American Prigozhin (English version)

There is one difference between Musk and Prigozhin: Putin got rid of his minion after the task was completed. Trump, because he abandoned it altogether.

(Photo composition: Fragen zur Zeit; Elon Musk: Prime Minister's Office (GODL-India), GODL-India <https://data.gov.in/sites/default/files/Gazette_Notification_OGDL.pdf>, via Wikimedia Commons; Jewgeni Prigoschin: Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (passport)PLATEL (restoration), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Hintergrund: ADARSHluck, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

Elon Musk has reached the next station of his Prigozhin arc. He has apologized to Trump. The contradiction remains unresolved. How it will end is uncertain.

There are more similarities between Elon Musk and Yevgeny Prigozhin than just the fact that both, at some point, turned against their masters with loud accusations of malice and incompetence. Indeed, the parallels, despite all superficial differences, are striking. Both were brought in as outsiders by a chief of state during a crisis of government institutions. Only the scale with Musk is vastly larger. What Wagner did for the Russian army, DOGE was supposed to do for the entire American government: accomplish a task that government institutions, due to their internal structure, were incapable of handling. However, while the regular Russian army soon adapted to the demands of the Ukrainian battlefield, there is not the slightest indication that the Washington swamp is making even the smallest effort to get its spending problem under control.

Thus, there is a significant difference between Musk and Prigozhin. Both Putin and Trump got rid of their man at the behest of the apparatus to avoid making enemies of the officials in state institutions for the sake of a favorite. But Putin cut Prigozhin loose after he had accomplished his given task. Trump, because he abandoned the goal of somehow curbing the rampant national debt. Trump is lucky that, just now in Los Angeles, some illegal immigrants threatened with deportation—along with, above all, left-wing professional protesters—are causing a ruckus. This allows him to distract from the fact that the second Trump administration has just thrown in the towel on one of its two most important goals. On the immigration issue, despite all the tough talk, they’ve also hit a dead end. Trump is arguing with provincial judges over the deportation of illegals. White Americans will inevitably become a minority under Donald Trump’s course. Behind this looms the big question:

Whoever comes to power must govern. But how? In the rift between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the threads of two crises intertwine into a Gordian knot of impossibilities. On one hand, mass immigration. Its core lies in the fact that immigrants acquire personal rights to stay, and under conditions of political normality, it is always far more difficult to get them out of the country than it is for the migration lobby to bring new immigrants in¹. The other great crisis, addressed here, is public finances. The problem, as Musk noted on his way out and as anyone has known for decades, is only secondarily the nominal national debt, which in the U.S. currently stands at $36.2 trillion, but rather the obligations from pensions, healthcare, and social security. According to a calculation by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters from the University of Pennsylvania, this implicit national debt amounts to a staggering $65.7 trillion². Combined with the $36.2 trillion in explicit national debt, we arrive at $101.9 trillion³. Musk was supposed to save $2 trillion per year through DOGE. That’s the scale that would be necessary. DOGE has so far achieved $180 billion. Not only is that far too little, but it’s also being more than offset by spending elsewhere. In fact, new borrowing under Trump in 2025, as of April 2025, is $1,051 billion, about 22 percent higher than under Biden in the same month the previous year⁴.

Implicit national debt, by the way, has a peculiarity compared to explicit national debt: since many of these benefit obligations are tied to inflation in one way or another, implicit national debt can only be inflated away to a limited extent. All claims to certain material benefits, like medical care or nursing, are based on the price of those services anyway, without needing to calculate any inflation rates. While inflation doesn’t improve anyone’s standard of living except for a few profiteers and parasites, it has a crucial advantage for politicians: it just happens. No one has to stand up and make the decision to take something away from someone. This also means: more than any other type of debt, implicit debt endangers political stability. Not all debts are equal. Inflation, as long as it’s not galloping inflation, has the political advantage of avoiding a clear conflict point that could destabilize the system. If, instead, it becomes necessary to publicly negotiate at a specific point in time who will lose what, that’s the occasion for revolutions.

With a shrinking demography, government cannot pay what it has promised. Even less can it deliver the actual goods services expected. $36.2 trillion, or $65.7 trillion, or $101.9 trillion are numbers that no one can truly comprehend. Gokhale and Smetters have kindly converted this into the additional net tax burden over the lifetime of an average 20-year-old American. The net tax burden is the tax burden minus the benefits received from the state. On average, for a 20-year-old American today, this amounts to $132,000. That’s how much they’ll have to pay over their lifetime. If you include the implicit national debt and assume it will be financed solely through higher taxes, this net tax burden for today’s 20-year-old would have to rise to $426,000! That’s an increase of 223%!