The brazen attempt by Convicted Felon Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk to seize authoritarian control of the United States’ government accelerated dramatically in the past several days. (Or is it Elon Musk and his sidekick Donald Trump? Hard to tell sometimes.) It is an effort that can and should be called a coup. Yet it has been met, largely, with yawns.

That is very unfair, of course. Lots of Americans are livid, terrified, and sounding the alarm. But with a few notable exceptions, the leadership of the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, the business community, and the other centers of gravity in public life, including the majority of the American people, are variously unbothered, resigned, or at the very least insufficiently concerned to stand up and announce that we will not allow this unconstitutional seizure of power to stand.

As I’ve written before, I fully understand the exhaustion, the sense of fatalism, the lack of 2017-brand vigor, and the reasons behind that downbeat mood. I feel it too—and the other side brought it on very deliberately. We are also beset with a tsunami of calculated, eyepopping distractions, including—as this goes to press—the insane notion of the US occupying Gaza. But we have to rally, because what we are seeing is undeniably an illegal attempt to undermine, obliterate, or otherwise neutralize the mechanisms of American governance and consolidate all power under an autocratic, openly criminal president.

Doubt it? Let’s briefly survey some of the things that have gone in the mere fifteen days since Trump raised his stubby little fingers and didn’t put his hand on the Lincoln Bible and was sworn in as President of the United States for a second time.

THE WEEK THAT WAS

We can start with a chef’s tasting menu of some appetizers:

There was the raft of executive orders including an attempt to end birthright citizenship in violation of the 14^th Amendment; the plan to re-open Guantanamo Bay as a concentration camp for deported migrants; the ending of temporary protective status for some 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the US and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans; the attacks on trans people that literally put lives at risk; the white nationalist dictates ending any hint of DEI initiatives in the federal government; the directives mandating Pentagon televisions be tuned to Breitbart and Fox News; the scrubbing of government websites of any reference to LGBTQ+ matters, women’s health, and what the blogger Robert B. Hubbell calls “scientific knowledge in general,” and more.

These are all awful, and emblematic of our new far right wing regime—and several them cause great harm to various demographics of our fellow Americans. But they pale in comparison with the biggest development in Week 2 of Trumpmerica™ 2025, which was that a group of private individuals under the control of the President (or are they?) has illegally seized control of the US Treasury.

That group of private individuals, as we all know by now, consists of people from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which demanded access to the sensitive Treasury Department computer system responsible for some $6 trillion in federal transactions annually. Treasury officials who objected were forced out, put on leave, or retired, including the man in charge of that network, David A. Lebryk, the department’s highest-ranking career official, with more than 35 years in service,. Once Lebryk was sidelined, Trump’s new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, gave Musk and DOGE full access to the computer system, which covers Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, grants, salaries for federal employees, tax refunds, and payments to government contractors, including those of Musk’s own competitors.

Public policy expert Don Moynihan told a reporter that  it felt “like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.” Gosh, you’d think that would alarm people, no?

We have since learned that this “team” of DOGE interlopers consists of six engineers, all male, aged 19 to 24, with no experience in government of course, some of whom are associated with yet another right wing billionaire-cum-Bond villain, Peter Thiel, who bankrolled JD Vance’s Senate run before he became Trump’s running mate.

A similar brute force takeover happened at the Small Business Administration, where the Muskovites got into that agency’s human resources, contracts, and payment systems, and the General Services Administration, where a Twitter employee called Nicole Hollander who claimed to be in charge “sent an email to regional managers telling them to begin ending the leases on federal offices,” according to Heather Cox Richardson. Apparently the process is also now underway at the Department of Education, where HCR reports that DOGE has “accessed sensitive internal data systems, including the personal information of millions of students who are taking part in the federal student aid program,” making good on Trump’s long-threatened (or promised) plan to close it entirely, which legally only Congress can do.

But a lot of this is stuff that legally only Congress can do. It’s functionally no different than if a group of armed insurgents broke into a government building and took power….and with the blessing of a rogue president who seeks to use these callow, pimple-faced tech world brownshirts as a private militia to establish one-man rule.

So while the courts wrangle over whether the Trump administration has the authority to usurp Congress’s constitutionally-directed power of the purse (spoiler alert: it does not), Musk’s plan is simpler: he has simply taken physical control of the mechanism of payment, such that he can choose which government programs to pay and which not, according to his (and/or Trump’s) personal desires. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elon’s basement.”

Most alarming of all, DOGE seized control of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, after Trump had announced (on day two in office) an immediate freeze on about $60 billion in foreign aid, except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, including humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable populations. In case you think that’s a huge savings for the US taxpayer, please note that it amounts to less than 1% of the US budget annually. But on the bright side, sadists, it does mean the US is reneging on its promise of food aid to starving children. So there’s that.

It’s hard to overstate how stupid, cruel, and needlessly self-destructive the shutdown of USAID is in particular. Anyone even passingly familiar with the Marshall Plan understands the strategic value of this kind of soft power and what an insanely dumb move it is to cut it off, even apart from any moral considerations. Our enemies are high-fiving.

Here’s Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.):

The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on US aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the US will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. US power will shrink. US jobs will be lost.

The breaching of USAID by these children without security clearances also means that our national intelligence systems must now be considered insecure—par for the course for a president who himself stole TS/SCI information of the most sensitive nature and kept it stored in his bathroom. (Musk himself has been denied a high-level security clearance because of concerns about his relationships with foreign powers, principally China. Quite the crew, no?) In response to anger over his moves, Musk posted that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” He also called it  “evil” and “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists (sic) who hate America.”

Across its various bureaucratic targets, this Gang of Six has connected non-government computer servers to the US personnel mainframes, seized private information about millions of federal employees, locked the senior Office of Personnel Management managers out of their own agency’s computers. Reportedly, they have moved sofa beds into the OPM offices and put the place into a “lockdown mode.” Mimicking his actions when he took over Twitter (right down to the subject line of the email), Musk then sent a memo offering millions of federal employees buyoffs if they would quit.

As the Yale historian and expert on authoritarianism Timothy Snyder notes, “Can American companies responsibly pay taxes to a US Treasury controlled by their private competitors?”  Tesla made $2.3 billion last year and paid $0 in federal income tax. “Should other companies pay taxes that, for all they know, will just enrich Tesla’s owner?”

Political scientist Seth Masket:

Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’ announced by Trump in a January 20th executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title. It’s perfectly fine to have a marketing gimmick like this, but DOGE does not have power over established government agencies, and Musk has no role in government. It does not matter that he is an ally of the President. Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup.

Remember back in 2021, when there was such debate over whether or not to pursue criminal prosecutions of Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election? At the time, it was common for those of us who argued for prosecution to say that a failed coup that goes unpunished becomes just a dry run. Well, that proved 100% correct, and we are seeing the second part of the formulation playing out right now, before our eyes

HE FOUGHT THE LAW, AND THE LAW LOST

In retrospect, it  makes perfect strategic sense that Trump would try to seize the power of the purse as one of his first and most fundamental moves toward full-blown autocracy. But I don’t think many people thought he would do it so brazenly, or in concert with Auric Goldfinger, er I mean, Elon Musk.

But in concert with obtaining this stranglehold on the government’s finances, there is another equally alarming aspect to the ongoing coup, and that is the purging of the justice system and Intelligence Community and their transformation into a personal arm of vengeance on behalf of a mentally deranged convicted felon with access to the nuclear codes. (In case you were worried the James Bond plotline would not hold up.)

As of last Friday evening, the FBI told eight senior officials in charge of cybersecurity, national security, and criminal investigations to retire, resign, or be fired. The Special Agents in Charge (SAICs) of the major FBI field offices in Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles were given that same ultimatum. The Bureau has also asked for a list of every agent across the US  who worked on investigations of January 6 insurrectionists, demanding that they detail what their roles were in those investigations, and has already fired dozens of them. As of that same Friday evening, the acting US Attorney for Washington DC, Ed Martin—a longtime defender of January 6^th insurrectionists—had fired some 30 US Attorneys who had been involved in J6 prosecutions. In similarly firing dozens of other federal prosecutors who worked on those cases, acting US Attorney General and Trump appointee James McHenry stated that he “does not trust” them “to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.”

“Think about that for a moment,” writes the blogger Robert B. Hubbell, one of the most clarion voices on this matter. “The convicted felons who attacked the Capitol have been pardoned and the loyal servants of the Constitution who prosecuted them have been fired.” That, former US Attorney Joyce Vance wrote In her own Substack newsletter, is the sort of thing that suggests “we are in the middle of a five-alarm fire.”

Heather Cox Richardson reports that the administration has also squashed federal cases against at least two Republican congressmen or former congressmen who were under investigation for election fraud of their own, one of whom has since introduced legislation that would allow Trump to run for a third term. And, of course, in his first week in office, Trump already fired 18 Inspectors General, including those at Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, HHS, Veterans Affairs, HUD, Interior, Energy, Commerce, Treasury and Agriculture as well as several independent agencies. As the Internet meme goes, firing the IGs is like spray painting the security cameras before the big heist.

While all this was going on, Kash Patel, Trump’s ghastly nominee to be FBI director, testified under oath during his Senate confirmation hearings that, to his knowledge (note the qualifier), there were no plans to punish any FBI agents who had worked on the cases against Trump, saying “no one will be terminated for case assignments,” and that “all FBI employees will be protected against political retribution.” And then he showed a PowerPoint presentation for a bridge in Brooklyn he’d like to sell us.

Speaking of those confirmation hearings, HCR notes that, per The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, “while it is traditional for Cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question.” Among them: Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi, Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Small Business Administration nominee Kelly Loeffler, VA Secretary nominee Doug Collins, and Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick. All insisted that the question was moot, because Trump would never issue an illegal order. Yet the Senate may well confirm Patel to head the FBI, an agency he has all but publicly pledged to destroy, Gabbard as DNI despite her coziness with Moscow and with the deposed Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad, and RFK Jr as the Dr. Josef Mengele Chair in Public Health. Just yesterday morning, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a medical doctor widely seen as a potential obstacle to Bobby’s confirmation, but also a man facing re-election in 2026 in his ruby red home state, voted to advance  the vaccine-skeptical, whale-decapitating, bear cub-absconding nepo baby and former junkie for consideration by the full Senate.

Somebody send Dr. Bill a copy of the Hippocratic oath—I don’t think he’s seen it.

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION

It’s all of a piece, of course.

“On Friday, January 31, 2025, Trump moved to complete the coup he began on January 6, 2021,” the aforementioned Robert Hubbell writes, in what he calls, without exaggeration, “an effort by Trump to overthrow the Constitution and establish himself as the unbounded dictator of the United States.”

Hubbell notes “the obvious coordinated nature of the unprecedented attacks on the DOJ, FBI, Office of Personnel Management, Treasury Department, and dozens of other agencies. Taken together, those actions amount to a hostile takeover of the US government by those who are loyal to Trump rather than to the US Constitution. The only word that accurately describes that situation is ‘coup’. Any other description is a sign of fear, submission, or surrender.”

“The longer we fail to recognize the current situation for what it is,” he argues, “the longer it will take for us to recover.”

In a Substack piece called “The Logic of Destruction,” Timothy Snyder writes:

The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government….are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

Snyder explains that decades of telling the public that “government is bad” (looking at you, Ronald Reagan) were pre-conditioning for the coup we are now experiencing, one in which billionaires have cast themselves as the heroes riding in on white horses, and I do mean white.

“Theirs is a logic of destruction,” Snyder writes. “It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

I’m gonna pass the rock over to Tim now, because he don’t need no stinkin’ assist from me to explain how all the moving parts work together for ill:

Trump’s tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump’s attacks on America’s closest friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible.

Deportations are a spectacle to turn Americans against one another, to make us afraid, and to get us to see pain and camps as normal. They also create busy-work for law enforcement, locating the “criminals” in workplaces across the country, as the crime of the century takes place at the very center of power.

The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trumpwashing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way.

In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else.

OF SLEEP AND SHEEP

I thought of using a “sleepwalking” metaphor for this blog, but that’s wrong. We’re not asleep—we’re collectively wide awake, and seeing what’s happening right before our eyes, and acting like it’s just another Friday. (TGIF!)

No. The herd of sheep is the better analogy.

Joyce Vance contrasted the, uh, muted response to the Trump/Musk coup with the widespread public and Congressional outrage and pushback to Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre in 1974:

(T)here wasn’t much more than a whimper from the public. Americans didn’t take to the streets. Nothing like the pink pussy hats of 2016 was evident. Some people talked about how horrible it was, but for the most part Americans went about their business.

Why are so relatively few Americans furious about what’s going on? It might be partly due to the media diet most of America is relentlessly fed. Can you imagine what Fox News would say if Kamala Harris and George Soros were doing this?

Now, I feel compelled to note that some on the left—like Harvard Law Professor Jay Michaelson—have angrily rebutted the “no one’s doing anything” narrative, slamming it as doomsaying that plays into Republican hands while—ironically—doing nothing substantive to stop the crisis. He also argues that some folks are indeed acting aggressively to respond to the coup.

It’s true that there was a large protest outside the US Treasury building on Tuesday….that unions like AFGE and SEIU have filed suit against the Treasury Department, and that other NGOs are engaged in similar lawsuits….that Hakeem Jeffries has announced lawsuits over the IG firings (and even better, is deftly using parliamentary procedure to minimize the GOP’s already slim House majority)….that eighteen state attorneys general have challenged Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship….that the ACLU and the National Treasury Employees Union and GLAD Law and the National Center For Lesbian Rights have filed suits involving immigration policy and Schedule F and trans rights. (The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky has long argued that the resistance in this second Trump administration will be “smarter” than the first time around, and more focused on lawsuits than on street protests. “More facts, less outrage,” as he puts it.)

Good on them, and more of that please.

But I strongly disagree with Michaelson that the MSM has reported the crisis adequately, and that people like me are “attacking journalists” whom, he says, are already “being threatened by the FBI.” It is flat-out wrong to equate intimidation by the government or its right wing vigilante auxiliaries with a reasonable demand that major media outlets report the current crisis more accurately. When I first saw the news about Musk gaining control of a key mechanism of the US Treasury late last Saturday night, I expected to wake up to 32 point headlines all across the media expressing outrage. Instead it was an afterthought below the fold. That is not the kind of coverage that this emergency requires. Yes, there are many individual journalists doing yeoman’s work on this topic, including many I have quoted and referenced here. But the Fourth Estate is largely is on its ass, with some—like the Washington Post, the paper I grew up with, that led the charge during Watergate—actively kowtowing to the Administration, which is heartbreaking. Not sure the Gray Lady—which once published the Pentagon Papers—is doing much better, with headlines like, “With Gaza Plan, an Unbound Trump Pushes an Improbable Idea.”

Michaelson is certainly correct that merely complaining is not enough, and it’s more useful to call your congressman, get out and protest, or give to organizations like the ones mentioned above. “Just like we should not obey in advance, we should not panic in advance either.” Fair enough. But I don’t think the two approaches are at odds. There are a multitude of things we can do, and banging the drum is one of them—necessary but not sufficient.

So even though some hardy souls are pushing back admirably against the coup, what we are NOT seeing is widespread outrage among the bulk of the American people. Maybe that’s not a surprise, since they re-elected Trump in the first place. But you would think that seeing what Elon Musk and his teenaged wrecking crew are up to might get a larger chunk of the American populace at least a little bit upset.

AVOID THE ROMAINE

On that point, where is the mainstream Democratic Party in all this? Shouldn’t its leaders be out on the barricades, leading the opposition? Uh, yes. But after Musk executed his Baader-Meinhof style occupation of the government’s financial network, the WaPo reported with No Discernible Irony: “Democrats have strongly criticized the idea of giving Musk surrogates access to the payment systems.”

That’ll stop ‘em.

Way back in 2017, after the firing of Jim Comey—arguably the first openly authoritarian move Trump made­—John Oliver noted that checks and balances only work “if someone fucking checks and balances.”

And if you don’t, it’s no longer on Trump, it’s on you, because when you’ve got the presidential equivalent of a five-year-old shitting on the salad bar of a Ruby Tuesday’s, at some point you stop blaming the five-year-old and you start blaming the people who are not stopping him.

Here’s a deeply alarming sentence: “Senate Democrats are divided over how hard they should fight to resist Trump’s agenda, with Democrats up for reelection in battleground states looking for areas of compromise.”

AYFKM?

As The Hill reports, seven Senate Democrats voted to confirm Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, where she will oversee the mass deportation plan, and 25 Democrats and Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats, voted to confirm Doug Burgum as Secretary of the Interior, who will oversee the plan to increase oil and gas drilling on federal lands. Another seven (again including King) voted to confirm Chris Wright, CEO of a fracking company, as Secretary of Energy.

The Hill quotes Democratic strategist Christy Setzer:

“Democratic leadership acts like it’s permanently 2006, a year when, yes, we took back the Senate, but also before the Republican Party found a cult leader and lost its collective minds. We don’t live in that world anymore; we have a lifelong conman and convicted felon in the Oval Office who tries every day to turn this country into a dictatorship. Let’s start acting like it. That means you can’t be mad about Trump trying to freeze government spending in the morning, and vote for his Treasury secretary—who will destroy the economy—in the afternoon. Stop helping Trump.“

Some elected Dems know what time it is. One is Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland—who physically stood in front of the USAID headquarters this week to protest Musk’s actions—as is Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who has pledged to stall on all Trump nominees until USAID is restored to its former self. Another, as I have noted before, is Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who said last week: “I’m not voting for a single nominee while this crisis over federal spending persists, and I don’t think we should proceed to any legislation until Republicans stand up and start helping us protect democracy.” The Hill again:

Murphy argued that voters around the country won’t fully accept the alarms Democrats have raised about Trump’s agenda until they see Democratic senators and House members deploying every tactic they can to fight it in Washington.

“I do not think that we will be able to convince people that this is a serious, grave moment if we are helping them populate a deeply corrupt government and helping them pass legislation here,” he said. “We are wondering why people out there are not rising up in the way that they did in 2017, even though Trump’s conduct is worse,” Murphy said. “I think they watch us supporting his policies and his nominees and come to the conclusion it must not be that bad.”

Preach.

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In part two of this essay, coming soon, we’ll look at what to do—and not do—when your government is under attack from within.