TRUST: Can you believe the things you're told...

TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2025

...by billionaire volunteers? Johnny Carson was one of the first to raise one form of the question. He did so at the start of his career:

Who Do You Trust?

Who Do You Trust? [was] an American television game show.

Under the title Do You Trust Your Wife?, the show premiered in prime time on CBS in January 1956 and was hosted by Edgar Bergen. The show lasted in this form until March 1957. In September of that year, the show was revamped as a daytime program, and Johnny Carson was installed as host. 

This version aired from September 30, 1957, to November 15, 1957, at 4:30 pm Eastern on ABC, and from November 18, 1957, to December 27, 1963 at 3:30 pm Eastern. The title was changed to Who Do You Trust? on July 14, 1958.

We were only nine years old when Carson took over, but we could already see he was funny. 

Decades earlier, Robert Frost had raised the basic issue in a somewhat obscure poem, a poem said to be about the world's treatment of his mother.  As we've noted before, the question of trust was raised here:

The Lovely Shall Be Choosers

The Voice said, "Hurl her down!"

The Voices, "How far down?"

"Seven levels of the world."

"How much time have we?"

Take twenty years...

[...]

Then send some one with eyes to see
And wonder at her where she is,
And words to wonder in her hearing how she came there,
But without time to linger for her story.
Be her last joy her heart's going out to this one
So that she almost speaks.
You know them—seven in all."

"Trust us," the Voices said.

She'd been hurled down seven levels of the world, On the brighter side, she hadn't been thrown into a strongman's gulag, never to be heard from again. 

At any rate, Send some one to wonder at her where she is? 

"Trust us," the Voices said, at the end of the poem. Today, people occasionally wonder where the recently disappeared from our own struggling nation might be.

Whatever that answer might be, this raises the question we'll explore all this week. In the present circumstance, whose statements and claims—whose representations and allegations—can an overwhelmed citizen trust?

Carson and Frost had different ideas with respect to such questions. Yesterday, we asked if we can trust the statements made by the volunteer who went on the Fox News Channel last Wednesday morning and made the statements correctly described in this online Fox News report:

DOGE volunteer credits Trump for unprecedented effort to curb 'jaw-dropping' Social Security fraud

[...]

Musk and [Antonio] Gracias revealed over the weekend during a get-out-the-vote rally in Wisconsin that millions of noncitizens received Social Security numbers during former President Joe Biden's tenure. The pair shared a chart showing a steady year-over-year increase, reaching more than 2 million in FY 2024, which ended on Sept. 30.

FY23 saw roughly 1 million noncitizens issued Social Security numbers, as did FY25, which began in October and will end in September of this year. 

"We found that there were just about five-plus million of them that came to the country as illegals, were given various forms of parole or allowing [in] the country, and they got through an automatic system, Social Security numbers, so they could get into our benefit systems," Gracias said. 

"And we tracked that through and found that they were on benefit programs," he noted. "And just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls, and we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted."

Gracias said that DOGE confirmed 1.3 million individuals who secured a fraudulent Social Security number received Medicare benefits, too. 

That's what the volunteer told Steve Doocy on last Wednesday's Fox & Friends. Given the current rules of the game, Doocy was suitably blown away by what the volunteer said.

As we noted yesterday, the volunteer was Antonio Gracias, a multibillionaire private equity investor and a close friend of Elon Musk. There's nothing automatically "wrong' with either of those states of being—but yesterday, we posed this question:

Can you trust the various things you're told by Gracias and Musk?

More specifically, we posed this question:

Can you trust the statements and suggestions launched by Gracias concerning the acquisition   of Social Security numbers by millions of non-citizens? Also, concerning the alleged discovery that 1.3 million such non-citizens—possibly by some such "illegals"—are siphoning oodles of money, in an inappropriate way, from one of this nation's major benefit systems?

Can you trust the things this volunteer says? We'll start with this minor observation:

Yes, that's what he said! As you can see by clicking here, this is what Gracias said to the suitably slack-jawed Doocy:

Antonio Gracias on Fox & Friends, 4/2/25:

DOOCY (4/2/25): So let me ask you this, Antonio. Have you figured out— You saw these millions of people, non-citizens, on the Social Security rolls. Did they get benefits?

GRACIAS: Yes, we actually tracked them into the benefits programs. We found them in all the benefits programs. And one statistic for you, we found 1.3 million of them on Medicare [sic].

DOOCY: Wow!

GRACIAS: Yeah.

Oops! As we noted yesterday, Gracias is new to the services being provided by DOGE. With respect to his current volunteer work, he hails from a substantially different "level of the world."

In his presentation to Doocy, Gracias claimed or said or alleged that he and "Elon," as Doocy called him, had found 1.3 million non-citizens "on Medicare."

In fact, the alleged program in question is actually Medicaid. That may have been the volunteer's inexperience showing through. Or it may have been a simple slip of the tongue.

People do make mistakes! That said, a cadre of billionaire volunteers are now exploring levels of the world which are quite new to them.  Can we trust the various things they say or perhaps suggest? 

Can we assume that their statements and insinuations are actually accurate? Can we assume that their statements, and their insinuations, aren't misleading or just plain false?

We ask this question for obvious reasons. Gracias has pledged his troth to Musk, but Musk is the rather peculiar person who launched the claim (and/or the insinuation) that as many as 20 million dead people—people over the age of 120!—are still being sent Social Security checks. 

(That suggestion is now being sanded down. But Musk is still out there making it.)

Also, Musk is the person who instantly said this to the suitably gobsmacked Bret Baier:

BAIER (3/28/25): For you, what's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?

MUSK: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing. Just—we routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more. Casually.

You know, for example, like the simple survey that was—literally, a ten-question survey. You could do it with SurveyMonkey—it would cost about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that.

BAIER: For just a survey!

MUSK: A billion dollars for a simple online survey, "Do you like the National Park?" 

As it turned out, that claim was almost surely bogus too. Not that any major Blue American news org bothers itself with such trivial matters at this point in time.

Can you trust the general thrust of what Gracias told Steve Doocy? If you watch the full interview, starting here, we would suggest the following:

Insinuations to the side, we'll suggest that Doocy seems to know that those "illegals" obtained those Social Security numbers in a thoroughly lawful manner. We'd also suggest that the term "illegals," or "illegal immigrants," gets thrown around in ways which are governed by very few semantic regularities.

For today, we ask you this:

Did Gracias and Elon actually discover that 1.3 million "non-citizens" are actually "on Medicaid?" (Not "on Medicare," as the volunteer mistakenly said.)

Correcting for the novice's irrelevant error, are that many non-citizens on Medicaid in some illegal way? As far as that goes, are that many non-citizens actually on Medicaid in any way at all? 

The volunteers keep making that claim, but are such statements accurate? We don't know how to answer such questions, nor will any major Blue org ever attempt to say. 

In fairness, the zone is currently being flooded on a daily basis. It would be hard for a news org to keep up with the flood of representations, even if a news org wanted to try. 

(We see no sign that any such news org does.)

Can you trust the various things these billionaire volunteers say? Given the fact that they're out of their element, can you assume that they aren't making simple mistakes? 

Also, given the fact that we're all human beings, can you assume that they aren't simply being less than obsessively honest?

Tomorrow, we'll continue to explore this question, turning to this remarkable guest essay by Professor Lepore in Sunday's New York Times. For today, we'll merely show you something we stumbled upon yesterday as we continued to google around.

In yesterday's report, we noted that Gracias had made some of these claims about "non-citizens" being "on Medicaid" on the All-In podcast. We showed the way the leading authority described that widely-viewed entity.

Later, we also came across this report in Mediaite. Sam Harris, a well-known figure, had dropped a bomb on Joe Rogan—but also on that other podcast:

Sam Harris Drops Brutal Takedown of Joe Rogan

Podcast host and political commentator Sam Harris dropped a scorched earth takedown of fellow podcasters Joe Rogan and Dave Smith on Sunday, accusing them of regularly flubbing facts, helping to fracture the U.S. politically, and recently platforming World War II revisionists.

“Joe is a genuinely good guy who wants good things for people, but he is honestly in over his head on so many topics of great consequence, right?” Harris began.

[...]

During his lengthy monologue, Harris also took swipes at Lex Fridman and the All-In podcast, which, along with Rogan, are part of the so-called “manosphere” of new media that helped President Donald Trump win reelection.

Say what? Harris had dropped a bomb on the All-In podcast? In his report for Mediaite, Alex Griffing now included a clip in which another observer had said that Harris criticized the All-In podcast for its alleged recitation of "Kremlin talking points!"

Is that podcast part of the manosphere? Does it traffic in any such talking points?

We don't have the slightest idea. Summarizing, we would offer this:

"Who Do You Trust?' Johnny Carson once asked. 

"Trust us," the Voices had already said. 

That said, who can we trust in the present day? Tomorrow, we'll return to the 1930s to see how crazy the thought processes of certain types of volunteers can actually turn out to be! 

Tomorrow: Jill Lepore draws on the past