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Real Horror Could Lurk Beneath Trump’s Social Security Zombies Lie
Elon Musk and Donald Trump may want to foster the belief that there are large numbers of dead people getting Social Security benefit so that they can justify a purge of the rolls.
Feb 22, 2025
Good followers of U.S. President Donald Trump have to believe an increasingly large collection of ridiculous lies. First and foremost, they have to believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Then they have the corollary, that January 6 was an inside job pulled off for some reason by the FBI. Of course, they have to believe global warming isn’t happening and apparently now that that Ukraine started its war with Russia.
However, this week Elon Musk and Donald Trump added another big lie to the list: There are tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security. As with all Trump lies it is hard to know what the guy really believes and what is being thrown out to advance a larger goal, but this lie definitely ranks alongside the others for both its craziness and potential importance.
It seems the origins of the Social Security zombie story is Elon Musk’s misunderstanding of a Social Security file on the ages of people getting Social Security. He immediately began tweeting to his hundreds of millions of followers that tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security. This line was quickly picked up by various right-wing influencers as yet another example of government incompetence and corruption.
It might have been helpful to Elon Musk’s “super-high IQ” DOGE boys if they had taken a few minutes to review some of these audits to understand how Social Security works and the problems it faces.
Then Donald Trump made the claim about millions of dead people getting Social Security himself. And under MAGA rules, once the “king” makes a pronouncement, everyone has to say it’s true no matter how utterly absurd it might be. This means all good Republicans have to insist that tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security, or at least millions.
This claim is absurd on its face. Social Security actually keeps very good track of who is getting benefits, as numerous audits over the years have found. Yes, Social Security is in fact regularly audited by its inspector general and also the Government Accountability Office. It might have been helpful to Elon Musk’s “super-high IQ” DOGE boys if they had taken a few minutes to review some of these audits to understand how Social Security works and the problems it faces.
And the system does have problems, most of which are widely known to those familiar with the program. The two most obvious ones are the country’s method of tracking deaths and the age of the Social Security computer system.
The first problem is that there is no national death registry. We could compile this nationally, but this has been a big states’ rights issue, with many people, mostly Republicans, complaining that a national system of registering deaths would be a dangerous step toward totalitarianism. Therefore, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has to rely on getting data on deaths from states.
The other problem is that SSA is relying on an antiquated computer system that is using a computer language from the sixties. Musk and the DOGE boys may well want to ridicule SSA for using a computer system that is 50 or even 60 years old, but an analysis of the problem would again require looking in the mirror.
It would cost billions of dollars to put in place a new system, while maintaining the operation of the current system and ensuring that the privacy of workers’ earnings and benefit records are not compromised. Cost-conscious Republicans in Congress, along with many Democrats, have not wanted to fork over the money. If Elon Musk and the DOGE boys can arrange for the funding for modernizing the system, they would be widely applauded by supporters of Social Security, but that doesn’t seem the direction they are taking.
In fact, SSA has been pretty ingenuous in working around these obstacles to ensure that the overwhelming majority of its payments are accurate. And when overpayments are made, such as when benefits go to a dead person for a couple of months after death, they often are able to get the money back.
Mr. Arithmetic Exposes the Lie
Anyhow, when it comes to the claim that the zombie hordes are getting Social Security, a quick visit with Mr. Arithmetic should put this nonsense to rest. Social Security gives us very good data (it’s even available to Elon Musk and the DOGE boys) on payments to beneficiaries by age.
We can add this up and calculate the total amount of payments that SSA can identify. That came to $1,227 billion at the end of 2024. We can also go to the Social Security Trustees Report and find out the total amount the program paid out in retiree benefits last year. Interestingly, that also came out to $1,227 billion. So where is the money that is going to the millions of Musk-Trump Social Security beneficiary zombies?
Okay, but maybe these are fake numbers that the geniuses at SSA have put together to trick real tax-paying Americans. But which numbers would be fake?
It could be paranoid to imagine that Trump will take away the Social Security benefits that people worked for over many decades, but those who think the worst about Donald Trump are rarely wrong.
We know the total amount Social Security pays out in benefits each year. There are dozens of records kept on this that are regularly published. Even Elon Musk and the “super-high IQ” DOGE boys can find this out.
Furthermore, if we want to venture into the Twilight Zone and imagine that there are actually hundreds of billions of dollars secretly being paid out to the Musk-Trump zombies every year, we wouldn’t have to worry about this money contributing to the deficit. If the zombie payments are never recorded anywhere, they can’t be a factor in the official deficit that we all know and love.
Maybe the SSA tricksters did it on the other side. They are hugely exaggerating what we are paying as benefits to real working people. All those numbers on people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s are hugely inflated so that they have extra money to pay to the Musk-Trump zombies.
While that would be a very clever trick by the SSA fraudsters, it would also be pretty hard to pull off. We do have very good data on births. We know how many people were born in 1940, 1950, 1960, and every other year. We also know roughly how many of these people are dying. Anyone interested could examine whether, for example, the number of 90-year-olds SSA says are getting benefits makes sense.
The same applies on the benefit side. Social Security has a very well-defined benefit formula, which is readily available to anyone who wants to look. We have good data from a wide variety of sources on the wages people earned during their working years, so we can know roughly what they should be getting in Social Security benefits. We also have data from both public and private sources on what Social Security beneficiaries are actually getting from the program.
If the SSA bureaucrats are able to find ways to exaggerate their proper payments to living people, to hide hundreds of billions of dollars being paid out to dead people each year, they are way more clever than anyone gives them credit for. I’m not sure that fits the story that Elon Musk and the DOGE boys want to tell.
Is There Method to the Madness?
It is always dangerous to try to get into the head of someone who is not making any sense, but it is worth asking if there can be any purpose served by Musk-Trump spewing nonsense about tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security benefits. This could just be another absurd Trump power play where he forces his MAGA followers to accept an absurd lie just to show he can. He did this when he released a huge volume of water in California, ostensibly to help contain the Los Angeles fires, even though the areas getting the water were nowhere near LA.
There is another more pernicious possibility. Musk-Trump may want to foster the belief that there are large numbers of dead people getting Social Security benefit so that they can justify a purge of the rolls. The purge will not be directed at the dead people who are not there, but at their political opponents. This is obviously completely illegal, but if Trump gets decide the law, as he insists, it’s all fine.
It could be paranoid to imagine that Trump will take away the Social Security benefits that people worked for over many decades, but those who think the worst about Donald Trump are rarely wrong. I guess we will eventually find out his intentions with this idiocy. We have to hope that it’s just Trump’s dementia.
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40K+ People Urge Trump-Led GOP to Stop Attacking Disaster Relief
"Politicizing disaster response efforts for political points at the expense of real people who are suffering after natural disasters is unacceptable."
Jan 27, 2025
Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition calling on U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to stop attacking disaster relief, including by trying to attach politicized conditions to California wildfire aid, spreading lies about the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and threatening to shut down the vital government body.
As of Monday afternoon, more than 41,300 people had signed the petition, which was launched by the progressive political action committee MoveOn earlier this month in the wake of Trump's mounting attacks on FEMA.
"Instead of working to support those trying to survive and rebuild, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are exploiting this climate disaster to spread disinformation and sow chaos for political points."
"The tragic wildfires raging across Southern California have killed dozens of people and displaced tens of thousands from their homes," the petition states. "But instead of working to support those trying to survive and rebuild, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are exploiting this climate disaster to spread disinformation and sow chaos for political points."
Trump has threatened to withhold wildfire aid if California does not enact voter identification legislation and reform its forest and water management policies. He also said last week that "FEMA's turned out to be a disaster," and that "we're gonna recommend that FEMA go away."
"And this isn't the first time," the MoveOn petition notes. "Right-wing disinformation and attacks against disaster workers prevented people from getting the urgent help they needed in the wake of devastating natural disasters like Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Conservative-fueled conspiracies have even resulted in meteorologists receiving death threats for reporting on the weather and explaining climate science."
"Accessible and accurate information, including weather forecasts and disaster relief, can be lifesaving for those impacted," the petition stresses. "Instead of focusing on helping our communities recover from these latest natural disasters, Republicans disseminated harmful disinformation about FEMA's response and relief efforts, discouraging people from getting the help they urgently need. And they're doing it again."
MoveOn cited recent examples including Trump falsely accusing FEMA of stealing donations and diverting disaster aid to migrants, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-Ga.) unfounded allegation that Democrats are controlling the weather. Critics say such baseless claims endanger FEMA personnel and make their work harder, if not impossible.
"Threats of truckloads of militia members 'hunting FEMA' forced FEMA and U.S. Forest Service workers to pause their lifesaving recovery efforts to relocate workers out of fear for their safety," MoveOn said of agency work in North Carolina. "Survivors of natural disasters who urgently need assistance are refusing FEMA's help because of this disinformation."
"Conservative-led disinformation campaigns against our disaster relief workers and meteorologists are threatening public safety and undermining public trust in our lifesaving institutions," the petition argues. "In times of crisis, our elected officials should be working to deliver aid and recovery—not spreading conspiracy theories on social media. Politicizing disaster response efforts for political points at the expense of real people who are suffering after natural disasters is unacceptable."
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Wake Up Media! Here's a Bullshit Detector for Trump 2.0
The great fascist fabulist is returning. The Fourth Estate, battered and bruised as it is, must stand guard and be prepared to fight back on behalf of the people.
Jan 19, 2025
“Facts don’t cease to exist because they are denied.” —Aldous Huxley
Despite all his lies, crimes, impeachments, bad polls as well as a scandal-free opponent and a strong economy, Donald Trump defeated his opponent by, among other reasons, exploiting polemical sleights-of-hand. Witnessing the legacy corporate media cling to its “both-sides” template in the face of his rhetorical war was akin to watching a video-game battle between muskets and drones.
Like Trump, cold-blooded thinkers from Catherine the Great to Machiavelli have understood how in political life the “first lie” usually wins and there’s a “liars dividend” since normal people tend to believe what they’re told by authorities, especially when it’s consistent with their “confirmation bias.” (Supporters of Mussolini's fascism had a phrase that simplified matters: “Il Duce is always right.”)
In this context, disinformation and gaslighting spread like hot embers to dry forests in 80 mph winds. Sadly, it appears to only be getting worse: next day fact-checking and letters-to-the-editor are certainly desirable but no match for invisible algorithms, A.I. content, corporate-owned media, and reactionary tech bros who can reach a billion people in an instant. Has there ever been a faster-rising or more influential press lord than Elon Musk?
Biden's farewell warning against a growing "oligarchy" of political/economic/technological power will likely endure as a benchmark to measure Trump's yearning to be a "Dictator on Day One" (as if he'd stop 24 hours later).
In this hinge of history, can the media build a new template to hold the new billionaire bullies accountable or will it merely be deja vu in Trump 2.0?
Admittedly, there’s little expectation that the emerging Trump-Musk duet and their fellow oligarchs will alter their impulse to replace facts with fiction as a way to advance their financial ends and ideological aims. As the Number One's in the world in their respective categories, the tandem of these two strongmen understandably believe that might-makes-right for them. Similarly, it’s nearly psychologically impossible to sway hard-core MAGAs who merge their identities with those two, those who would insist that D.E I. caused the Los Angeles fires of recent weeks and that reverse racism (whatever that is) is worse than the abhorrent racism they've espoused.
Still, after the two national candidates in 2024 were separated by only 1.5% of the popular vote (a “massive landslide” it was not), there are small but potentially decisive percentages of swing voters—traditional Republicans, anti-Trump independents, and non-voting Democrats and progressives—who can make tip the scales in 2026 and 2028 between an America in the grip of a new class of billionaire bullies and one that reverts to a nation governed by and for the people.
The first step is for traditional executives, editors, journalists—as well as fretful Democrats in 26 purple congressional districts—to be armed with blunt language that was largely sidelined in the 2024 general election yet could disrupt Team Trump's propaganda and put him on the political ropes. After writing three books on Trump, what follows are eight types of his “twistications” (Jefferson’s word) and how participants in this struggling democracy can decode them as we enter the next Trumplandia of media and politics.
1. Assertions & Adjectives. Just recycling battle-tested assertions and adjectives no matter how ridiculous sure beats researching the facts. His most popular lines— “The Biden Crime Family…it was a perfect phone call…’tariff’ is the most beautiful word…January 6th was a day of love” —can only work if your target audience is as credulous as the jurors in the cult classic Idiocracy.
Which Trump understands. He simply told a confidant after his political escape from the Access Hollywood tape, “You just tell them and they believe it. They just do.” And when former aide Anthony Scaramucci asked why he lied so much at a rally, he replied, “Look, a billion people now know me and half hate my guts. But the other half are a great market for my brands, properties, product, campaigns.”
Two extremely effective examples of assertions passing as evidence are “Fake Media” and “Liberal.” They have become enormously powerful epithets for those who lack the time, ability, or motive to think independently.
Whenever reports show that the GOP is doing something scandalous, Trump just utters the near-magical words “Fake Media” to erase any controversy. Trump once admitted to Leslie Stahl that he "constantly berates Fake News to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
As for “Liberal” (aka, CRT, DEI, Deep State, Woke), it too can paralyze the cognitive abilities of MAGA audiences. Decades later, journalists—and defensive Democrats too—should no longer turn the other cheek when hearing this polemical kill shot. “So which of these ‘liberal’ policies would you reverse—Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, the Freedom of information Act, environmental protection laws, labor laws, health safety rules and agencies—all were passed by liberals and opposed by conservatives?” It’s past time to re-focus such conversations away from abstractions like "Big Government" to specifics like "whether government should make sure that your children don’t burn to death in a low-speed rear-end collision."
2. Playing on Fears. Trump told Bob Woodward, “Real power is—I don’t really want to use the word—fear.” Comedian Larry Elmore put it best when he joked, or appeared to joke, that “Trump is our FDR since the only thing he has is fear itself.”
This goes well beyond the normal political anxiety of, say, losing an election or a job. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows presumably now regrets going along with his boss’s orders on January 6 because “I was afraid of being yelled at.” Trump now routinely deploys fear of actual violence to get his way.
For example, when rebutting rival Hillary Clinton in 2016, he said that some of his supporters might have to use “their Second Amendment rights.” After he blamed the FBI for investigating him with a lawful warrant, one enthusiast shot up a Bureau office and was killed. And when irked in court, he personally assailed judges, their families and clerks who then invariably were subjected to scores of death threats. Hence the gag-orders imposed on Trump as if he were a vengeful mob boss.
Sen. Mitt Romney admitted as much when some fellow Republicans privately acknowledged that they voted to acquit Trump during two impeachment trials because they were afraid for themselves and their families.
3. Big Lies. What percent of sentient adults don’t think that he relentlessly lies? That even includes many followers who shrug and say, “Well, they all do it.”
But no one in American history has remotely lied so voluminously or bigly as Donald J. Trump. The Washington Post famously documented over 30,000 lies or falsehoods in only his first term, including 22 per day in his final year.
Then there are the Big Lies on the Goebbels’ scale, like repeatedly implying that Obama was a foreigner, Trump won the 2020 election because of invisible voter fraud, and Biden’s DOJ was behind multiple indictments in several jurisdictions around the country. Up to now, such falsehoods merely resulted in news stories burying the mild admonition that articles that “lacking evidence, Trump today claimed that…” Something more riveting will be needed this time around.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ” – George Orwell
4. False equivalence – WhatAbout-ism. Trump can turn any criticism into an attack-line if he can find some Democratic example in the past say hundred years. So when he rejected the outcome of the 2020 election and 139 House Members refused to certify the results, Trumpers indignantly replied, “neither did Hillary Clinton…and Democrats also refused certification.” Except that Clinton did concede the day after her loss. And while a few Democrats did question the results and begged questions of possible misconduct, they had no expectation of actually blocking certification.
The difference between these two examples could not be more stark.
5. Cherry-picking. When data is overwhelmingly against Trump—say the polar ice caps are melting faster than predicted and 97 percent of scientists agree that current trends could lead to ecocide—not a problem. Trump calls it a “hoax” or finds one study alleging that 300,000 years ago the climate was just as hot. That is, isolate one black swan to imply all are black.
Or if too many swastikas appear on signs at a rally where white protestors chant “Jews will not replace us,” Sean Hannity can announce that “Democrat Bob Byrd was a Klansman.” Which was true…100 years ago when he was in his twenties and before he recanted to become a renowned senator. Indeed, one party now contains not all but most American white supremacists and it’s not the Democratic Party.
6. Anti-Science. Because the U.S.S.R. believed in the perfect “Soviet Man,” Stalin embraced biologist Lysenko’s ridiculous view that learned traits can be inherited. And the Kremlin delayed responding to the lethal Chernobyl meltdown because they thought it couldn’t happen.
A president of course needn’t be a scientist—indeed we’ve never elected one. But they should ideally be open-minded and resilient when national emergencies strike. That means according to the scientific method when facts lead to conclusions rather than conclusions leading to “facts.”
With each recent year being “the hottest ever,” Team Trump’s political hostility to rapid climate change is like denying the comet in Don’t Look Up, as the calamitous Los Angels fires demonstrated. Vaccine denialism too was once a fringe view. But MAGAs resistance to vaccines during Covid-19 caused many needless deaths, with more likely to come if RFK Jr. is confirmed as HHS Secretary.
7. Projections. Trump’s greatest homage to Goebbels was embracing his own rhetorical maneuver to “accuse the other side of that which you are guilty of.” Like when Trump accused Robert Mueller of ”treason” and Democrats of ”election interference” when they brought indictments against Trump for “election interference.” And after Biden last year laid out a bill of particulars on how Trump was a dire threat to democracy, the latter claimed that “Joe’s abuses of power will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt and depraved chapters in all of American history.”
The goal here is not to actually win a policy debate but to get inattentive voters to throw up their hands.
8. Rhetorical Questions. Few politicians under fire can resist the age-old device of planting a false premise in the form of a rhetorical question in order to mislead audiences to a wrong conclusion.
So candidate Trump urged Black voters to support him in 2016 because “what could go wrong?” Or Tucker Carlson wondered “why should I not side with Putin” during his genocidal invasion of Ukraine? Donald Jr. asked after January 6th: “Do we really want to pretend it’s not a false flag?” Vivek Ramaswamy questioned whether “there were any federal agents on those planes on 9/11…I’m not saying there were but it’s a fair question.”
No it’s not.
Historically, bi-partisan debates saw exaggerations but rarely blatant falsehoods…until Reagan’s “Reign of Error” came along in 1981 (that being the title of a book on the subject by this author.)
Today, however, we’re in a different dimension as Trump normalizes disinformation and falsehoods. Like the difference between comfortably warm and life-threatening boiling water, it’s a difference not merely in degree but kind. A functioning Democracy can survive a leader and party that occasionally deploys hyperbole, tells “stretchers” (Twain), or even lies. (Ike certainly lied over the U-2 incident, which was an exception then justified by the stakes.)
But since legislation often requires compromises between two major parties, a democracy cannot survive when one side believes that it can get away with creating a fabulous alternate universe that infected some recent confirmation hearings chaired by Senate Republicans.
The American media understands this when it applies to, say, an authoritarian like Putin but has, with exceptions, refused to assume the same about Trump despite all the supporting evidence. Yet in the insight of Yale language professor David Bromwich, “the presentation of factual truth matters because we have no substitute world to live in when this world is gone.”
How can the Fourth Estate adjust to another post-truth era—one even more vicious and sophisticated that the first? Will they even attempt a new playbook? Already, MSNBC is strengthening its prime-time lineup for Trump Redux. The Washington Post, meanwhile, seems ready to embrace anticipatory genuflection due to the business conflicts of owner Jeff Bezos. At "The "Paper of Record," New York Times publisher and executive editor, A.G. Sultzburger and Joseph Kahn, have given no indication of changing their model of merely being a conveyor belt of Trumpian disinformation in the face of the most radical revanchists in American history.
For now, independent news outlets, podcasts, and writers at some platforms are objecting to giving a standard “benefit of the doubt” to government officials who don’t deserve it. And new models of non-profit news and tax-supported platforms—we subsidize farmers because making food is urgent even if not always profitable—so why not 'food for thought' as we enter this unprecedented four year stress test?
Are our major civic institutions ready to acquiesce to Trump and his band of oligarchs who blithely claim that disinformation is "mere speech," that 1,400 people convicted of a violent riot on January 6 are now "hostages" and that the catastrophic L.A. fires were the result of D.E.I. and Mayor Karen Bass' trip to Ghana?
January 20th is a good time for our major media to understand how a fascist oligarchy—of the kind we now see in Russia and Hungary, and in Italy and Germany in the early Thirties—could allow neoliberal capitalism to purchase democracy to write the next (if not the last) chapter of our nearly 250-year experiment in majority rule.
Surely smart publishers have learned lessons from their failure to hold Trump accountable in the nine years since he came down that elevator, and understand the insane irony that a small country born in reaction to a powerful monarchy would voluntarily accept a home-grown version 248 years later.
Who will emerge as the Keynes of journalism to explain that, when it comes to truth, might can’t make right?
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