So much shit but first the Coup.
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.
When I wrote my 2017 CNN essay, “Trump and Bannon’s Coup in the Making,” that described Donald Trump’s intent to give power to “a small group of loyal insiders, who take orders directly from the leader’s inner circle and…bypass those of the existing federal government and party bureaucracies,” Musk was not on my radar. Today, Musk would replace Steve Bannon in the title.
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.
Only with coups –or crackdowns initiated in response to coup attempts, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s post-July 2016 purges—do you see such a rush to punish and expel non-loyalists from the government.
The new administration also builds on the idea of “power verticals” such as that created by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who allied with oligarchs and billionaires to expand control of the media and other sectors and allow him to consolidate his personal power. Those personalist dynamics characterize current autocracies in Turkey, Hungary, and India, and the support Trump receives from media tycoons such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are an American equivalent.
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.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump watch the launch of a SpaceX Starship rocket test flight, Nov. 19, 2024, Brownsville, TX. Brandon Bell/Getty Images.
Musk’s Autocratic Capture
Musk already had dangerous amounts of power in America due to his defense and other government contracts that make our national security partly dependent on his products. His takeover of Twitter, a platform widely used by governments and politicians around the world, gave him even more leverage. What he lacked was the key to the castle, a way to get control of government from within. The $250 million he spent to help Trump get elected helped to unlock the door. And so DOGE was created as a vehicle for his infiltration.
The press reported on Musk’s unusual and constant presence at Mar-a-Lago, and the input he had on the presidential transition process, but did not highlight the likely aim behind it: to insert his private businesses into the governance equation. Employees from SpaceX and other Musk entities interviewed potential appointees for the Trump administration.
Now Musk and his surrogates have physically occupied the Office of Personnel Management, setting up beds to have a 24/7 presence. They have also infiltrated the General Services Administration, which manages technology in government buildings. Thomas Shedd, a former software engineer at Tesla, is now director of Technology Transformation Services within the GSA.
That means that random individuals, whose credentials seem to lie mainly in their loyalty to Musk, now have enormous power over America’s purse strings and access to a treasure trove of sensitive personal data. They locked out the federal employees to prevent any obstructions to this access.
This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.
Yet Musk did not need to deploy a private army to stage his coup. He was given permission to stage this operation by Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager. Acting Deputy Treasury Secretary David Lebryk, a career civil servant, resisted when Musk allies demanded access to the payments system. Lebryk was then placed on administrative leave, at Bessent’s suggestion.
According to a person interviewed by Politico, Musk’s team gained entry on Bessent’s assumption that the DOGE team’s access would be “read-only.” But Musk’s social media posts indicate an intention to cut off funds of people and organizations designated as enemies.
When extremist and proponent of Evangelical Christian holy war Gen. Michael Flynn claimed on X that Lutheran Family Services charity and aid work was a cover for a “money laundering operation” that profits from federal funding, Musk responded: “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”
Musk and his minions are not working alone to destroy America. The GOP, Heritage, and many American actors are embedded in foreign autocratic and right-wing populist networks, while billionaires Musk and Thiel (and their muse, Curtis Yarvin, who tells his followers that “democracy is done”) have ambitions on a global scale that hinge on destroying open societies.
Through his various investments and companies, Musk is a business partner of China, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and other autocracies, and has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose dream is to see America implode from within. Even if Musk were removed tomorrow, he is part of a larger design to wreck America as a functioning democratic society and a global power. It is now America’s turn to be a laboratory of autocratic innovation.
