The DOGE Boys: the “Thinking Man’s” Trump Guy and the Men Who Make Them
The New American Elite and the System that Made Them
When I saw him in his deposition, the way he managed his hair, that tempest-in-a-teapot cowlick right above his eyebrow, the intensity of his eyes, the way his tee shirt peeked out of his crewneck sweater I wanted to punch him in the face. Hard. That is an unusual feeling for me. But watching Nate Cavanaugh, Elon Musk disciple, the man who relied on AI to cancel millions of dollars in research, a stranger, did elicit exactly this out of me.
I sat transfixed watching him admit that he had no experience. When questioners pressed him on his rationale, and whether he might have been wrong, he looked into the camera and said his justification rested in an executive order and in the goal of reducing the national debt. When they pushed harder, he admitted his understanding extended no further than following orders. And that goal, reducing the national debt, a small, almost imperceptible smirk before the admission that there was no mission accomplished. If this one-man show of research destruction was not bad enough on its face, when someone asked whether he regretted his role in it, he said no.
It was hard not to look at his round, pale face, his thin lips, his copper hair, and see that his Aryan good looks — which told a little too much of his Irish background — did little to diminish how similar he looked to a member of the Hitler Youth.
After watching for just a few minutes, my desire to punch him became softer, almost parental, and then almost pitying. It was easy to picture him as the victim of a mob, his hair torn out in patches, kicked into a bloody mess and left on the side of the road. He was an unsympathetic character if there ever was one. It takes nothing to dislike the unlikeable. The harder question is understanding how the world makes the unlikeable like Nate.
I found myself wondering about this kid who felt it was perfectly fine to enter the business of government and deconstruct important work, who was doing so in service of Elon Musk, a man whose extraordinary wealth is comparable to the spectacle of watching someone once revered for his progressiveness become loathed for who he has been revealed to be. Elon is a product of horrific parents who seem never to have recovered from their loss of South African apartheid, the system that gave them their financial leg up simply because of their skin color. Not that this makes Elon any more palatable, maybe just more understandable.
But Nate? For all the vileness contained in his elf-like being — his association with Trump and Musk, his ideological attachment to Peter Thiel — Peter Thiel? A man so much like Roy Cohn he is the argument for reincarnation. Just how did this Nate become?
Someone, something, like Nate doesn’t just happen. No more than Stephen Miller just happened. When I initially Googled him, I got the story most know now. But I’m not interested in the origin story that’s been sprouting up online, the one about a restless boy who only went to college to bide his time before breaking out and making millions. That story is as old as time and explains nothing and accomplishes only the kind of history appreciated by a curator of TikToks.
It was not even the fact that Nate relied on artificial intelligence and Google searches to become the wrecking ball he was…is. That’s ordinary now. Our HHS Secretary ginned up an entire roadmap to bad health using AI, replete with false references and made-up science. This part of the story, relying on AI, no matter how dangerous and uninformed, is also just a part of the human condition. Technology has always been mankind’s villain and hero, from the wheel to the telephone. Don’t we all know that by now?
No, I wanted something more. I want the Alex Haley dive. There has to be more to it than the familiar argument that technological advancement makes our heroes and villains. Because to become that hero or that villain, you had to come from a place that prepared you for it. That floor you learned to walk on that gave you the particular shape of confidence, or recklessness, that made it possible. Nate Cavanaugh came from something. Some place.
I pictured Nate’s mom and dad, in our current age of Instagram-pretty and rich-makes-right, posting proudly about their copper-haired golden boy. That is the parental dream, isn’t it? You can see the toddler who was never told no. The pre-teen boy who learned that The Gap was not good enough – there was always Banana Republic. No matter the quality, it was the label that mattered. It’s inevitable that they raised a human being so self-absorbed, so skill-less, and so unshakably sure of himself that it would make most people cringe.
This is where my mind went in a blink reading about Nate and his family. It was a snapshot in form and function. Nate’s origin story deserved more.
The more I dug, the more I learned, and on the road less traveled it became apparent that Nate was not some accident of a genome meets teratogen. His father designed him. Nate was a plan. Nate was more than fate. Whether it was the Y chromosome that hijacked his moral compass or the social pond he swam in, there is just no question that his father had no small part in the creation of this arrogant young man who looked like Tiny Tim with the mind and heart of Ebenezer.
Nate was one of those kids who grew up seemingly pulled from a WB series — perfect and polished. And like one of these vapid soaps for tweens, some characters have more screen time than others. In real life, online, his mother is vapor, a woman with almost no presence in Nate’s narrative, while his father’s story is a subplot that shaped everything.
The record of who Nate Cavanaugh was before DOGE is more revealing than anything he said under oath. At thirteen, he wrote a letter to his future self with a single question at its center: Do you still want to start your own computer company?At eighteen, given a high school assignment to write about his role model, he chose Mark Zuckerberg and declared, in writing submitted for a grade, that he too planned to start a technology company in college and intended to drop out once he could comfortably support himself. He attended North Allegheny High School in the Pittsburgh suburbs, and by his junior year had already launched a website design business generating enough income that college felt not just optional but slightly beneath him. He enrolled at Indiana University anyway — largely because Mark Cuban, another Pittsburgh kid, had gone there — with no intention of finishing. He lasted one year, founded an esports tournament platform called Guuf, sold it, dropped out, and filed the experience away as complete. College was not an education. It was a waiting room. A high school assignment wrote the arc of Nate Cavanaugh, and he never deviated from it.
This is not the story of a restless genius impatient with slow institutions. It is the story of a young man who decided very early that curiosity was optional, that credentials were decorative, and that confidence, the precise inheritance his father had modeled so carefully, was the only qualification that mattered.
Like Father, Like Son
When I first started reading about Nate's dad, Pat, it rattled a memory in me. Was it the Blind Side? Rudy? I couldn't put my finger on it. I don't watch many sports movies, but two were all it really took to recognize the story of Pat Cavanaugh. But like these silver screen versions of the runt walking out of the locker room and onto the field to become a hero, what you watch and what you live are never the same.
Pat Cavanaugh tells a good story. He has been telling it for a long time. Like all good stories, if you tell it enough, it starts to become the narrative, it takes on its own truth. And for Pat, like all these small-boy-wins-big stories, it has served him well.
The version that appears in press materials, brand websites, and friendly magazine profiles goes something like this: a scrappy, undersized kid from a small Pennsylvania town that nobody cared about walked onto one of the most competitive basketball programs in the Big East, no scholarship, no guarantee, no safety net, and willed himself into something. The coaches didn’t believe in him. The recruiters had never heard of him. But Pat Cavanaugh believed in himself, and that turned out to be enough. He made the team. He earned his scholarship. He became a captain. He chased the NBA dream all the way to tryout camps with the Nuggets, the Sixers, and the Magic. When the dream finally ended, he took everything he had learned about competition and discipline and built a company from his college apartment into an Inc. 500 firm. And then, drawing on a lifetime of athletic experience and a deep, inherited understanding of how nutrition shapes performance, an understanding rooted in his mother’s career as a dietician and nutritionist, he co-founded Come Ready Foods and its flagship product, Ready, a sports drink now carried at Walmart and Costco, with NFL star Aaron Donald and NBA champion Giannis Antetokounmpo as equity partners.
The only problem is that the story is doing considerably more work than the facts support.
Start with the nutrition authority, because it is the foundation the Ready brand rests on. Read the company’s materials carefully and a single claim surfaces, again and again, with the consistency of a legal credential: Pat Cavanaugh grew up in a household shaped by his mother’s expertise in dietetics and nutrition, and that proximity gave him a foundational understanding of how food and performance intersect. His mother studied it. He grew up near it. Pat built the brand on that adjacency, presenting it as though adjacency were a degree. In medicine, in law, in engineering, a claim like that would not survive a single serious question from a single serious reviewer. The consumer wellness industry is not those fields. It is a space where a compelling narrative and an air of authority have always been accepted as currency. The nutritional credibility underwriting a sports drink sold in two of the largest retail chains in the country traces back to the fact that his mother had a career. That is the credential. That is the science.
Now go back further. Go back to the origin story itself, to the runt from Grove City who nobody wanted.
Pat Cavanaugh grew up in Grove City, Pennsylvania, a small town roughly an hour outside Pittsburgh. In Grove City, he was not an underdog. He was the guy. In football, he started at quarterback his junior and senior years of high school. In basketball, he scored 371 points and handed out 219 assists in a single junior season, then averaged 20 points a game as a senior while leading his team in assists. He earned rare dual athletic honors in two sports. The doubt that frames his origin story was never really about his ability or his size. It was about his geography. College recruiters did not make regular stops in Grove City. That is a real disadvantage, but it is a materially different story than being told, to your face, that you are not enough.
And when the University of Pittsburgh came into view, Cavanaugh had options. He had scholarship offers from other Division I programs on the table. He turned them down, walked on to Pitt, and bet on himself to earn what others had already offered him elsewhere. The walk-on narrative carries a specific emotional weight, the boy with nowhere else to go, that simply does not apply here. He had somewhere else to go. He chose not to go there.
At Pitt, he made the team, earned his scholarship after one semester, and became the second player in program history to be named team captain in back-to-back seasons. His teammates voted for him, not the coaches. Jerome Lane, at the time the leading rebounder in the country, said Cavanaugh had more heart than anyone he had ever seen on a basketball court. Over four years and 109 games, he averaged 2.1 points per game. He was a role player on talented teams, a locker room presence. That is what the record shows. It is not the myth.
The NBA tryout camps, Denver, Philadelphia, Orlando, are offered in the telling as the final evidence of how far the kid from Grove City had come. Orlando cut him in the fall of 1993. What the story leaves room to imply, without quite saying it, is that a tryout is an audition, not a contract. Walking out of an NBA tryout camp without a contract is a dead end dressed up as a milestone.
Then there is the first business, the one that became an Inc. 500 firm, the one that anchors the self-made chapter of the Cavanaugh story. He built it from nothing, the story goes. What he built it from was a working knowledge of the promotional products industry he acquired while working for an uncle who already owned a promotional products business. His uncle handed him the industry.
A high school star recast as an unrecruited runt. A walk-on with scholarship offers in his back pocket. A role player with the footprint of a star. An entrepreneur whose uncle showed him the trade before he learned to sell it. A nutrition brand whose scientific authority is, at its root, his mother’s degree.
And if you look at it long enough, you can see exactly where Nate learned that credentials are optional, that confidence is a perfectly acceptable substitute for competence, and that if you say the thing with enough certainty, most people will never bother to check. He learned it at the dinner table. And he never forgot it.
What Nate never saw coming, and why should he, it had never happened to him before, was how his deposition would land. When you have lived a life of no real consequence and enormous reward, the idea that the world might one day watch you account for yourself simply never occurs to you. Not when you are a boy who wrote his own future at thirteen and then spent the next fifteen years making it come true, unchallenged and supported by your Dad.
But, alas, we know the world did watch. The never-aging, never-forgetting world of tech he knew would make his life cast his epitaph. No one could filter the arrogance and the vacancy into a convenient PR clip. Nate got what he always thought he wanted: the spotlight. What he didn’t want was scrutiny. Like his father, he wanted the fiction. And like his father, he expected, because his expectations have always been met, that the story he told about himself would hold. He had no idea that one day, the way real life actually works, a conference room on camera would demolish those expectations.
The deposition was so damaging, so volatile, that Federal Judge Colleen McMahon of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered it clawed back from the internet. McMahon is no Trump judge running interference for MAGAites. Clinton appointed her, the Senate confirmed her in 1998. Her reasoning was straightforward: releasing the depositions was putting witnesses in physical danger. Death threats. Real ones.
It is deeply ironic that the system Nate peered into from his perfect, incurious little life, the one he Googled his way through in order to dismantle, would end up being his knight in shining armor. But this is more the American way than the movies ever admit.
Which brings us to the only question that matters: where does a man-boy like Nate Cavanaugh go from here?
And this is where the story of American justice, as impressive as it is in protecting a man like Nate, fails entirely to protect the rest of us from him.
In 2025, Trump appointed him to run the United States Institute of Peace, the soft power instrument established by Congress in 1984, focused on diplomacy, mediation, and conflict resolution, the kind of painstaking, relationship-driven work that takes decades to understand. A federal judge put a stop to it. But that he accepted the role at all is the point. That he looked at an institution built to navigate the most volatile corners of the world and saw no reason why he shouldn’t run it, with no education in the field, no experience, no purview of any kind, that is the tell. It wasn’t shocking. It was just another brick on the road he has always traveled, the road where the destination is always the same and the qualifications are always optional. He mapped that road as a teen. In a high school classroom. For a grade.
It has been the courts and lawsuits pumping the brakes on Nate Cavanaugh. But nothing has addressed the engine. He is the instrument of dangerous, wealthy men, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, men with an endless supply of fuel to power his little-engine-that-could fiction, men for whom a Nate Cavanaugh is useful precisely because he asks no questions and feels no remorse.
Like Tiny Tim and Ebenezer Scrooge, it is not the character of Nate Cavanaugh alone that should hold our attention. It is the Dickensian nature of the story itself. A thirteen-year-old boy writes a letter to his future self asking if he still wants to build something. The future arrives. The letter, it turns out, was the entire education he ever intended to get. The ghost is real. The warning is real. And the most troubling thing of all is that we don’t yet know what version of our Christmas future we are looking at.
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