Such was the travesty of a news conference held yesterday, February 11, 2025, by United States President Donald Trump and his supervisor, billionaire Elon Musk, who heads a semi-mythical government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which supposedly uncovers fraud and waste. As his young son clung to him, entertaining the TV audience while distracting everyone from the issues, as only an adorable child can, Musk slithered around the issues.
The central theme behind DOGE’s fallacies is equivocation about words like “fraud” and “abuse”. Or the phrase, beloved by politicians, “fraud and waste.” Fraud and waste are, although both bad, not the same. The public most often thinks that fraud is an illegal act in which money or services are obtained by trickery. However, if we bunch “fraud and waste” together, we can use the word “fraud” (or even “treason”) to describe any expenditure of which we disapprove. Note that it is often hard to prove fraud in the usual sense, but it is easy to prove that someone is spending money in a way we disagree with. Nevertheless, “fraud” sounds terrible – indeed, illegal – whereas “I don’t like the way we are spending money” might be more accurate, but fails to create the same blood-curdling chills. Fraud sounds terrible, while misplaced priorities come down to value judgments.
Anyway, citing fraud and abuse, Trump introduced Musk’s presentation:
“And we’re going to be signing a very important deal today. It’s DOGE and I'm going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it and some of the things that we’ve found which are shocking, billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. And I think it’s very important.” [italics added]Now, later in the news conference, one reporter, having discovered that DOGE had made a factual error about condom purchases, asked this reasonable question:
“Mr. Musk, you said on X that an example of the fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to Gaza, but after fact check[ing] this, apparently Gaza and Mozambique and the program was to protect them against HIV. So, can you correct the statements? It wasn't sent to Hamas, actually. It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms [were] sent there. And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say?”That is, the reporter caught DOGE making a careless error, and gently asked Musk whether DOGE’s findings are trustworthy (which they obviously are not). Musk responded:
“Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So, nobody's going to bat a thousand. I mean, we will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”After tentatively and quite vaguely admitting that he made a reckless mistake, Musk immediately squirmed and shifted his argument to a question of policy values:
“I'm not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly. I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about. And that is really an enormous number of condoms, if you think about it. But if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, I'm like, ‘Okay, that's not as bad. But still, why are we doing that?’”Let us simply unpack that exchange. First, Musk did not specifically admit that he had made a silly mistake. From the standpoint of dialectical honesty, he should have said something like, “Well, it sounds as if I made an error, and I guess I should have been more careful about that.” He didn’t. Instead, he fidgeted.
Second, Musk continued to promote his case even though his premise turned out to be factually false. Now, the condoms had not gone to Hamas, which United States considers to be a terrorist organization. Instead, they went to the more peaceable nation of Mozambique. Furthermore, the purpose of the condom shipment was to reduce the spread of a deadly disease – not to support vicious terrorists. With the wind totally taken out of his argument, Musk stated: “I'm not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere.” He could have admitted that he was wrong but that he wanted to give a different argument against the condoms. However, he did not. Instead, Musk admitted that “That’s not as bad,” but nevertheless persisted. He plowed right past his mistake.
The aura of government mismanagement, the implication that the condom shipment was tantamount to treason, had been utterly refuted. Did Musk back off? No.
I think that many American voters would label a program that supplies sexual aids to a terrorist organization as fraud and abuse. I suspect that many Americans would consider it a good thing to reduce the spread of HIV. Shifting and squirming, wriggling and writhing, DOGE had created the impression that a basically healthy program was tantamount to fraud, or gross mismanagement, or something like that. The reality of humanitarian aid was besmirched by the false aura of fraud, sullied by a careless but momentous factual mistake. Most critically, Musk totally ignored the reporter’s punchline: “And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say?” That was the real question. If DOGE’s wild accusations turn out to be factually false, or even fabricated, why should the public give the slightest credence to anything that DOGE or Musk has to say? Musk never answered! Instead, slippery as a California rattlesnake, he slithered away from that real issue.
And that, dear readers, is the black magic of ambiguity. Equivocation. Shifting and squirming. Refusing to debate openly. Politicians practice those evil tactics all the time. Nasty Democrats have done it, but this time it was a contemptible Republican. And it is my job, as a specialist in argumentation and debate, to call out this kind of sneaky argument whenever I see it.
Oh, what a better world we would have, what a happier nation, if politicians would debate honestly!
by William D. Harpine
Earlier Posts:
Elon Musk's 2016 Mars Speech: A Speech and a Vision
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P.S.: Thanks to rev.com, a commercial transcription service, for providing a prompt verbatim copy of the press conference.
Copyright @ 2025 by William D. Harpine
Image from DOGE.gov's rapidly changing website
