Winners & Losers: The Puppet Master & The Purple-Haired People Eater

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy lunatic, but behind the Elon-Trump slap fight is a cabal of extremist Christian puppet-masters who are wearing the norms of our society like a skin suit that, once their power is calcified, they will remove and reveal themselves as anti-liberty, anti-Democracy, anti-human, armageddonist lizard people.

Seeing that in writing does make it seem a little conspiracist-y. But I shall make my case!

Welcome to this week’s Winners & Losers, your handy guide to the characters behind the chaos. Remember: it’s people who have caused this mess, and if we don’t call out their complicity, they will never, ever stop.

Late last week, the world became engrossed in the tween-boy fight between the richest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world. But there’s a case to be made that this is a fight between two figureheads. Consider: Trump’s inability to reason is matched only by his inability to communicate clearly. That’s not to say that he isn’t powerful, or that he isn’t a fascist who sees himself as a king. It’s just to say that — it’s possible, at least — he is more of a symbol of a movement than the mastermind behind it.

Even kings get played.

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And Musk might have been pulling the levers of DOGE, but there’s someone else pulling Musk’s strings. He’s a darker, more dangerous figure. And he’s this week’s Loser.

Our winner, as is becoming a trend, is a woman willing to call him out.

Week 4: Russell Vought (A Loser, Hopefully not The Winner)

You have heard the name, Russell Vought, and if you’re chronically online, you probably know that he was one of the designers and co-authors of the infamous Project 2025, which has been written about endlessly but, apparently, not read about all that much because it’s fucking terrifying and should have already caused mass panic.

It’s not causing mass panic, and that’s a problem.

You can read all about Project 2025 in this concise explainer from the ACLU. Anyone who subscribes to Lincoln Square probably already knows all about it. But as a refresher, here’s how the ACLU describes it:

Project 2025 is a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity. Project 2025’s largest publication, “Mandate For Leadership,” is a 900-page manual for reorganizing the entire federal government agency by agency to serve a conservative agenda...