Hannity knows who his boss is now.

I’m sure he’s made sure that he still holds power over trump, at least financially and maybe in other ways like having the goods on him for crimes. So besides what he outright paid for, a lot of what Musk has bailed trump out with would be recorded as loans, so as soon as trump tries to shut him out, Musk could show the receipts and call in the loans, which would bankrupt and humiliate trump. God only knows what all kinds of shit he has over him but trump’s behavior tells me it’s substantial.

What Musk has on trump is that he bought him the presidency and bailed him out on a shit-ton of debt, so much we can’t even know what all Musk has given trump, so trump as POTUS now has nothing to worry about any more–except Musk. In return Musk gets to pocket and funnel billions of taxpayer money into his businesses (and not to his competitors), incapacitate all the government agencies that regulate his businesses or investigate complaints about his businesses–all his problems have gone away and he totally owns trump. We need only watch how “Little X” can pick his nose to tell trump to shut up to his face during a press conference and trump sits there and takes it, to know this is how things are.

They’re not supposed to be able to be fired for no reason. But now with trump all rules have been discarded since the constitution’s “checks and balances” mechanism has collapsed.

I didn’t go into all the details, but besides the civil service protections, many of these jobs require extensive training to learn the job (some are quite specialized) which is a significant investment. With some entry level positions, it’s not uncommon for people to take a government job, get training and experience and then quit to go to the private sector for more money. This way the govt at least gets a certain return on their investment in training the employee. The incentive to stay for less pay after that is that after a certain number of years, you’re vested meaning you get a pension, not to mention that theoretically you’re doing something worthwhile serving your country instead of a for-profit corporation.

For federal career civil servant jobs, yes. It’s because those jobs have (until now/soon of course) protections so they can’t (until now/soon) be easily fired for political reasons every time the party in power changes. That’s why the probation period (when they don’t have those protections yet) exists so that there’s time to evaluate if someone turns out not to be fit for the job, before civil service protection kicks in.

Of course the first thing trump did was decree the “Schedule F” tactic (see Project 2025), which will remove those protections from all federal jobs so anyone can be easily fired, but until that is fully in effect, they’re going ahead with the low-hanging fruit and firing all the people who don’t have the protections–those still on probation, which firings can’t really be legally challenged like “Schedule F”.

DOGE stands for Dept of Oligarch Grift Efficiency

No need to even pretend they want to help people now that they’re in power. Their goal by gutting the federal agencies is to destroy their ability to function, so they can turn the functions of government over to private enterprise owned by the oligarchs. The worse the damage caused by these firings, the faster they can say “we need to privatize” the functions of that agency. The “Efficiency” part of DOGE means “get more taxpayer money into oligarchs’ pockets more efficiently”

So what I’m hearing is, we should forgive 10% of the magats?

I’ve seen interviews with some of them who say they still support trump, that he’s just bluffing as a negotiating tactic. I don’t think it would really happen (who knows), but I do think he’s serious–he and Jared have been talking out loud for a long time about what a great area for real estate development it would be–that’s just how their oligarch minds work. But I guess once you buy into the magasphere, it’s very difficult to ever pull your head back out, no matter what he says or does.