“What, exactly, are journalists — with our sources, our access, our experience — supposed to do here? I spent the early afternoon frantically blowing up the phones and Slacks of my

colleagues in Washington, sending them, naturally, tweets. We found ourselves navigating an impossible loop: Our sources, like so many random people on X, were joking about Trump deporting

Musk over allegations he’d violated immigration rules early in his career. Within minutes, Bannon had transformed that joke into a statement to the New York Times, making it capital-N News.”