Is it really a coup if it doesn’t feel like one?
Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse:
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.
[...] Why damage the American experiment as we near the celebration of its 250th anniversary? Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy had some thoughts about that as he joined his colleagues outside of USAID’s closed offices on Monday. Suggesting this was not the time to pull punches, he called it a move to benefit the oligarchs who lined the front rows at Trump’s inauguration. “Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China. And China is cheering at [the destruction of USAID]. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest: their belief that if they can make us weaker in the world, if they can elevate their business partners all around the world, they will gain the benefit.” Senator Murphy also suggested that by closing agencies and cutting back the federal workforce, conservatives could “create the illusion they’re saving money” while they pass giant tax cuts that would benefit “billionaires and corporations.” Sunday night, I called it a coup as well, writing in exasperation that “Musk and his crew of men barely out of their teens haven’t taken an oath to serve, and they are not accountable to the public. They are not a ‘Department’ of anything. They’re a private army that has taken over. Presidents can set up private advisory groups, but they have to function according to the rules, which include transparency. That’s not what’s happening here.” Worse still, there is little reason to believe that what starts in USAID, Treasury, and the FBI won’t continue to spread to other agencies that are in disfavor with Trump and Musk.
This Joyce Vance column lays it all out: Elon Musk’s coup feels like a coup in a lot of senses.
See Also:
The Present Age (Parker Molloy): The Media Is Missing the Story: Elon Musk Is Staging a Coup
Slate: Elon Musk’s Power Grab Is Lawless, Dangerous, and—Yes—a Coup
Tristan Snell: Trump already broke the law 23 times?!
