There is practically no way to describe what is currently happening in the United States without sounding hysterical, or like some sort of crank—or, maybe, insane. But here goes!
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.
That’s not all! Trump and Musk have shut down the United States Agency for International Development and cut off nearly all foreign aid. This will have devastating consequences for global health, global democracy, and the future of American soft power. Speaking of: Trump has spent the early days of his presidency threatening 25 percent tariffs against Mexico and Canada for no real reason, other than that he thinks a tool that worked more than a century ago will work now. (It won’t.) Even if he doesn’t end up enacting these tariffs—which would likely be a form of economic suicide—he has already likely damaged the future of any trade agreement between the U.S. and its closest allies. He has also pardoned over a thousand violent insurrectionists and now seems ready to fire hundreds of FBI agents who helped prosecute them.
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.
I have not mentioned confirmed cabinet members like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (problem drinker who has been credibly accused of sexual assault) or those who seem on the verge of confirmation, such as Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy (conspiracy theorist, had a literal brain worm, no experience, looks and sounds like a beat-up pleather recliner). Even then, this is just a fraction of the horror that has been unleashed over the last two weeks. As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick put it, the past fortnight has been like “a distributed denial of service attack on people who believe in reality.”
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.
Now, the Republican resisters have been replaced by lackeys and cowards (sometimes a combination of both) and his administration is being staffed by fascistic loyalists eager to do his bidding; these loyalists are now engaged in a project aimed at destroying much of the existing civil service, particularly any part of it that was deemed insufficiently pro-Trump. (USAID, for instance, is under fire in part because of the perception that it is a hotbed of commies; the FBI, famously not a hotbed of commies, is under fire because they investigated Trump’s attempted coup after he lost the 2020 election.)
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.
Despite all the full-frontal fascism, the response has been oddly and frustratingly muted. The story of the first Trump administration was one in which the president constantly embarrassed the country and himself. But it was also about a clear manifestation of anger and pushback over his avowed plans (usually tweetied at odd hours) or his trying to implement them and being met with resistance. That resistance hasn’t really materialized yet. If Trump merely talked about building a moat filled with alligators at the southern border in his first term, now there’s a non-zero chance he’ll just do it.
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.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, who ostensibly don’t get to take a break from this, have in characteristic fashion, taken the wrong lessons from his re-election and seem to have spent much of the last two months paying the same consultants who lost the election to tell them how they can be more like Trump. Despite the takeover of the Treasury they are, incredibly, still voting for some of his nominees. (Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, was confirmed as Energy Secretary with seven Democratic votes on Tuesday.)
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.
Media coverage has somehow been even less inspiring than the Democratic response. During Trump’s first term, the press struggled to find a way to deal with Trump’s admittedly difficult to describe mix of extremism and incoherence. The speed of all of this and the enormity of it is, to be fair, difficult to capture. But there are bigger problems emerging in the ongoing coverage. One is simply that Trump and his cronies are taking direct action against the press, threatening to shut down via lawsuits (or, in the case of National Public Radio, defunding) any outlet that they deem as being critical and appear to be serious about it. ABC has already settled one lawsuit, while CBS seems ready to settle another—settling both would essentially amount to paying Trump protection money.
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.
Worse still, all of these old problems have been exacerbated by an emerging consensus that the media’s intelligentsia somehow extracted from Trump’s reelection campaign, which is that much of the public thought that their coverage was too sensationalist. And so there has been a palpably strenuous effort to dial things back at the very moment when Trump and Musk are escalating their war on American life. No one is crying wolf; but the wolves have arrived.
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.
