9 deeply sinister things Donald Trump and Elon Musk did while you were sleeping

Donald Trump is apparently so comfortable letting Elon Musk run the country that he’s taken a second job as a theatre impresario.

And seizing personal control of a cultural institution is one of the least dictator-esque things he did overnight.

He also gave a ‘heretic’ televangelist a West Wing office, effectively declared white South Africans only group in the world so oppressed they deserve refugee status and tried to fire America’s election watchdog.

Here’s all the authoritarian-adjacent things Donald Trump did on his 19th day in office that you need to know about.

1. Seized control of a performing arts institution

Clearly worried he didn’t seem to be copying Kim Jong Il enough, last night Donald Trump declared he was to sack trustees of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and install himself as chairman.

In a post on Truth Social, he wrote: “I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.

“We will soon announce a new board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!”

He went on to complain about the Kennedy Center featuring drag shows “aimed specifically at our youth.”

The centre last October hosted a Dancing Queens Drag Brunch at its Roof Terrace Restaurant. The event was £100 a ticket, and was not aimed at children.

To give a UK comparison, this is a bit like Keir Starmer deciding he was going to become chief exec of the Barbican Centre.

In a statement, the Center said: “The Kennedy Center is aware of the post made recently by POTUS on social media. We have received no official communications from the White House regarding changes to our board of trustees. We are aware that some members of our board have received termination notices from the administration.

“Per the Center’s governance established by Congress in 1958, the chair of the board of trustees is appointed by the Center’s board members. There is nothing in the Center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members; however, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.”

We look forward to the Center’s 2025 line-up, which will presumably be just Lee Greenwood and Journey performing every other night.

2. Gave a “heretic” televangelist who speaks in tongues a White House office

Donald Trump launched a “faith office” in the White House – led by a televangelist branded a heretic by mainstream Christians.

Paula White is linked to the “prosperity gospel” – a belief that faith in God makes you rich and healthy.

She’s perhaps best known for a bizarre sermon she delivered in 2020 at a prayer service aimed at enlisting the almighty to deliver a second term for Trump.

During the sermon, she said the words “we strike at the ground” over and over again, repeatedly claimed Angels were on their way, some of them from Africa – and spoke in rhythmic gibberish for a few seconds.

She has also suggested “Demonic confederacies” were attempting to steal the 2020 election. As opposed to, say, voters.

The same year she was criticised for a sermon in which she prayed for expectant mothers to suffer miscarriages in what she claimed were “satanic pregnancies.”

The Senate Finance Committee launched an investigation into televangelists, including her ministry Without Walls International Church, between 2007 and 2011.

The report, while inconclusive in its findings, reported the Church spent $900,000 of tax-exempt donations to pay the mortgage on her mansion, and also for her private jet.

She is married to Jonathan Cain, the keyboardist from Journey who co-wrote Don’t Stop Believin’.

3. Tried to fire America’s election watchdog. She refused.

Ellen Wintraub chairs the Federal Election Commission – which keeps tabs on whether US elections are being held legally and properly.

She tweeted yesterday that she had been sent a letter, signed by Trump, which read: “You are hereby removed as a Member of the Federal Election Commission, effective immediately.”

But she’s staying put, saying Trump’s bid to unseat her is not legal.

She wrote: “There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners-this isn’t it. I’ve been lucky to serve the American people & stir up some good trouble along the way. That’s not changing anytime soon.”

For someone so determined to sow mistrust in elections to try to remove the person in charge of their administration is chilling, to say the least.

To try and do it illegally takes it to another level of yikes.

4. Elon Musk did a Twitter poll asking whether he should un-fire his racist minion

Yesterday one of Elon Musk’s youth goon squad was forced to resign after a twitter account linked to him was found to have posted – very recently – racist comments.

Today, Musk did a poll on Twitter, which read: “Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate comments via a now deleted pseudonym?”

At the time of writing, nearly 400,000 people had voted. 78% voted yes.

Later, Vice President JD Vance

5. Meanwhile his teenage minion was apparently fired from an internship for leaking secrets

Edward Coristine, a teenage college dropout who called himself “Big Balls” on LinkedIn, and who has been terrorising public servants on Elon Musk’s behalf for the last week or so, was reportedly fired from an internship at a cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets.

Bloomberg reports Coristine was fired by Path Network in 2022 for “leaking internal information to the competitors.”

Now he has access to the most sensitive personal information on American citizens held by the federal government. And he has no apparent security clearance, other than being an acolyte of Musk.

All totally fine.

6. Quietly backed off some China tariffs in the middle of the night

With Canada and Mexico’s sanctions earlier in the week, Trump at least got them to pretend to make some concessions so he could save face when he backed down.

But late last night, the Donald quietly backed down on part of his tariff regime with China, allowing packages worth less than $800 to enter the US duty-free.

The tariffs had caused major headaches for people ordering goods from Chinese online marketplaces like AliExpress and Temu.

China, thus far, has offered no concessions to the US.

7. Elon identified his next target – his own company’s regulator

With a tweet, Elon Musk designated the next target for his DOGE bully squad.

“CFPB RIP” he tweeted, prompting a lot of feverish googling to see what on earth he was talking about.

Turns out CFPB is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in the wake of the 2008/9 financial crisis to regulate non-bank financial companies, protecting consumers and the world against another similar crash.

In recent years it’s been key to scrutinising payment apps, including those offered by Apple and Paypal.

As of last week, when they announced a partnership with Visa to let users make one-off transactions, Elon Musk’s X – formerly Twitter – joined the list.

By stalling the work of the body, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has ensured X will face little scrutiny.

8. Scrapped Joe Biden’s security clearance

When Joe Biden took office, Trump was knee deep in investigations into exactly why he had boxes and boxes of documents, some of them classified, stashed in a toilet at Mar A Lago. As a precaution, in case he was, you know, a threat to the nation, Biden took away Trump’s security clearance and access to classified briefings.

Trump last night returned the favour, simply out of revenge.

9. Reopened the US refugee programme, but only for ‘persecuted’ white South Africans

Trump issued a statement slamming the government of South Africa for treating the white Afrikaner population terribly poorly.

And he did a partial reverse ferret on the complete shutdown of the US refugee programme, presumably because he thinks they’re the most persecuted people on the planet.

Why is he doing this? Well, he appears to have misread – or been, ahem, misinformed – about a new law that allows the South African government to take land from private parties if it’s in the public interest and under certain conditions.

It’s basically compulsory purchase, which we’ve had in the UK for centuries.

But Trump, from somewhere, has got the idea that the South African government is doing “terrible things” and confiscating land from “certain classes.”

To be clear, no land has been confiscated.

But groups representing parts of the white minority, who say it will target them and their land even though race is not mentioned in the law.

The law is tied to the legacy of the racist apartheid system, and colonialism before that, and is part of South Africa’s efforts over decades to try and find a way to right historic wrongs.

Under apartheid, Black people had land taken away from them and were forced to live in designated areas for non-whites. Now, whites make up around 7% of South Africa’s population of 62 million but own approximately 70% of the private farming land, and the government says that inequality needs to be addressed.

Afrikaners are a group of white South Africans descended mainly from Dutch settlers who arrived around 370 years ago. They speak Afrikaans, one of South Africa’s 11 official languages, and make up many of South Africa’s rural farming communities.

Afrikaners were at the heart of the apartheid regime, and tensions between some Afrikaner groups and Black political parties have lingered after apartheid, although South Africa has largely been successful in reconciling its many racial groups and most Afrikaners consider themselves part of the new South Africa.

So…why is he doing this?

Well, Elon Musk was born and raised in South Africa but left after high school in the late 1980s, when South Africa was still under the apartheid regime.

We don’t know for sure he’s nobbling the President about it.

But he has for years criticised the current leadership in his homeland, accusing them of anti-white policies and ignoring or even encouraging a “genocide” with regards to the killings of some white farmers. Those killings are at the center of claims by conservative commentators — and now amplified by Trump and Musk — that South Africa is allowing attacks on white farmers as a means to remove them.

The South African government has condemned the killings and says they are part of the country’s desperately high violent crime rates across the board. Experts say there is no evidence of genocide and the killings make up a very small percentage of homicides. For example, a group that records farm attacks says 49 farmers or their families were killed in 2023, while there were more than 27,000 homicides in the country that year.

Musk also accused South Africa this week of having “racist ownership laws,” an apparent reference to his failure to get a license in the country for his Starlink satellite internet service because it doesn’t meet affirmative action criteria.