moody, brooding photographs that can’t quite conceal how badly he wants to look cool. Ava Kofman wrote about him for the New Yorker; many of the details there I already knew and have already written about, but this was a fun piece of color:
Former peers told me that he wore a bicycle helmet in class and seemed eager to show off his knowledge to the professor. “Oh, you mean helmet-head?” one said when I asked about Yarvin. The joke among some of his classmates was that the helmet prevented new ideas from penetrating his mind. . . “He wanted to be viewed as the smart guy—that was really, really important to him,” his first girlfriend, Meredith Tanner, told me.
I’ve read a bunch of Gray Mirror columns and listened to Yarvin yack it up on the Red Scare podcast. Always I walk away with the same conclusion: As smart as the guy is, he has a tendency to make sweeping generalizations that initially sound convincing because he is a good writer and speaks with an authoritative (if not an authoritarian) air. These sweeping assertions fall apart pretty easily once you stop and think about them. Kofman noticed it, too. She calls it “his airbrush”:
Yarvin’s congenital cynicism about governance disappears as soon as he starts talking about dictatorial regimes. He has kind words for El Salvador’s strongman, Nayib Bukele, and has encouraged Trump to let Putin end the liberal order “not just in Russian-speaking territories—but all the way to the English Channel.” Picking at a plate of fried calamari, Yarvin praised China and Rwanda (neither of which he has visited) for having strong governments that insured both public safety and personal liberty. In China, he told me, “you can think and pretty much say whatever you want.” He may have sensed my skepticism, given the country’s record of imprisoning critics and detaining ethnic minorities in concentration camps. “If you want to organize against the government, you’re gonna have problems,” he admitted. Then he returned to his airbrush: “Not Stalin problems. You’ll just, like, be cancelled.”
Yarvin is an unrepentant authoritarian who wants the United States to become an absolute monarchy—an idea as daffy as it sounds at first blush. He should be dismissed as a quack. But, to the extent that he has the ear of JD Vance (a darling of the Dark Enlightenment) and Peter Thiel, he remains a dangerous figure.
Will the American people—and the elites-hating, tired-of-being-talked-down-to MAGA especially—thrill to surrendering their individual liberty to Helmet Head? Will Trump enjoy being upstaged by Booger from Revenge of the Nerds?2 Has Curtis Yarvin become a liability to Peter Thiel’s Sauron-like dreams of world domination? How does Yarvin feel about the Unabomber Manifesto?
Journalists are well advised to ask and keep asking these questions.
Radical Catholic Weirdos
(Leonard Leo)
In my first PREVAIL piece on the dark money maestro and radical Catholic weirdo Leonard Leo, I describe him as “a short, foppish, pear-shaped man, in wire-rimmed glasses and pricey suits. Think a dandier George Constanza, or if The Penguin worked at Jones Day.”
That was four years, three months, and eight days ago(!). I have been trying literally for years to make Leonard Leo—the most powerful man in America no one’s heard of—a household name, writing a number of subsequent pieces about him. My friend Tom Carter, who I’ve now known for over four years, has been trying much harder, and for much longer. He’s spent over a decade begging practically every major journalist in Washington to write about the guy, mostly in vain.
Leo has hand-picked five Supreme Court Justices, including all three Trump selections, and bears one of the more comic-book-villain names in recent memory, but the media wouldn’t touch him—until this week, that is, when, irked at a lower court torpedoing his tariffs, POTUS lit into Leo on Truth Social, calling him “a ‘sleazebag’ . . . a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”
Alas, the legacy media, for the most part, remains either unwilling to explain or incapable of explaining who Leonard Leo is and the critical role he’s played in subverting the judicial branch. Much of this week’s coverage conflates Leo with the Federalist Society, an outfit he helped found but disengaged with years ago. For example, David French’s New York Times op-ed promises to explain “Why Trump Is Mad at the ‘Sleazebag’ Leonard Leo,” but winds up being a flaccid defense of FEDSOC.
Me, I agree with Trump’s assertions that Leo is a bad person; that he has his own ambitions distinct from those of the Federalist Society; and that he probably hates America. Based on Leo’s hidebound approach to the judiciary, he clearly doesn’t support democracy.
Back in March, in an open letter to Leo—which I really did print out and send to the three addresses where I thought he might get mail—I wrote:
We are nine weeks into the second Trump term—what I call the Redux—and Donald has already mooted your answer. In this short time, the President and his Co-President, Elon Musk, have acted so rashly, brazenly, and hastily, with their firehose of executive orders; with DOGE playing life-and-death Jenga with the federal government; and with fatally incompetent if not outright treasonous appointments to key Cabinet positions, that they have broken through the guardrails—overwhelming, by Bannonian design, our fragile system of checks and balances.
Congress has failed to provide an adequate check on power, owing to the preponderance of pusillanimous Republicans in the two chambers; the Senate, with its GOP majority and sclerotic Dem minority leadership, voted to confirm all of Trump’s nominees, however unqualified, however aligned with Putin, however ignorant, however openly vengeful. To its credit, the judiciary has held so far, true—but to what end? The administration is already openly defying court orders, a constitutional crisis that will get worse before (if?) it gets better. Trump, a lifelong criminal, has nothing but contempt for the rule of law. He has called for the impeachment of judges who disagree with him. Lower level judges, suddenly thrust in the spotlight, rightly feel threatened by well-armed stochastic terrorists in MAGA hats. The Chief Justice—your dude—was concerned enough about Trump’s tirades against the judiciary to issue a public statement. Meanwhile, prominent white-shoe law firms have capitulated to Trump’s mafioso-like demands. No doubt you are aware of Paul, Weiss essentially paying protection money to get POTUS off its back.
It gets worse. Although the legacy media is reluctant to say so, Musk has outed himself as a Nazi. I know you have some connection to VP Vance through the Catholic networks, but he is, and has long been, an open fascist. Trump, a yooge fan of Hitler, promised to be a dictator on Day One and is doing his level best to keep that promise.
All of these things are objectively true, and are really taking place. In fact, your old fellow-traveler Ed Whelan has been tweeting his displeasure about the goings-on, leading me to the uncomfortable realization that I sometimes agree with Ed Whelan. Strange bedfellows, indeed.
But I digress. I’m writing today to ask one simple question:
Are you okay with this?
I never heard back.
But now, at last, we have an answer—albeit a cryptic one:
“I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the Federal Courts, and it was a privilege being involved,” Leo said in a statement to the New York Post. “There’s more work to be done, for sure, but the Federal Judiciary is better than it’s ever been in modern history, and that will be President Trump’s most important legacy.”
This sounds polite and respectful. But reading between the lines, Leo seems to be telling Trump, “Remember when I played you like a cheap fiddle to get the judges I wanted on the bench? That was awesome! I loved that! Thanks, buddy! This is your legacy. I am your legacy. When you’ve gone to the great McDonald’s in the sky, the judges you nominated will still be in place, undermining the separation of church and state and doing tangible harm to women and gay people. Ha ha ha.”
Or, as he told the Washington Post in 2019, “I was here long before this president and I’ll be here long after, doing what I’m doing, God willing,” which seemed more prescient six years ago than it does today.
The pilot episode of Breaking Bad takes place on Walter White’s fiftieth birthday, when he learns that he has cancer. Wanting to leave his wife and son a nest egg, he decides to start manufacturing and selling meth. At his birthday party, we meet White’s brother-in-law, Hank Schrader, who is a DEA agent. From the very first episode, then, we know that Walter and Hank are on a collision course. Sooner or later, they will become adversaries. And only one of them can win.
So it is with the Donald Trump Fascist Coup and the Leonard Leo Supreme Court. So far, the latter has greased the skids for the former. Like, Roberts & Co. gave a lifelong criminal full immunity from crimes committed during “official acts,” which, functionally, is full immunity, period.
But the administration keeps defying court decisions. And there is no enforcement mechanism strong enough to compel the executive branch to heel. As LB pointed out on The Five 8 recently, when discussing Kristi Noem’s ominous comments about habeas corpus, the administration is effectively arguing that the Constitution says whatever Donald Trump says it says, Marbury v. Madison and 200 years of stare decisis be damned.
If things continue on this path, Trump will either make like Caesar and cross the Rubicon, effectively neutering the Supreme Court, or the Court will itself rule that Trump is well within his Constitutional rights to be a dictator, yielding the same result. At that point, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—Leo’s six Justices—will retain their ridiculous robes but be stripped of all their power. As I wrote in my open letter to Leo, “Did you really spend your entire adult life laboring to create a Supreme Court full of like-minded Catholic conservatives, only to watch Donald Trump—a godless idiot who called you a ‘fat fuck’—neuter the Nine?”
Watching these two assholes fight is like this Knicks fan watching a playoff series between the Pacers and the Celtics—I hate both teams and want them both to lose. But as with Walter and Hank in Breaking Bad, conflict between Donald and Leonard is inevitable. In the NBA, the loser goes to Cancun but returns again next season. The battle between the executive and judicial branches is a fight to the death.
Will Leo or Trump be the last man standing? The jury’s still out.
I was here long before this president and I’ll be here long after, doing what I’m doing, God willing. Not if Trump has something to say about it.
Let the Sleazebag Wars begin!
There’s a whole chapter on this in my book, Rough Beast, that dropped over a year ago.
Curtis Armstrong > Curtis Yarvin, always.
It’s TUESDAY🎉This piece is PERFECTION!👏🏻👏🏻🎯
What a wonderful epistle to cogitate over whilst enjoying my morning repast! Huzzah! I raise my mug of earl grey, hot, to you sir!