In the last two months, Elon Musk has inserted himself into a range of government functions on the grounds that he and his team, the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), have an urgent mandate to root out “government waste.” In the early rollout, Musk’s team claimed to see fraud everywhere: he reported that FEMA was sending migrants to “luxury hotels” and reposted a claim that USAID is “basically a form of money laundering.” And in a recent interview with the Fox Business Network, he announced, “The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — most of the federal spending is entitlements — that’s the big one to eliminate.” Entitlement spending includes Medicaid, Medicare, and, of course, Social Security.
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Musk has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” a direct accusation that support for the benefit is for chumps. He seems to be laying the groundwork for a full-scale assault on the most popular redistributive program in America with a line of thinking that society is, well, for suckers. Sharing, cooperating, promise-keeping, and helping—that kind of earnestness is for losers, not leaders.
Musk purports to believe that many federal functions, especially within agencies like the EPA, the Department of Education, and even the FBI, harbor freeloaders at every turn. In February, he demanded that federal employees email DOGE with an accounting of what they had accomplished in the previous week, posting on X, “The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all! In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud.” He has made the same claim about deceased Social Security beneficiaries, apparently based on a misunderstanding of the underlying coding, according to reporting by WIRED.
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On the one hand, many of the boldest claims appear so easily refutable that the whole campaign may be destined to implode. But I have been thinking about and studying the social science of feeling scammed for almost two decades, and I know that the emotional efficacy of sucker rhetoric distorts our moral and political reasoning. Even when the accusations are unfounded, even when the risks are small, the mere possibility of being a sucker can be psychologically potent enough to undermine a rational preference for cooperation.
It is all too easy to convince people that compassion and integrity are illusory—that, as historian Anne Applebaum wrote in 2018, in Trump’s America “morality is for losers.” Understanding the rhetorical power of warning Americans that they are being played for suckers, at a personal and visceral level, was part of the winning strategy of the 2016 Trump candidacy. He held himself out as the voice of reason who could see humane asylum policies and international cooperation for what they really were: traps for the unwary. Now the appeal of that rhetoric is being put to a new test.
Psychologically, the fear of being a sucker is a distinctly aversive feeling. Most people are so acutely attuned to the threat of feeling duped that even minor scam risks can contaminate their decision-making, both in terms of everyday financial and social decision-making, and also at the level of their core values and deeper goals. Trust is risky, and there is ample evidence from social science that the risk of being conned sparks a special risk aversion. People will go way out of their way to avoid even the suggestion that they are about to play the fool. In a famous study from 2011, research participants shown a promising startup company were willing to gamble a lot when the 5% downside risk was due to overestimating market demand, but willing to invest much less if that same 5% downside risk was the small chance that the founders were “fraudsters.” Same risk, different psychological resonance, and perhaps why Trump and Musk’s deployment of that sort of language is so effective. Most of us recoil, or retaliate, at the first suggestion that we might be taken advantage of; as threats go, the warning that you’re a sucker works.
Since he came into office last month, Trump has gone after a range of vulnerable targets. Whatever you think about the rightness or competence of the underlying missions, the human harm has been real and widespread. Patients have been turned away from lifesaving medical intervention abroad; American government and university workers are losing their jobs; visas are being revoked. Real people, with lives and obligations, are suffering.
We might think, or hope, that Musk and Trump are overplaying their hands. Billionaires targeting workers, refugees, and SSI recipients—the optics ought to be terrible. But the relentless search for scammers coming from marginalized groups has a reliable psychological appeal. One of the core insights of Trump’s populism is that he seems to see how the sucker rhetoric is tied to status anxiety. There is an extra humiliation, and thus an extra threat, to being suckered by someone you think should be below you on the social ladder, behind you in the line for promotion or priority seating. (“If they can put one over on me, what does that make me?” the thinking goes.) Trump’s obsessive policing of who’s the sucker has given him political clout with a populace trained to be vigilant to the prospect of being scammed—even by the least plausible fraudsters. In the meantime, scammy behavior by rich men is routinely coded as “savvy” instead of grotesque. So it invites the question: who’s conning who right now?
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The line between the helper and the pawn is easily manipulated. All it takes is some vague warnings about government waste and suddenly paying your taxes means you’re a dupe; after a few headlines about 150-year-olds on Social Security, a modest retirement benefit looks like a reward for cheating the system.
But that whole framework is wrong. It is tempting to respond to Musk’s numbers with direct refutation (no, DOGE has not saved taxpayers 115 billion dollars), but it’s better to refuse the premise altogether. We can support government efficiency and nonetheless insist that it is destructive to approach our most important cooperative ventures with rank suspicion. Living in a society requires trust, and with that trust comes some vulnerability. Alleviating human suffering is the right goal for a government to have. And Social Security, a self-funded program that keeps millions of American retirees out of poverty every year, achieves widespread good with remarkable efficiency.
The fear of playing the sucker is often weaponized for political ends, but it can only cover so much real harm, and right now, real harm abounds. One laid-off IRS worker—a Trump supporter himself—described the juxtaposition to NBC10, the sucker’s stakes versus the human stakes. “You know, when he talks about government waste and all that, yes, I’m behind it. I believe there is a lot of stuff in the government that needs fixing.” So far, though, all he sees is a billionaire “coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason.”