Wednesday Reads: Of Course It’s a Coup.

Good Afternoon!!

Of course it’s a coup, and it is moving unbelievably rapidly.

Timothy Snyder at Thinking About: Of course it’s a coup. Miss the obvious, lose your republic.

Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”

And that sort of coup attempt would have failed.

Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.

A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.

In the third decade of the twenty first century, power is more digital than physical. The buildings and the human beings are there to protect the workings of the computers, and thus the workings of the government as a whole, in our case an (in principle) democratic government which is organized and bounded by a notion of individual rights.

The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.

In gaining data about us all, Musk has trampled on any notion of privacy and dignity, as well as on the explicit and implicit agreements made with our government when we pay our taxes or our student loans. And the possession of that data enables blackmail and further crimes.

In gaining the ability to stop payments by the Department of the Treasury, Musk would also make democracy meaningless. We vote for representatives in Congress, who pass laws that determine how our tax money is spent. If Musk has the power to halt this process at the level of payment, he can make laws meaningless. Which means, in turn, that Congress is meaningless, and our votes are meaningless, as is our citizenship.

Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse: Is It Really a Coup?

Is it really a coup if it doesn’t feel like one? If your day-to-day life hasn’t changed? Can it be a coup if I can still write posts like this?

What we’ve seen over the last two weeks and accelerating over the weekend looks like a coup, a hostile, undemocratic takeover of government. Merriam-Webster says a coup is “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.” No violence so far because this is a coup fueled by tech bros, not the military. But we’re watching the alteration of government happen before our eyes.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls it “a new kind of coup,” writing in Lucid about Elon Musk’s seeming power sharing with Trump: “And here is where the U.S. 2025 situation starts to look different. The point of personalist rule is to reinforce the strongman. There is only room for one authoritarian leader at the top of the power vertical. Here there are two.” It is unusual, but it is still an effort to use extra-legal, undemocratic practices to radically alter American democracy, undoing the balance of power the Founding Fathers established between the three branches of government by consolidating power in the hands of the presidency as a complacent, Republican-led Congress looks on.

Monday night, Heather Cox Richardson started her nightly column by explaining that if Republicans wanted to do away with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the federal agency the Trump administration suddenly shuttered over the weekend, they could do that legally. Republicans now control the White House and Congress. There is a 6-3 majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents on the Supreme Court. But instead of doing it lawfully, with Congress passing a bill for Donald Trump to sign, Richardson writes, “They are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.”

Richardson concluded: “The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.”

So, “coup” is the correct way to label the transformation of government we are living through. But with so much continuing normally, it’s easy to doubt what you’re seeing. Even experiencing it from the perspective of historians who understand this moment through the lens of history, it doesn’t seem quite real.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat at Lucid: A New Kind of Coup: Trump and Musk are Updating the Autocratic Playbook.

It seems like the plot of a political thriller. We are living through a new kind of coup in which Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has taken over the payment and other administration systems that allow the American government to function, and has locked out federal employees from computer systems. Many of Musk’s collaborators in this endeavor previously worked for his private companies and/or helped him take over Twitter.

Musk is subject to no Congressional or other oversight because he seems to have no real official function other than as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a plunder operation that was named after the cryptocurrency DOGE….

What is happening now builds on classic authoritarian dynamics as I described them in Strongmen and in many essays for Lucid. There is always an “inner sanctum” that really runs the show, with its mix of family members and cronies, some with histories of working with or for foreign powers. And there is almost always a purge of the federal bureaucracy. That is now being carried out on a mass scale.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, and others have analyzed these processes and the interrelated factions that are implementing what I have called a Fascist-style counterrevolution: the MAGA loyalists inside and outside of the GOP, the Project 2025/Heritage Foundation crew (roughly two-thirds of the executive orders Trump has issued conform to Project 2025 plans), and the technocrats around Musk and Peter Thiel.

Vice President J.D. Vance shows the overlap among the categories. Vance is a MAGA loyalist; he wrote the forward to Heritage CEO Kevin Robert’s book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America; and he is the surrogate of Thiel, who bankrolled not only Vance’s Senate race but also his private business ventures.

All of these individuals and groups want to rearrange government around an extremist ideological project of Christian nationalism and White supremacy, and most of them want to enact neoliberal deregulation and privatization meaures to “free” America from “corruption” and “drain the swamp.” This is part of the “revolution” Roberts has long talked about, and it has a history that runs through right-wing dictatorships across a century.

The speed of its implementation makes Trump’s takeover stand out within an authoritarian framework. The more corrupt and criminal the autocrat, the more he is obsessed with punishing enemies and feeling safe. Cue the immediate execution of the revenge and retribution part of this plan, with anyone who was involved in attempts to bring Trump and his collaborators to justice for the Jan. 6 insurrection or anything else, FBI employees included, is now a target.

Dave Troy at America 2.0: America Under Attack, Week 2: What We’re Monitoring.

Attacks on the United States have unfolded much as anticipated, with Donald Trump issuing an overwhelming number of executive orders and provocations, while Elon Musk dismantles the government from the inside out. Frankly, the number of individual actions taking place are too many to count, much less keep up with. Tariffs and market crashes are old news, while capturing Gaza is the latest provocation. Rather than react to everything, we are taking an active stance in monitoring several specific attack vectors. Here’s what we’re monitoring this week.

Neoreactionary Movement and Network State

In addition to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, the public is beginning to become aware of the names Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and Balaji Srinavasan. Those of us watching the rise of extremism in tech circles know these names well, but they have been less well-known to lawmakers. Yarvin seeks to eliminate government where possible and privatize the rest. One of Yarvin’s proposals, called “RAGE” stands for “Retire All Government Employees.” Yarvin is also a monarchist, and Musk sees himself as king. Several of his team of young DOGE engineers are also aligned with Monarchism. Several politicians are being briefed on the Neoreactionary movement and its connections to Musk. The related “Network State” movement led by Srinavasan is also rooted in Neoreactionary philosophy and has been linked to Trump’s efforts to annex Greenland. (See: Meet the Bros Behind Trump’s Greenland Bluster; See: Neoreactionary Movement Memo)

DOGE: Agency ‘Deletions’ and Illegal Activity

Elon Musk has engaged a team of young engineers to attack and shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as well as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and 18F, a technology services arm of the General Services Administration. DOGE has also been reported to have altered contracts across multiple agencies (including plans to sell or eliminate real estate holdings), as well as gained direct read-write access to the US Treasury’s payments systems, pushing new code into live production use. This presents a serious security and operational risk to the United States. The House Oversight Committee has voted to subpoena Elon Musk for testimony before the committee.

Project Russia

We have previously reported on Project Russia, the Kremlin’s plans for destroying Western democracies. Musk’s current actions — nullifying the rule of law, bypassing Congress, introducing financial instability — are aligned with prescriptions outlined in Project Russia, which include replacing democracy with a supranational monarchy led by an enlightened prince-king. Project Russia also includes plans to collapse the global economy, especially the dollar. Uncertainty around tariffs along with government shutdown (March 14) and potential US debt default (Q2 2025) pose major national security risks. (See: Project Russia: The Kremlin’s Playbook for Undermining Democracies)

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: A Full-Blown Constitutional Crisis With No End In Sight.

Judges Can Only Do So Much

President Trump’s extraordinary assault on the constitutional order is inflicting unimaginable damage on democracy at home, on U.S. national interests abroad, on individual rights, and on the health, safety and welfare of all Americans. It is a full frontal assault on the people and on the government they elected him to run.

What now?

With congressional Republicans in abject subservience to Trump, the only potential constraint on his lawlessness are the federal courts. Emphasis on “potential.” But even if a judiciary stacked with Trump appointees stands tall, it’s critical to understand that the courts alone cannot save us from the constitutional disorder of a sidelined legislative branch over which the executive runs roughshod or of an immunized president who is not only failing to take care that the laws be faithfully executed but is violating the laws on a near-daily basis.

As I’ve emphasized this week, one important measure of how bad things will get is whether Trump begins to ignore court orders. That wouldn’t spell a constitutional crisis only because this already is a constitutional crisis. But it would mean that we’ve well and truly crossed the Rubicon into something that is no longer a democracy, with Trump as an American strongman, even if he continues to prop up some of the trappings of the former republic, like Congress. We may already be there.

Whether the judicial branch serves as a bulwark against Trump’s worst excesses or is merely the next domino to fall will play out over the coming weeks. But even if the judiciary holds the line, it cannot undo all the colossal damage already wreaked by Trump and his billionaire wingman. It can’t fully stop ongoing damage from what has already been done or fully corral future yet-to-be-done damage from a renegade Trump.

While the focus is now shifting to the courts and the dozens of important lawsuits that have been filed in recent days to try to rein in all manner of blatant presidential lawlessness, judges can only do so much. While fighting Trump in the courts is critical and could shape much of the next four years and beyond, it an extremely limited response to the breakdown in the constitutional order that is underway….

A sampling of just some of important lawsuits filed in recent days:

• FBI agents suing to stop the release of the names of employees involved in the Trump and Jan. 6 prosecutions;
• federal employee unions suing over Trump’s bogus deferred retirement offer;
• a doctors group suing over the removal of public health data from government websites;
• two anonymous federal workers suing to stop Elon Musk’s team from continuing to use an unauthorized server at OPM to send blast emails to everyone in government;
• a coalition of labor union suing to block the Musk team from continuing to access sensitive payment systems at Treasury.

This is only a partial list and excludes a whole different category of lawsuits by targets of Trump seeking to vindicate their individual rights, like trans prisoners.

Tyler McBrien at the New York Times: What Is ‘State Capture’? A Warning for Americans.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granted aides of Elon Musk access to the department’s payments system, which handles more than $5 trillion and sensitive data on Social Security and Medicare benefits and grants. The system also contains data on government contractors in direct competition with Mr. Musk’s own companies.

It was the latest troubling report of the administration’s interventions into practically every corner of the federal government that also include President Trump’s firing, sidelining and encouraging civil servants to quit.

The full picture of the government overhaul has yet to come into focus, and the contours of Mr. Musk’s role and mission in that transformation remain sketchy. (On Monday, President Trump tried to offer some clarity, saying that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”)

But the cumulative effect of these stories offers at best a complicated answer to what should be an uncomplicated question: Who exactly is running the federal government?

It’s troubling enough not to be able to answer emphatically with “democratically elected leaders.” Even more troubling is the possibility that the actual answer is Mr. Musk — the world’s richest man — and other unaccountable, unelected, unconfirmed allies cozy with the president.

Political economists have a name for that: state capture. State capture occurs when wealthy private interests influence a government to such a degree that they can freely direct policy decisions and public funds for their own benefit or for the benefit of their ideological fellow travelers (or both).

Revelations of this especially pernicious, widespread form of corruption have occurred in other countries — a striking example occurred in the country of Mr. Musk’s birth, South Africa — and they offer cautionary tales for democratic governments everywhere.

The details vary by context, but the political scientist Elizabeth David-Barrett lays out three general mechanisms of state capture. They now sound familiar: shaping the rules of the game through law and policy; influencing administrative decisions by capturing the budget, appointments, government contracts and regulatory decisions; and disabling checks on power by dismantling accountability structures like the judiciary, law enforcement and prosecution, and audit institutions like the inspectors general and the media.

Some of these strategies could come straight from the Project 2025 playbook or Trump administration executive orders. This should disturb all Americans. According to Ms. David-Barrett, state capture creates broad, long-lasting systemic inequality and diminished public services. Changing the rules of the game to allow such collusion to flourish, she writes, “leaves those few holders of economic power in a strong position to influence future political elites, consolidating their dominance in a self-perpetuating dynamic.”

Garrett Graff at Doomsday Scenario: Today, Right Now, is the Easiest Moment To Draw the Line Against Donald Trump.