Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has seized control of the Treasury Department. He is deciding who the government pays and who it doesn’t. The federal payment system he has access to contains the Social Security numbers and even the bank account information of nearly every American. It also has information about Musk’s private sector competitors that he can now use for his own self-enrichment. Musk has given a handful of inexperienced young coders control over this sensitive system, where they can—and reportedly have—started to mess with its code. At least one of them is not even old enough to drink. This is a hostile takeover of the finances of the United States government. It’s blatantly unconstitutional. It’s a coup. It sounds like the treatment for a Gerard Butler action flick.
But there’s more! The administration is freezing funding for climate and infrastructure spending despite numerous court orders. Trump just released a ton of water into California’s Central Valley in a publicity stunt. All he accomplished is screwing over farmers who will likely need that water in the summer; it did absolutely nothing to fight the (mostly contained) fires that devastated the state last month. His administration is waging an all-out war against trans people and seems on the verge of all but ending gender-affirming care for minors. As I write this, American planes are flying migrants to Guantanamo Bay, where they will be held in a concentration camp. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—supposedly one of the normal people in this administration!—just reached an agreement with El Salvador where it will accept deportees of all nationalities, including Americans.
This is all very bad. Saying that it is very bad feels like an understatement. There is an ongoing oligarchic takeover of the United States government. Donald Trump’s authoritarian project has never been more threatening and fully realized. Things are already so much worse than his first term. The first time around, the president was stymied by legislative checks, particularly by a handful of congressional Republicans who occasionally emerged to block him, a still embryonic political project that had a dearth of apparatchiks to fulfill his (often insane) requests, and a bureaucracy that often frustrated his unconstitutional overreach and general authoritarianism.
All of this (and the litany of horribles I haven’t mentioned) has happened over the course of two weeks. Most of Trump’s nominees aren’t even confirmed yet. There are no signs of a brewing rupture between Musk and Trump. Every sign points to the fact that this is going to get a whole lot worse. Many signs suggest that there may be no coming back from this.
Why has has the response been so muted? There has been a sense since his re-election that much of the public is simply exhausted by an wearying decade of Trump and is doing what it can to tune him out. It’s hard not to blame the populace for taking a break from the daily grind. If you were born at toward the end of the last century, it’s possible you’ve never voted in a presidential election without Trump on the ballot. That’s a hellish quarter-century to live through.
In some quarters, a fighting spirit is stirring, and members are starting to sound like the #Resistance Dems of old. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ron Wyden, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have taken on the administration and publicly condemned Musk’s role as a shadow president perpetrating an ongoing takeover of the U.S. government; on Tuesday evening, there was a large protest at the Treasury Department attended by two dozen members of Congress.
But there’s also been the return of an old malady: The mainstream press’ wholesale inability to grasp the magnitude of Trumpian misrule and capture the existential threat he poses. There is also the standard illiteracy and dysfunction among many major outlets that fails to rise to the moment: Over the past two weeks, for example, New York Times headlines have argued that the plain text of the Constitution is actually a matter of partisan argument and that the Treasury system Musk and his Muskrats have taken over is a legitimate means of deficit reduction; Bloomberg somehow found the only liberal legal scholar willing to say that the constitutional order has been resilient against Trump and for some reason published his take despite it very clearly being incorrect.
These are facts, I’m afraid: Over the last two weeks, the incoming president, has disabled most of the federal government as he figures out how to purge the federal bureaucracy and remake it into an instrument of personal revenge and self-enrichment. To do this, he has empowered the richest person in the world to take control over the federal government’s financial machinery and given him permission to refashion it at the source code level. To say that seems hysterical. To experience it seems insane. But that’s precisely what’s really happening.
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