The Sound of Heads Exploding

Has There Already Been a Coup?

Although the court order mandates an immediate halt to the Musk employees’ access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, it was not immediately clear when or if they would fully comply….

—The New York Times

I have two kinds of friends. Those whose heads have exploded…and those who expect their heads will explode in the next few months. For the former, the coup has already taken place. Elon Musk and his naughty boys have hacked the government. There’s no force strong enough to stop them. For the latter, the illegal hijack attempt has been blocked, momentarily, by the courts. The results will be decided, eventually, by the Supreme Court. One hopes, for the sake of the remaining craniums of my beloved friends, this will happen soon.

Where does Sanity reside? Damned if I know. One thing is sure: Trump has chosen some smart people to dismantle the government. Their choice of USAID as lead cow to the slaughter was inspired. There are two types of average Americans: those who don’t know or care what USAID is, and those who know, and oppose foreign aid…and insist, against all rational argument, that it takes up a disproportionate amount of the budget. (Those of us who like most of what USAID does are a sliver small enough to be a rounding error.) The fact that the Biden folks marbled the USAID budget with nonsense like gender studies for Nepalese children made the target that much fatter. Next up: the Department of Education, a hive of political correctness that probably should be restored to its former residence in the Department of Health and Human Services (oldsters like me remember when it was called Health, Education and Welfare).

Here again, there’s a fork in the road. As it were, in Muskspeak. There are those who believe that it’s about time the government was culled of unnecessary fat, even if the fact is the Feds are a mostly lean, entitlement-disbursement machine. And there are those, like Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, who think the meta issue here is the very attempt by Musk to rout the government illegally:

A day later, I spoke with a Republican who worked closely with the architects of America’s botched Iraq invasion. I asked whether he had been surprised by anything so far in a Trump Administration designed to shock. Yes, he replied—Musk’s sneaky takeover of the apparatus of the vast U.S. executive branch was something entirely new in the annals of global coups. “Elon figured out that the personnel, information-technology backbone of the government was essentially the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteen-fifties television tower in the Third World,” he observed, and “that you could take over the government essentially with a handful of people if you could access all that.

On the other hand, there is Nate Moore of The Liberal Patriot who believes Musk’s sell-by date has already passed and quotes the always interesting Rep. Jared Golden from Maine:

“I’ve been getting a lot of calls over the past few days, and the interesting thing is none of them are about Donald Trump. They’re all about Elon Musk. My constituents, and a majority of this country, put Trump in the White House, not this unelected, weirdo billionaire. Musk is stepping on the president’s toes—making decisions without his approval, pursuing his own agenda. If I had an employee that sidelined me the way Musk is sidelining Trump, I don’t think I’d just sit back and take it.”

I am reluctant to buy into the coup already has happened scenario. I am, by nature, unable to imagine the unimaginable. I can’t imagine American democracy destroyed. But I know, right now, that it’s a very real possibility. I’ve seen civilized societies collapse around the world; I’ve read a lot of history…and yes, I know the Roman Republic was supplanted by the Roman Empire, which may be Musk’s model in all this (I doubt Trump would know about the Rubicon, but would certainly sniff such a moment in his feral way). I am reluctant to subscribe to Coup Theory because the American experiment has been too successful, providing the greatest good for astonishing numbers of people—but the success, the arrant affluence, has been so numbing that it has created a narcotic lassitude. You can’t have a democracy without citizens—active, engaged citizens—and we have too few of those.

Indeed, Trump is still using the 2020 election as a litmus test. As Philip Bump writes in The Washington Post:

As The Post reported Saturday, officials in Trump’s second administration have been using the 2020-election question and others to measure the loyalty of people being considered for national-security-related jobs. Asking an FBI official whether they think the election was stolen is a slightly less direct way of asking another question that has reportedly been asked: whom they view as their “real boss” — the desired answer obviously being Trump, not the American people.

There are only two types of people who think Trump won in 2020, fools and villains. My friends whose heads have exploded believe that the tide of disinformation is so powerful that most Americans can’t distinguish false narratives anymore. They have recent history on their side: Trump won the 2024 election, preaching through an asbestos curtain of lies.

My friends whose heads haven’t exploded believe that Trump’s policies will bring him down—if not the civil liberties violations that are terrifying us now, then the price of eggs…and soon, steel and aluminum, and the prices of Chinese goods at Walmart. Or they believe that there’s a basic core of decency in America that will rise up against the brutality of the new regime. How will people react if Trump actually tries to prosecute Liz Cheney (For what? You might ask. For being Liz Cheney.) or poor old Joe Biden? What happens when an ICE raid goes sideways and actual US citizens are arrested or, worse, killed. Here, I find myself siding with my Coup Accompli friends: the blanket of Machiavellian ozio—that is, indolence—is so heavy upon the land that massive public reaction against the incipient authoritarianism is unlikely.

That leaves the courts, especially the Supremes. Again, my friends divide. Those who believe the coup has taken place tend to think the Republican majority on the Court are a bunch of cowardly political hacks. Look how they delayed then niggled judgment on Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government via false electors in 2020. But today, in the New York Times, five former Treasury Secretaries were a bit more hopeful. They wrote:

As Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court previously wrote, “Even the president does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds.” Chief Justice John Roberts agrees: He wrote that “no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse.”

And if the Supremes rule 5-4 or 6-3 (I have hopes for Amy Coney Barrett) against Trump, and in favor of the Congress and Constitution? My Coup Accompli friends spiral down the rabbit hole: Trump will just ignore them. Who’s gonna stop him? The military? Doubt it. The Democrats? Hahaha. “Do you think he’ll actually allow an election if things look bad for him?” A friend asks.

Unthinkable, of course.

But I’m listening more closely these days to those who are thinking it.