Tag: news

When I was young, and romantic, I used to be dazzled by stories about people who had faced vast challenges and overcome them. Not just heroes, but even the mass of ordinary people who simply lived through epic, Earth-shaking periods of history, whether it was the Second World War, the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights Movement, or going back further, the Civil War, the westward expansion of the United States, the founding of this country, and so on. Times that try men’s souls, as Mr. Paine once wrote. Times of danger, and high stakes, and life-and-death drama.

It all seemed very exciting.

At my age, I am of a generation that has seen a few bold-faced moments of our own: Vietnam, the AIDS crisis, 9/11 and the ensuing wars, the 2016 election and all that followed, the COVID-19 pandemic, and January 6^th all come to mind.

We are in another such historic moment right now, bigger perhaps that any of those, or any that our generation has lived through before, maybe even rivaling some in that first paragraph. It’s a time of an unprecedented test of America democracy, with no guarantee that the republic will survive. Stakes don’t get much higher or scarier than that.

And I gotta tell ya: it ain’t as much fun as I imagined. 

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight and the certainty of a happy outcome, the struggle to defeat Hitler and Nazism—to take but one very extreme example—seems glorious. But while it was going on, and people were suffering and dying, and the prospect that fascism might triumph and crush all humanity under its bootheel was very real, it must have been…..uh…..stressful.

I do not mean to invoke Godwin’s Law here with that analogy, only to note that we are in a hard slog, the outcome of which is by no means certain. And it’s sure to get worse before it gets better, if in fact it gets better at all. Let’s hope that our children and grandchildren are able to read about it and feel that same vicarious, romantic glow that we get looking back on the dark times that our predecessors lived through and prevailed over.

AMERICA WORST

Of late this blog has, for obvious reasons, been focused on our domestic crisis, but let’s spend a little time on foreign affairs, which once upon a time was my preferred métier, and with which the ongoing emergency at home is unavoidably intertwined.

Pete Hegseth went to Europe and put down his cocktail glass and stopped groping women long enough to announce that the US was turning its back on 80 years of security commitments and to give the EU and NATO and non-aligned but friendly countries a big fat middle finger. To their great credit, American middle schoolers in Department of Defense Dependent Schools in Germany heckled the new Secretary of Defense (cough, cough) and staged a walkout when he spoke. (The White House recently banned a bunch of books from DoDDS schools for being “too woke.”)

I am a product of those schools, where my mother was a teacher, in Germany no less, way back when the Berlin Wall first went up, and it made me proud to see what those middle schoolers and some of their parents did. Why are those kids braver than the entire Republican Party and half the Democratic one too? That’s a rhetorical question, in case it wasn’t sufficiently clear. (Literally old school DoDDS education ain’t too shabby, n’est-ce pas?)

But speaking of craven cowardice, elsewhere on the Continent—in Munich, to be precise, for those of you who like things really on the nose—J.D. Vance had the gall to lecture Europe’s leaders on authoritarianism with language that sounded better in the original Russian. Then to top it off, and in case anyone missed the neo-Nazi point, he met with the leadership of the odious far right AfD party, already poised to make big gains in the German elections next week, and to praise it.

Who’s gonna tell the Greatest Generation—those very GIs who fought the world war that I referred to at the top of this piece—that we switched sides? Sorry about that whole “please invade Normandy” thing, fellas. Turns out we prefer the fascists to be in power after all.

What else? Oh, a Russian stooge was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence. (That sound you hear is Champagne corks popping in the Kremlin.) Way over yonder in the monarchy, Secretary of State Marco “L’il Marco” Rubio was in Riyadh to see what Crown Prince Mohammad Bonesaw Salman wants us to do. Of course, that’s a complicated triangulation with what Vladimir Putin wants us to do. It’s hard to have lot of different masters we’re beholden to, people.

And last but not least, the draft dodging, twice-impeached, 34 times-convicted felon Don Trump himself sold Ukraine down the river, barring it from “peace talks” (more like mobsters carving up newly acquired turf) about its own future, as well as—similarly mobster-like—demanding Versailles-dwarfing protection money, blaming Kyiv for being invaded by Russia, and calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” who “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”

Sheesh.

All in all it was one of the worst weeks for American foreign policy in recorded history.

I have long been critical of US military misadventures abroad. It’s a topic near and dear to me. But what we are seeing now is not a welcome antidote to that by any measure. On the contrary: it is a tragic error just as wrongheaded in its own way, and ironically, driven by the same venal and arrogant nationalism. Because in the end, isolationism is just interventionism’s equally evil twin.  

The United States’s abdication of its essential role as the indispensable nation (I did not say “exceptional”), a role that it has played since 1942, is a world-rattling shift, and not in a good way. For all America’s flaws—not something MAGA cops to, or that figure in its calculus—withdrawing from engagement with the rest of the world like this does nothing but cede power to the Putins, Xis, Erdogans, Bibis, Orbans, and Kims of the world, vile company that Donny is of course desperate to join. It further imperils the already imperiled cause of liberal democracy the world over, and it consigns beleaguered peoples like those of Palestine and Ukraine and elsewhere to something that can without exaggeration be called extermination, if not the dreaded “g” word.

And it makes me ashamed of my passport.

THIS WEEK IN SHINY OBJECTS

So that’s the wider world. But maybe things were better here at home?

LOL. It’s good we can laugh, right?

Here in the land of round doorknobs, Musk’s hostile takeover of the mechanisms of the US government continues, even as his figurehead partner carries on establishing a white nationalist regime.

The notion that Musk is curbing waste is laughable on its very face when Trump is firing inspectors general and DOGE is slashing nutrition programs for poor children (to name just one of its highlights). This week we learned that Musk wants to get into the weeds of the IRS, as The Washington Post reports that DOGE “is seeking access to a heavily-guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country, according to two people familiar with the activities, sparking alarm within the tax agency.” Can you imagine if a Democratic administration wanted the IRS to give this kind of access to a bunch of unelected twentysomething staffers under the control of a billionaire in its camp?

In a piece for The New York Times called “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up,” Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind reported that there are “at least 11 federal agencies that have been affected” by Trump’s attack on the federal government, agencies that have “more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.” Those companies include Tesla; SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink;  Neuralink, the AI startup XAI; the Boring Company (which is a tunneling venture); and of course, the Gulf of MeXico, Formerly Known as Twitter. Edsall adds that, “In addition, the federal government has awarded contracts with a total value of $13 billion over the past five years to Musk companies, Lipton and Grind found, most of which went to SpaceX, making it “one of the biggest government contractors.”

And now Musk even wants to be let into Ft. Knox. (And I thought Ian Fleming was dead.)

Responding to polite inquiries about what the fuck this Boer douchebag is up to, the White House risibly claimed that Elon Musk is just an unofficial advisor with no authority, and not even an actual employee of DOGE (which it can’t definitively say is or is not a federal agency or what). Man, I was born at night, but guess what? Wasn’t last night.

Trump/Musk, of course, claim they are only carrying out the will of the people. At a White House briefing last Wednesday, Elon defended what DOGE is doing by saying, “If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected officials in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”

Irony, thou hath an Afrikaaner accent.

The New York Times’s Thomas Edsall asks, “How, then, does granting one man, a very rich man, unchecked power to reconfigure the federal government from the ground up get to be described as democratic?” He then gives us Musk’s answer, as delivered at a White House press event this week:

“We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House. We won the Senate….The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. They’re going to get what they voted for…..And that’s what democracy is all about.”

We have already discussed in previous blogs that Trump’s claim of a mandate is both mathematically false and willfully deceptive. (I know, it’s hard to believe, right?) But even beyond that, the idea that an unelected outsider—who also happens to the world’s richest man, with a pronounced affinity for far right wing politics and massive federal contracts—is going in and taking control of the machinery of government with no legal authority to do so, and almost no transparency to what he is doing, is the very opposite of democracy.

The Guardian quotes Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island):

“I think their claims that they’re going after waste, fraud and abuse is a complete smokescreen for their real intentions”……Likening Trump’s firing of the IGs to “firing cops before you rob the bank,” Whitehouse stressed: “It’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is a very deliberate effort to create as much wreckage in the government as they can manage with a view to helping out the big Trump donors and special interests who find government obnoxious in various ways.”

That is it exactly. All this zone-flooding-with-shit is ultimately in the service of distracting us from the giant tax break the GOP is about to give the richest 1% of Americans, to the tune of about $4.5 trillion, “justified” on the money saved/not really saved by cutting programs for poor children.

You know, I am beginning to regret voting for Elon.

AND HE SHALL BE ELON

So what exactly is going on here? In that same issue of the New York Times, Thomas Edsall neatly summarized the state of play in a piece called, “Elon Musk Is Leading a ‘Hostile Takeover of the Federal Government’.” Laurence Tribe, emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told Edsall:

“I can think of no precedent in American history of such enormous power being entrusted to a private citizen.

To say that this delegation of unsupervised authority by President Trump to Elon Musk is an unprecedented violation of the appointments clause of Article II of the Constitution, which at a minimum would demand the Senate’s advice and consent to the appointment of anyone exercising the kind of power, would be an understatement.”

Michael Dorf, a constitutional scholar who is a professor of law at Cornell, told Edsall that the authority given to Musk is “truly unprecedented in US history.”

By way of comparison, opposition parties have occasionally raised substantial objections when even a small amount of power was given to persons who held no official office: think about the Republican reaction to the essentially advisory role that Hillary Clinton had in the formulation of health care reform in her husband’s administration.

Or consider the concerns raised by many Democrats when Dick Cheney (who was the elected VP at the time) was meeting with private industry leaders to help formulate energy policy during the George W. Bush administration. Yet Hillary Clinton and the industry captains with whom Cheney met held only advisory power. By contrast, Musk appears to be formulating and executing policies.”

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, speculated to Edsall that Trump is empowering Musk as payback for what he did to get him re-elected, and/or “for future financial assistance with Trump’s legal difficulties.” He also suggested that “having Musk do the dirty work” will let Trump be the good cop when it comes time to negotiate some of the more extreme measures. (I am not sure that is going to happen, but let’s hope.)

Brooke Harrington, a sociologist at Dartmouth, has been studying wealth, power and the rise of oligarchs since the turn of the century. In a phone interview, told Edsall “that a tech broligarchy has effectively bought the presidency.”

Trump gets to be chairman of the board, cut the ribbons in day-to-day ceremonies, while control of the structure of government is left to them, in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the federal government.

Speaking to Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” the night after Trump’s inauguration, Harrington compared Putin’s relationship with his oligarchs to Trump’s with his own wealthy patrons who propelled him back into the White House:

“At least Putin has a red line with his oligarchs. The grand bargain was that he was going to let them get rich on condition that they kept their noses out of his political business. At most, they would be his errand boys. What Trump has done is so extraordinary. He doesn’t have that bright line with the new oligarchs of America at all. He basically said, ‘You bought it. Do what you want’.”

Even some on the right are unhappy with what’s going on. In a January 13 interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, Steve Bannon called Musk  “a truly evil person. Stopping him has become a personal issue for me.” Wow, it’s a rare day when I agree with Steve Bannon. (Other than that, it’s mostly just our mutual love of field jackets.)

Yet even as he’s at odds with the far right wing of the American GOP, Musk is somehow managing to cozy up to the far right in other countries, the ideological brethren of the racists who ran the apartheid-era South Africa in which he was raised. Speaking to an AfD rally via pre-recorded video, Musk told the young brownshirts: “I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” adding: “It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” He added that there has been “too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”

Still think that wasn’t a Nazi salute he gave? The man is openly courting the connection. Musk is even to the right of Nigel Farage, who has bristled at Elon’s ideas for his Reform UK party.

Edsall writes:

Musk’s engagement with these parties suggests….that his agenda at DOGE is at least as much about being partisan and radically conservative as it is about cutting spending or increasing efficiency. His targets, so far, have been liberals in the federal work force, particularly those involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and such federal programs as consumer protection and foreign aid that draw workers, in the main, with liberal views. Musk, then, is in charge of a campaign to purge left-leaning or liberal government initiatives, with little or no regard to legal or constitutional constraint.

WHEN PUSH COMES TO SHOVE

So far, the most significant push back to what Trump and Musk are doing has come from the federal courts, which Robert Reich calls our “last defense.” That is also why the White House and its allies have begun shamelessly attacking them.

Calling Trump “the most lawless president in American history,” Reich writes in The Guardian:

But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts. On Sunday, J.D. Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power “legitimately”, not the president.

Vance, a Yale Law School graduate who clearly knows better, also told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “If the Supreme Court said the President of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit.”

It’s a nonsensical analogy, as it’s premised on the Court making a plainly unconstitutional and incorrect ruling. One might as well say, “If the Supreme Court said the head of state is really Ryan Seacrist, the President has the prerogative to ignore it.” As Reich writes, what Vance really means is, “if the US Supreme Court rules against Trump on an important issue, there’s a fair chance the Trump-Vance-Musk regime will thumb their nose at it.”

They are already at it. Just last week, federal judge John McConnell Jr. expressly declared that the Trump White House is disobeying his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, alleging that the administration is openly defying the “the plain text” of his edict. The previous week, US district judge Loren AliKhan reprimanded the OMB for disregarding a similar order.

So yes, we should take heart that there have been such orders, and others from federal judges like Paul Engelmayer and John Coughenour denying DOGE access to the US Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, and blocking the executive order ending birthright citizenship, as well as lawsuits from sanctuary cities and counties challenging Trump’s executive order on that front, and from state attorney generals led by New York’s Letitia James. But we should not kid ourselves that they will stop Trump, who is quietly—and not so quietly—ignoring rulings invalidating his actions.

Undoubtedly we are on the road to a showdown at the Supreme Court, where, to quote Woody Hayes, only three things can happen and two of them are bad.

1. The Trumpified Court might have his back (as it did when it was asked “Is Trump a king?”), or,
2. The justices rebuff him and he defies them.

Possibility No. 3, the idea that the Court remembers what it learned in law school and upholds the Constitution, remains a longshot.

IS DONALD TRUMP GOOD OR BAD? THE JURY IS STILL OUT, PEOPLE

Despite all this, the center-right MSM (let alone media outlets even further right) continue to treat Convicted Felon Donald Trump like a conventional politician—rather than a terrorist and aspiring despot—and give his proposals credibility they don’t remotely deserve.

We see it from The Wall Street Journal (“Peace in Ukraine Needn’t Mean Russian Victory”) to The Economist (“Will Donald Trump and Elon Musk Wreck or Reform the Pentagon? America’s Security Depends Upon Their Success”). That last one cannot be a serious question, of course, and just asking it makes it impossible to view The Economist any longer as a serious magazine. Next week: Are Trump and Musk going to serve poor people at a soup kitchen next Thanksgiving, or will they be lighting cigars with US citizens’ Social Security checks? No one knows!

Of course, the WSJ has gone even further in it drooling subservience to Trump, like its recent piece “Did Trump Just Win a ‘Tectonic’ Election?,” in which the Princeton historian Allen Guelzo—also an ordained minister and harsh critic of the 1619 Project—muses that Donald could wind up in the company of FDR or even Lincoln. And we need not even get into the bootlicking Republican politicians who want to make his birthday a national holiday (an honor accorded to—hang on, lemme count—zero other US presidents), or put him on Mt. Rushmore, or rename Dulles Airport for him.

Even The Atlantic has gotten into the act. It ran an article recently with the infuriating headline “How Progressives Broke the Government,” which leads one to believe it is yet another piece blaming the left for the right wing nightmare we’re in. In fact, it’s mostly a discussion of turn-of-the 19th-century Teddy Roosevelt-era Progressivism…..and even when it does turn to today, its ultimate critique is that small “p” progressives have been too timid, too willing to bow to the less-government-not-more mindset of conservatism. So in that regard it’s really a critique of the right. So the headline is the worst of it, but the piece itself is also sketchy in its desire to be transgressive. It even includes the classic journalistic CYA trope of “to be sure,” comme ça: “Conservatism, of course, hasn’t been helpful in making government more effective.”

Oh, is that so?

Give me a fucking break. We will continue to be in this mess as long as the journals that the chattering class reads busy themselves with this tripe. It’s bad enough that allegedly respectable conservative ones like the WSJ and Economist do.

Despite the navel-gazing solipsism of the MSM, we keep hearing that the American people will soon begin to feel the pain from Trump’s actions—that is to say, from both the things he has lied about, like lowering the price of eggs. and the things he didn’t, like his plan to destroy the federal government as we know it. But for now, Trump is still in the mode of blaming Biden and Buttigieg for air disasters that happened on the GOP’s watch (a fourth one this week, an American flag carrier, though it crashed in Toronto) even as it was in the process of gutting the FAA. And I don’t see barricades going up in the streets.

Is all this very dramatic, very grave, very profound? It is. And I wish it wasn’t upon us, and I could devote all my time to “Seinfeld” trivia and fantasy football and re-organizing my record collection alphabetically by recording engineer. Sadly, none of us have that luxury right now.

We all know the famous curse, “May you live in interesting times”—often (but apparently erroneously) said to be an old Chinese proverb. But I never truly appreciated it until now.

*********

Photo: Two American GIs of the 79th Infantry Division after a battle in the Bien Woods, near Lauterberg, France, December 20, 1944. Photographer unknown.

Last week, the first part of this essay addressed the rapidly unfolding democratic emergency in the United States and the appalling non-response of the majority of the American people and institutions.

I regret to inform you, dear readers, that it has not gotten better since we last met. Worse, in fact.

In that interval, the administration cut off billions of dollars in federal biomedical funding from the National Institutes of Health—a catastrophe for public health and medical research that has zero logic to recommend it, even under the canard of cutting alleged waste, only cruelty and self-destructive nihilism. Trump called for 60 Minutes to be “terminated,” and fired the head of the National Archives, whom he blames in his stolen classified documents scandal. He also fired the whole board of trustees of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and said that henceforth he personally would decide what American artists deserve recognition (I look forward to Kid Rock’s Kennedy Center Honors), conjuring the image of Nazi attacks on “degenerate art” in the process. His Secretary of Homeland Security and spokesperson for People for the Ethical Shooting of Dogs Kristi Noem announced that she would recommend abolishing FEMA, because emergencies don’t happen much anymore I guess. Oh yeah, and there was yet another plane crash, the third in eight days. (There were zero fatal airline disasters in the preceding 16 years, before Trump forced out the head of the FAA at the urging of Elon Musk, disbanded a crucial aviation subcommittee and threatened the already understaffed air traffic controllers with layoffs. But I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.)

How long before Derek Chauvin is pardoned?

But these are not even central to the autocratic takeover, only ancillary. The main event continues to be Elon Musk’s Orwellian-named Department of Government Efficiency and its extralegal assault and digital dismemberment of key aspects of the federal government.  

As Timothy Snyder writes, if a bunch of armed men rolled up to the Treasury Department in Tesla cybertrucks and seized the building by force, we would understand that a coup was in progress. This post-modern version—conducted out of sight, quite quietly, by twentysomething coders, with the Republican president’s blessing—is a no less illegal usurping of power. Yet most of the country seems unbothered by it. In his new Substack, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman uses the explosive term “dictatorship” to describe what is being put in place. He also immediately anticipating the sputtering response:

“If my use of the word ‘dictatorship’ disturbs you,” he writes, “if your first reaction is to say ‘Isn’t that a bit shrill?’,  you’re part of the problem. The constitutional crisis isn’t something that might hypothetically happen; it’s fully underway as you read this.”

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS IS HERE, PART 47

Is Musk breaking various laws in what he’s doing? Likely, but with no oversight, it’s hard to tell….and as Jonathan Chait points out in a recent piece in The Atlantic, Elon may not care in any event, since Trump has made it clear with his pardons of January 6 insurrectionists that he will protect anyone else who breaks the law on his behalf. Besides, in our current Bizarro World, there is an inversion of who the criminals are, in keeping with page one of the fascist handbook: “Accuse your enemies of your own crimes.”

Chait:

Musk has adopted Trump’s habit of deeming opposition to his actions inherently criminal. He has called the United States Agency for International Development, a decades-old program with support in both parties, a “criminal organization.” After an X user posted the names of the young engineers working with Musk, previously reported by Wired, he responded, “You have committed a crime.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., a Big Lie advocate who is now US Attorney for the District of Columbia, echoed that threat in a post on Twitter. (If Trump’s gonna try to rename the Gulf of Mexico, I’m gonna keep calling it Twitter, thankyouverymuch). I’m not a US Attorney, but just to be clear, as Chait reminds us: “Reporting on the identities of powerful public officials is, in fact, not a crime—even, or especially, if those officials have assumed public powers without going through formal channels.

One of the teenaged Red Guards that Musk turned loose to destroy the federal government was briefly forced out because of the revelation of racist and pro-eugenics posts he had made in his social media feed. I was surprised he was not promoted. But sure enough, within days he was reinstated, with Musk calling for the Wall Street Journal reporter who dug up his past to be fired. J.D. Vance said something about youthful mistakes not being cause for permanent cancellation, which will come as news to the Black teenagers doing decades-long bids in prison for minor offenses. As Ibram X. Kendi noted, that’s how white supremacy works: it treats white adults like children and Black children like adults.

Lawbreaking is almost beside the point, however, since the anti-democratic intent of the whole endeavor is the real issue. Why do so few of our countrymen, from Congress all the way down to the man and woman on the street, seem upset about that?

Chait argues that Republican Congressmen don’t see their power being abrogated by Trump/Musk, as one might imagine, because they either share the same goals, or have at least been cowed into supporting them, and because the success of this self-coup permanently resets the game in the GOP’s favor. “A world in which the president could cut spending without exposing Congress to accountability would hand small-government conservatives the opportunity to carry out policies they’ve long desired but been too afraid to vote for.”

But it’s a radical, anti-democratic, and indeed “revolutionary” maneuver to say the very least, and I mean that in the very specific political definition of the word. Chait:

Not even the most committed small-government-conservative lawmaker would design a process like the one now occurring: a handful of political novices, many of them drinking deep from the fetid waters of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, tearing through the federal budget, making haphazard decisions about what to scrap. And indeed, no elected body has designed this process. Trump and Musk have arrogated the power to themselves. The true urgent cause is to return that power to the legislature before the damage becomes irreversible.

Former US Attorney Joyce Vance calls Trump an “anti-president,” noting that “there is no telling where it will end.”

Once disobedience to the law is on the table, even adherence to absolutes—like the two term limit on holding the office of the presidency—fall into question. As James Romoser, Politico’s legal editor wrote yesterday, “when rulers consolidate power through a cult of personality, they do not tend to surrender it willingly, even in the face of constitutional limits.

And Trump, of course, already has a track record of trying to remain in office beyond his lawful tenure.” Romoser concludes, as did I earlier in the week, that the possibility Trump will seek and secure a third term shouldn’t be dismissed with a hand wave, as some commentators have.

Again, and despite the title of this piece, I do not mean to suggest that there has be zero pushback. There have been protests. Some elected Democrats know what time it is and others do not, and for the latter, Congressional phone lines have been overwhelmed with angry constituents demanding that their representatives do their jobs and defend democracy. The judiciary has stood up in some cases (although the administration has had some wins in court as well) and that is the result of aggressive action by state AGs like Letitia James and others. We should take heed of these actions and gather encouragement and momentum from them.

Still, the bulk the American people seem largely unbothered. (We can leave out of this discussion those maniacs who love what Trump is doing. “NRA Accidentally Forgets to Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government,” quipped The Shovel, an Onion-like satirical website from Australia. Ironically, the post comes from way back in 2020.)

The situation reminds me of the dark days of the Iraq war. In the three decades after the end of active US combat in Vietnam, the political-military-industrial complex successfully re-engineered the mechanisms of power projection such that Washington could prosecute foreign misadventures unhindered by the need for consensus and support from the mass of the American people—things like a draft, and a robust press corps free from government censorship—thanks in part to an overreliance on the reserve components, and the outsourcing of operations to private military contractors. As a result, even as American soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen were in vicious combat in places like Fallujah, one could look out the window in Anytown USA and never know that the United States was at war. It was a relatively small sliver of American families that felt the pain—to say nothing of Iraqi ones—over and over, by means of multiple deployments, and separation from loved ones, and horrific brain injuries and amputations, and aluminum coffins coming home to Dover AFB.

The difference is, with Iraq, our leaders were hiding it from us. This time they are not, and yet we are willfully acting like nothing’s wrong.

My friend Daniel Sibo argues that part of the problem is that the damage is not yet visible, unlike 9/11 or 1/6 or the pandemic, for example. “Deleting a database or electronic records just doesn’t mean anything to them,” as Daniel writes. That may change when the results of this slash-and-burn campaign are truly felt, but by then it will certainly be too late. The Washington Post, for example, reports that US farmers—who voted overwhelmingly for Trump—are now furious that millions of dollars in subsidies that they were promised by the US Agriculture Department have disappeared, “despite promises from the Trump administration that a federal funding freeze would not apply to projects directly benefiting individuals.”

Gee, I’m beginning to think you can’t trust the guy.

Still, some, on both the right and to a lesser extent the left, have even expressed enthusiasm for this “burn it all down” approach. I get where they’re coming from, and the frustration with a dysfunctional government. But I hasten to note that, for decades, now the Republican Party has deliberately worked to make government as dysfunctional as possible in order to create that very frustration, and to prepare the ground for the venal and self-serving destruction of the republic that it is currently conducting. And I would humbly suggest that the pro-arson crowd has no idea what “burning it all down” will truly entail. If and when that comes and they feel the pain, we’ll see how fire-friendly they really are.

IF IT QUACKS

So it is not hyperbole to say that the United States is hurtling towards dictatorship. The question is, which dictator are you talking about?

Just prior to his inauguration, I wrote a blog suggesting the Trump might be a lame duck on day one. That has not proved so in terms of the speed and aggressiveness of his executive actions. But it has been so very much in terms of who is running the US government.

For eight years now, we have been correctly focused on the manchild from Queens as the heart of a unique threat against the American experiment, even if he was only an empty vessel for centuries of John Birch-y proto-authoritarianism bubbling up in the American DNA. But it seems clear that the threat has morphed, as Trump has allowed Elon Musk into the house like a naïve teenager in a horror movie opening the front door to a blood-stained dude holding a chainsaw and wearing an old school Jacques Plante-style hockey mask.

Trump has been content to pursue his crusade of persecution against the people who tried to hold him to account under the law, to issue retrograde executive orders designed to thrill his white nationalist base, and to move forward with using the power of the presidency to line his own pockets and those of his plutocratic friends. But he has left it to Elon Musk to lead the dismemberment of the federal government. And dismember he has.

You may ask: don’t Trump’s allies, like Musk (though likely not Trump himself) realize that their actions are going to destroy the republic as we know it and result in massive damage that will eventually blow back on them? The answer to part one of that question is yes, they absolutely understand that. The answer to part two is that they don’t care. Or, more accurately, they’re delighted by it.

In his blog Notes from the Circus, Mike Brock writes:

(A) quiet revolution is unfolding within the US government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. This isn’t a spontaneous coup—it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be “disrupted.”

“DOGE is not about efficiency,” Brock writes. “It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.”

He goes on to offer a masterful survey of ideas that began to gain traction in fringe circles following the 2008 global economic meltdown. That survey deserves a whole blog of its own, which will be forthcoming. For now, the crucial point to understand is that Musk is carrying out a crusade that intends to do far more than just root out “waste” and inefficiency” in the federal government. In fact, as Brock notes, it does not intend to do that at all, except in the most euphemistic way. What it intends to do is completely obliterate American democracy as we know it—in that obnoxious way that Silicon Valley tech bros consider themselves “disruptors”—in favor of a right wing autocracy papered over with their favored form of flimsy ideological self-justification known as “techno-libertarianism.”Bottom of Form

It is now very clear why Musk was willing to invest a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected (and perhaps actions that go even beyond that): because it enabled him to get inside the executive branch and carry out this techno-libertarian coup, which in effect, will make him the de facto dictator of the United States, with Trump as mere figurehead. Brock writes:

This is not about Trump. This is about what comes after him. Actuarial realities do not favor an aging leader with a declining grasp on policy. But they favor the thirty- and forty-somethings laying the foundation for the post-democratic order. The men who have spent the past decade engineering an exit from democracy are no longer whispering in the dark corners of the internet. They are in power, with money, AI, and a plan. And democracy, in its current form, has never been closer to the brink.

Don’t believe it? Tune in next time for a detailed explanation.

OPPOSE³

Whether one views the current state of play as Musk doing Trump’s dirty work or as Trump providing Musk cover for his techno-libertarian revolution (or both at once), the result is the same. So let’s get back to how to stop the motherfuckers.

Paul Krugman—whose recent, angry departure from The New York Times speaks to the collapse of the MSM and its abdication of its public responsibilities—offers “three words of advice to Democratic politicians and MAGA opponents in general”:

(O)ppose, oppose, oppose. And make noise. A lot of noise. Don’t make conciliatory gestures in the belief that Trump has a mandate to do what he’s doing; don’t stay quiet on the outrages being committed every day while waiting for grocery prices to rise. I can’t promise that taking a tough line will succeed, but going easy on Trump is guaranteed to fail.

Krugman obliterates the myth that Trump has a mandate, or that opposing him will hurt Democrats, noting that “in 2008 Barack Obama won the popular vote by 7.2 percentage points, yet Republicans opposed his agenda every step of the way,” while “Joe Biden won by 4.5 percent in 2020, yet received no Republican support for anything he did.” Did voters hold that obstructionism against the GOP? Nope—on the contrary, they rewarded the Republicans with big wins in the 2010 midterms and a trifecta (both houses of Congress and the White House) this past November. “So Democrats are supposed to show deference to Donald Trump, who won by 1.5 percent and didn’t even win a majority of the overall vote?”

So Democrats and MAGA opponents shouldn’t hold their tongues and try to make nice with Trump in the belief that he represents the will of the people. Americans are just starting to find out that they guy they elected and his policies aren’t at all what they thought they were voting for. And we should do everything we can to accelerate their awful journey of discovery.

But winning the information war against Trump—which is central to any opposition—will require puncturing the formidable right wing propaganda balloon. “Democrats can’t just sit around waiting for Trump’s promises to fail,” Krugman writes. “They need to constantly challenge him.” Paul’s an economist, so he cites economics as a prime example:

One reason low-information voters may have believed Trump’s nonsense claims about being able to reduce prices is that some of them really thought he was the brilliant manager he played on TV. The reality, however, is that the Trump administration has made a complete shambles of its first 10 days….It would be political malpractice for Democrats not to make an issue of Trump’s raging incompetence.

On that front, the intrepid blogger Robert B. Hubbell, one of the sharpest voices calling attention to the coup, is surprisingly optimistic:

Trump failed the first time, and he will fail again—because he has underestimated the American people. We must steel ourselves because things will get worse before they get better—but they will get better. It is a fool’s bet to assume that the American people will sit idly by as their freedoms are stolen by a corrupt oligarch and a convicted felon destroying the government to promote their selfish interests.

Hubbell believes that Trump’s idiotic trade policies and the resulting damage “will provide fertile soil for massive action by Americans who are fed up with Trump and Musk acting like dictators.” (I would argue they ain’t just acting.)

Trump’s rolling coup is (mistakenly) predicated on his belief that the American people are sheep. He believes that we will sit still while he does whatever he wants. He is wrong. I believe in the strength and resiliency of the American people. It may take longer than some of us would like, but they will awaken.

I sure hope he’s right. At the moment, there is precious little sign of a critical mass on that front. Maybe when the pain of tariffs and a crashing stock market and a collapsing global economy hit, people will sit up and take notice. Pocketbook issues seem to be one of the few things that get Americans’ attention.

 Brock again:

However, these resistance efforts face an uphill battle against the immense resources and influence of those pushing for a post-democratic future. And if we do not act now, we may wake up one day to find that democracy was not overthrown in a dramatic coup—but simply deleted, line by line, from the code that governs our lives.

But Krugman is also on Team Glass Half-Full, arguing that even though we are in the middle of an attempted autogolpe, “the autogolpistas are having a harder time than they expected. America’s oligarchs may mostly have preemptively surrendered to the new regime, but many of the rest of us have not.”

A schism between Trump Musk—which is easy to envision, with these two megalomaniacs—could also be a potential point of weakness for us exploit. In The Atlantic, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer note that a recent poll by Quinnipiac University found that 53 percent of voters disapproved of Elon “playing a prominent role in the Trump administration, compared with 39 percent who approved.” (Even among Republican voters, one in five disapproved of Musk’s role.)

For now it is enough to recognize that we are smack in the middle of far and away the most alarming of the numerous constitutional crises we have endured over the past eight years. The surprising part is the Donald Trump may prove to be only a marginal figure in the rise of a democracy-devouring despot. But in the end, we must remember that people really don’t like dictatorships, except for the very few elites in a given society who benefit from them, and that includes the people who initially support the dictatorship until they realize what they’ve bought into and feel its boot on their neck. That irrefutable fact of politics should be our lodestar, even in the dark days in which we currently reside.

Let’s give Mr. Hubbell the last word, echoing what I wrote in Resisting the Right, which itself echoes the accumulated wisdom of the likes of Gene Sharp, Errol Harris, and Jonathan Schell, among others. Power flows from the consent of the governed, even in an autocracy, and we can withhold that consent, even if the price of that withholding is painful all around.

America is based on the consent of the governed, and its economic health requires the cooperation of the participants in the economy. If Americans withhold their political consent and economic cooperation, both the political and financial systems in America will grind to a halt.

What does withholding consent and cooperation look like? That is difficult to predict given the fluid situation, but the citizens of other nations that have grappled with similar challenges have used sustained and massive street protests, national work strikes, work slowdowns, taxpayer strikes, business boycotts, and transportation boycotts. To be clear, I am simply making an observation about how aspiring dictators in other countries have been brought to heel and held to account.

Soon, very soon, Americans will be called upon to leave the comfort of their homes and the anonymity of their computer screens to engage in massive, coordinated action to remind Trump and Musk that they are servants of the people, not vice-versa.

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Copy editing by the great Gina Patacca

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.