kottke.org posts about USA
I have one kid entering college this fall and one a few years away, so I've been thinking (with fury and sadness) about the effect that Trump's authoritarian regime is having on American colleges and universities. They're pulling funding from schools; schools are cancelling programs, freezing hiring, and cutting back on admissions; and NIH and NSF funding is being curtailed and withdrawn. College students are being snatched off the streets by ICE & DHS and schools either can't or won't do anything to stop it. If these actions persist, US colleges & universities could look quite different in a year or two.
In a piece called The End of College Life, Ian Bogost calls the potential effect of these changes a "calamity" and says "the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends".
Any one of the Trump administration's attacks on research universities, let alone all of them together, could upend the college experience for millions of Americans. What's at stake is far from trivial: Forget the frisbees on the quad; think of what it means to go to college in this country. Think of the middle-class ideal that has persisted for most of a century: earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.
This might all be changing for fancy private schools and giant public universities alike. If you, or your son, or your daughter, are in college now, or are planning to enroll in the years ahead, you should be worried.
I am curious to hear from parents of high school and college students, from college faculty & administrators, and from students themselves: how have the actions of the Trump regime changed your thinking about college? What plans are you making or changing? Let me know in the comments. (If you don't have a membership but would like to leave a comment, just email me your thoughts and I'll post it for you.)
This is a great post from Mike Masnick about why Techdirt is writing more or less full-time about the Trump regime's attack on democracy: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not).
I agree with every word of it. One of the points he makes is that media outlets like Techdirt (and Wired and 404 Media, etc) and reporters like Masnick that cover tech and the law are uniquely positioned to understand what has been going on, particularly w/r/t to Musk's seizure of the government's computer systems:
This is the kind of thing tech and law reporters spot immediately, because we've seen this all play out before. When someone talks about "free speech" while actively working to control speech, that's not a contradiction or a mistake — it's the point. It's about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.
This is why it's been the tech and legal press that have been putting in the work, getting the scoops, and highlighting what's actually going on, rather than just regurgitation of administration propaganda without context or analysis (which hasn't stopped the administration from punishing them).
I'm not a legal expert or a reporter, but I have been covering & writing about technology for almost 30 years and when I saw what Musk was doing (in conjunction with Trump's EOs and what Project 2025 promised), I recognized exactly what was going on and started to cover it almost exclusively:
I keep hearing people saying this is a five-alarm fire but I feel like it's a 500-alarm fire...we need metaphorical fire trucks coming from thousands of miles away to fight this blaze.
Masnick's other main point is even closer to my heart:
When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it's not a "political" story anymore. It's a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.
We've always covered the intersection of technology, innovation, and policy (27+ years and counting). Sometimes that meant writing about patents or copyright, sometimes about content moderation, sometimes about privacy. But what happens when the fundamental systems that make all of those conversations possible start breaking down? When the people dismantling those systems aren't even pretending to replace them with something better?
This x 10000. Like Masnick, I've gotten lots of feedback about my pivot to covering the coup, the overwhelming majority of it supportive — even the people who have told me they need to tap out from reading (I totally get it!) are generally approving. But there have been a few disapprovals as well, in the vein of "shut up and dribble" or "keep politics out of it" — which I also understand. To an extent. They want the Other Stuff back, the art and beauty and laughter and distraction, and for me to cool it with the politics.
But echoing Masnick, I believe that covering the rapid disassembly of American democracy is not some separate thing from the Other Stuff and never has been. The reason I have been able to write freely about those things for the last 27 years is because the US has had a relatively stable democracy1 under which people feel free to innovate, create art, take risks, and be themselves. Those things become much more difficult under fascist and autocratic rule. In a recent piece, Masha Gessen describes how autocracy stifles creativity:
Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it's not frightening. It is stultifying. It's boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.
I'm covering politics in this particular moment *because* the actions of the Trump administration are threatening all of that Other Stuff, because I want to be able to go back to covering design & photography & movies & science & food & travel & cities & all the cool things humans can do, and because I want my kids and everyone else's kids to live in a stable, free society where they can make art, pursue scientific truth, be freely gay or trans, have health care, be able to have families, have a place to live, and, if they want to, write about frivolities on their websites. All of that becomes much more difficult if Trump/Musk get their way, and if I can help push back on their efforts in some small way with this platform that I have, I'm gonna do it. ✊✌️
From Angry Staffer on Bluesky on the Trump/Vance/Zelenskyy meeting:
The public nature of the meltdown amplifies the embarrassment. Unlike past Oval Office tensions — like Nixon's private rants or Clinton's discreet scandals — this clash unfolded live before cameras, capturing every raised voice and pointed finger.
The world watched as Trump interrupted Zelenskyy's attempts to discuss Russia's broken agreements, dismissing him with, "You've done a lot of talking," and Vance chimed in with, "Have you said thank you once?"
The optics were disastrous: a U.S. administration humiliating an ally fighting for survival, all while the Ukrainian ambassador sat with her head in her hands.
This wasn't a leaked transcript or a hushed rumor; it was a global spectacle, branding the U.S. as impulsive and unstatesmanlike.
Historically, Oval Office embarrassments — like Reagan's "bombing Russia" quip or Bush's awkward Merkel shoulder rub — pale in comparison. Those were gaffes, fleeting and unintentional. This was deliberate and sustained, a tag-team assault on a guest that undermined America's moral authority.
Zelenskyy came seeking security guarantees and a minerals deal, not a lecture on gratitude. Instead, Trump and Vance turned what was supposed to be an olive branch into a cudgel, canceling a joint press conference and effectively kicking him out of the White House.
The message to our allies is chilling: U.S. support comes with a loyalty test, administered publicly and punitively.
America First inexorably drifts towards America Alone. We saw this last night, as world leaders rallied behind Zelenskyy, with figures like the U.K.s Ed Davey labeling it "thuggery."
America Alone. That really sums up America's current foreign policy. Trump is remolding the United States in his own image — bigoted, confrontational, erratic, reactionary, greedy, belligerent, vindictive, petty, friendless, authoritarian — and he won't be content until the US is as lonely and isolated as he is.
Here's a straightforward description of Trump's "ambush" of Volodymyr Zelenskyy from Heather Cox Richardson:
Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office — his attendance at such an event was unusual — in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.
In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a "mob hit," spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn't land, Vance said it was "disrespectful" of Zelensky to "try to litigate this in front of the American media," when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.
Unlike many media outlets reporting on this, Richardson ties this into a previous attempt by Trump to negotiate with Zelenskyy, which ended in Trump's first impeachment:
Zelensky came across Trump's radar screen when, in July 2019, Trump tried to force Zelensky to say he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden in order to smear Biden's father Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Only after such an announcement, Trump said, would he deliver to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia's 2014 invasion.
Zelensky did not make the announcement. A whistleblower reported Trump's phone call, leading to a congressional investigation that in turn led to Trump's first impeachment. Schiff led the House's impeachment team.
Talking Points Memo similarly did not mince words: Trump And Vance Ambush Zelensky In Prelude To Betrayal.
President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance moved to betray a key U.S. ally that has lost hundreds of thousands of people in fending off a Russian invasion on Friday, taunting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at an Oval Office meeting after spending weeks trying to undermine the bilateral relationship.
The Oval Office blowup, in which Trump and Vance berated Zelensky as ungrateful while dismissing the prospect that Russian President Vladimir Putin might renege on a potential ceasefire agreement, is a culmination in a weeks-long campaign to choreograph an end to U.S. support for Ukraine.
It occurs to me after reading about the meeting that Trump's actions here are partially motivated by a desire for personal retribution against Zelenskyy for not helping him smear Biden in 2019. Zelenskyy told Trump no and Trump wants revenge — and he's gonna turn his back on Ukraine and Europe to get it.
Trump just kicked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the White House after berating him for being "disrespectful" in the Oval Office.
The astonishing turn of events could scramble international affairs in Europe and around the globe. During his visit with Trump, Zelenskyy had planned to sign the deal allowing the U.S. greater access to Ukraine's rare earth minerals, then hold a joint news conference.
Instead, Ukraine's leader left the White House shortly after Trump shouted at him, showing open disdain. Untouched salad plates and other lunch items were being packed up outside the Cabinet room, where the lunch between Trump and Zelenskyy and their delegations was supposed to have taken place.
The White House said the Ukraine delegation was told to leave.
"You're gambling with World War III, and what you're doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that's backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have," Trump told Zelenskky.
My god, Trump and Vance are just total fucking assholes. The US is openly aligning themselves with Russia against Ukraine and Europe, a major shift in international relations that dates back to the 1940s. I am so embarrassed to be an American right now.
Update: The NY Times has some key excerpts from the meeting in the White House.
Vance: And do you think that it's respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
Zelensky: A lot of questions. Let's start from the beginning.
Vance: Sure.
Zelensky: First of all, during the war, everybody has problems, even you. But you have nice ocean and don't feel now, but you will feel it in the future.
Trump: You don't know that.
Zelensky: God bless, you will not have a war.
Trump: Don't tell us what we're going to feel. We're trying to solve a problem. Don't tell us what we're going to feel.
Zelensky: I'm not telling you.
Trump: Because you're in no position to dictate that. Remember this: You're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel. We're going to feel very good.
Zelenskyy's English is obviously not super strong but Trump sounds like a 4-year-old in full "you're not the boss of me" mode here. So glad he has control of America's armed forces and nuclear arsenal!
This is excellent reporting by the Times (although at times it makes Musk's actions sound heroic rather than unconstitutional, criminal, and treasonous) on how Elon Musk took over a huge chunk of the US government, which he still controls today. It began at a Republican fundraiser in September of 2023:
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company's servers.
Wouldn't it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
Musk, motivated by the Biden administration's regulation of his companies, went to work:
Seasoned conservative operatives like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate Mr. Musk about the workings of the bureaucracy. Soon, he stumbled on an opening. It was a little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.
Mr. Musk and his advisers — including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.
They would call it the U.S. DOGE Service, and they would not even have to change the initials.
They began their move on the digital service unit earlier than has previously been reported, The Times found, while President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still in office — giving them the ability to operate on Mr. Trump's first day.
And now here we are, an unelected private citizen in charge of the US government:
The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk's associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A month into Mr. Trump's second term, Mr. Musk and his crew of more than 40 now have about all the passwords they could ever need.
His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.
Read the rest of it for how it was all hurriedly planned out ahead of time.
The central point of Dr. Brooke Harrington's essay about the destabilization of "basic systems we count on to make our society function" over the past month is bang on:
This promises to be a tough way for Americans to learn a critical fact too often overlooked: that one of our country's greatest and least-appreciated assets has been public faith and trust in a variety of highly complex systems staffed by experts whose names we'll never know. In fact, high levels of trust used to be one of our superpowers in the United States: specifically, that meant trust in our government to operate with reasonable competence and stability and without the kind of corruption that has hobbled other societies.
In this video, David Lynch talks about the effect of depression on creativity:
It stands to reason: the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you're truly depressed, they say you can't even get out of bed, let alone create. It occupies the whole brain, poisons the artist, poisons the environment; little room for creativity.
But his assertion can be easily extended to how instability in one's life leads to an inability to live fully. Stability and lack of corruption allows people to live their lives, make art, engage in commerce with each other, build families, and strive to be their best, authentic selves. The US has never been completely stable or uncorrupt, but we're at real risk of losing something incredibly valuable here...and it'll be difficult to get it back when it's too far gone.
From David Wallace-Wells, a reminder that those who were considered alarmists at the beginning of the pandemic were ultimately proved right — it actually was an alarming situation.
Today, the official Covid death toll in the United States stands at 1.22 million. Excess mortality counts, which compare the total number of all-cause deaths to a projection of what they would have been without the pandemic, run a little higher — about 1.5 million.
In other words, the alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else. That includes Anthony Fauci, who in March 2020 predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths and was called hysterical for it. The same was true of the British scientist Neil Ferguson, whose Imperial College model suggested that the disease might ultimately infect more than 80 percent of Americans and kill 2.2 million of us. Thankfully, the country was vaccinated en masse long before 80 percent were infected...
I'm also going to point out that those who were labeled alarmists about the impact of Donald Trump's presidencies were also "closer to the truth than anyone else", certainly closer than all those centrist "pundits". I'm particularly thinking of those who knew when they woke up on November 9th to a Trump victory that Roe v Wade was toast and that Americans' civil rights would be taken away and were called "hysterical" (there's that word again) for saying so.
Whoa, HBO has made a third installment of Eyes on the Prize, the landmark series on the American Civil Rights Movement. The trailer is above and you can watch the six-part series on HBO or Max right now.
The first two series, which are amongst the best television ever aired, covered events from 1954–1965 (part one) and 1965–1985 (part two). Eyes on the Prize III covers significant events from 1977-2015, including:
- Community activists in the South Bronx and Philadelphia fighting for fair housing and healthcare during the Carter administration
- Reaganomics and the AIDS crisis
- How the criminal justice system affected the Black community from 1989-1995 in Washington DC and South Central Los Angeles (the LA Uprising).
- The Million Man March in 1995.
- The environmental movement (1982-2011)
- "The complexities of affirmative action policies and how a changing demographic landscape affected school desegregation in new ways."
- The soaring police brutality of the Obama years.
- The birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Featured participants include Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, congressman Kweisi Mfume, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Al Gore, Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, and dozens of other activists, scholars, and politicians.
In a review for the Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg writes:
Eyes on the Prize III is, as the title suggests, a formal sequel to Eyes on the Prize II, a six-hour exploration of the "aftermath" of the Civil Rights Movement that makes it very clear that the movement has never ended, just as its real concerns were never fully resolved. It's an emotional, inspiring and righteously angry series of vignettes that looks backward, while very clearly intending to reflect upon and instigate conversations about our fraught current moment.
The series isn't perfect, but it's utterly essential, sometimes feeling disheartening for the immediacy of that necessity.
In a post on Bluesky, Fienberg says "nothing you could watch this week is better".
From @existennialmemes on Tumblr:
Listen, if a Bad President can come in and take away our rights and we're dependent on a Good President replacing them in four years to give us back our rights, then we do not have any rights.
If politicians can take or distribute them, then they're not "inalienable" and they're not "rights."
We don't have inalienable rights we have conditional privileges, divvied out according to the whims of whoever currently holds the reins.
And if we want to have actual rights, then we must build a system in which no one has the power to take them away to begin with.
I am wondering what a system like that would actually look like... (via @halaylah.bsky.social)
The Guardian profiled a number of people fired from the agencies that manage federal lands - the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc. — purged from their jobs by the Trump/Musk administration.
Victoria Winch, US Forest Service wilderness forestry technician, Flathead national forest, Spotted Bear ranger district, adjacent to Glacier national park, Montana:
People come on to these lands to hunt, to feed their families. People are allowed to get firewood. Outfitters, who are a big part of the local economy, use these trails.
But every single field person at Spotted Bear was terminated. Those trails won't get cleared this year. And it takes less than one season for them to be totally impassable.
Nick Massey, USFS wilderness Ranger, Pisgah national forest, North Carolina:
We were very, very busy with public interaction, conversations, giving directions, educating. I would come up on folks quite often who were either lost or having some sort of emergency, and I'm also a member of two mountain rescue teams in the area.
I really loved seeing so many different people from different walks of life. Being able to be a part of that wilderness experience that people are having was really, truly magical.
Other fired federal land and National Park employees have been sharing their stories with media and on social media, highlighting how little these purges are about saving money and much more about all the services and benefits that Americans will be losing that we paid for. (Their stories also highlight the lies about employees not being fit for their jobs being used as the pretext to fire them. And the lack of due process. And, and, and...) Here are a few of those stories.
Brian Gibbs, Educational Park Ranger at Effigy Mounds National Monument:
I am a father, a loving husband, & dedicated civil servant.
I am an oath of office to defend and protect the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
I am a work evaluation that reads "exceeds expectations."
I am the "fat on the bone."
I am being trimmed as the consequence of the popular vote
I am the United States flag raiser & folder
I am my son's "Junior Ranger" idol
I am a college kid's dream job
Alex Wild, park ranger:
Today I lost my dream job as a permanent park ranger in the NPS. I'm still in shock, and completely devastated. I have dedicated my life to being a public servant, teacher, and advocate for places that we ALL cherish. I have saved lives and put my own life at risk to serve my community.
I honestly can't imagine how the parks will operate without my position. I mean, they just can't. I am the only EMT at my park and the first responder for any emergency. This is flat-out reckless.
The NY Times published an overview of the firings and their effect on federal land management, including interviews with purged employees:
Arianna Knight, 29, of Bozeman, Mont., the wilderness trails supervisor for the Yellowstone District of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, was let go on Feb. 14 along with more than 30 other Custer Gallatin employees. Ms. Knight said she and two workers under her supervision typically cleared 4,000 downed trees and logs from hundreds of miles of trails each year, often hiking and using hand tools for a week at a time in wilderness areas, where federal law prohibits motorized vehicles and mechanized tools like chain saws.
Now those trails won't be cleared, Ms. Knight said, adding, "People are going to suffer."
And:
While it may seem as if the cuts will mean fewer people trampling through the parks, allowing ecosystems to regenerate, some fear the opposite: that less oversight and control over huge crowds may damage the parks for seasons to come.
Adam Auerbach, 32, a former park ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, said visitor numbers at the park has been climbing consistently for decades, to more than four million in 2023 from 2.6 million in 1990. The park has had to institute a timed-entry permit system to control the numbers.
With the new cuts, he said, "There will be fewer rangers on the ground to enforce regulations and fewer public educators to help the public even understand the regulations and the reasons for them in the first place."
From a news release by the Association of National Park Rangers:
Rick Mossman, president of the Association of National Park Rangers (ANPR) said, "These actions will hurt visitors and the parks they travelled to see across the United States. If a visitor is involved in an automobile accident in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, or has their car broken into at a trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, there will be a delay in the response by a ranger to investigate — or perhaps no response at all. If a visitor suffers a medical emergency while hiking in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, ranger response could be delayed."
Mossman went on to say that visitors are likely to experience reduced hours or days — and even closures — of visitor centers and other public-use facilities. Ranger-led educational programs will be reduced or eliminated. Trash and litter may accumulate, and restrooms will be dirtier because of reduced maintenance and fewer custodial workers. There could even be complete closures of some parts of parks to protect visitors and those park resources.
From the National Parks Conservation Association:
In a phone interview, Moxley said she had to walk away from a year's worth of research and work on wetland restoration, invasive plant documentation and funding efforts to save Harper Ferry's remaining hemlock trees from a devastating invasive insect called a woolly adelgid.
Adding that she speaks on behalf of herself and not Harpers Ferry or the National Park Service, Moxley said parks — large and small — have behind-the-scenes staff who work to protect natural habitats, historic structures and museum objects and exhibits.
"Visitors don't usually encounter us, but without us, there would not be sites to enjoy," Moxley said. "Without staff, the National Park Service will be unable to carry out its 100+ year mission to leave the parks unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. This is a mission my colleagues and I take seriously."
Russell Vought is a Christian nationalist, a significant contributor to Project 2025, the policy director of the RNC's platform committee for the 2024 election, and is currently the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In 2023, he gave a private speech at a meeting of his Center for Renewing America think tank in which he describes the goal of the purge of governmental employees that's happening right now. A short clip of the speech obtained by ProPublica:
A transcript:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
From the accompanying article:
In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. "We have detailed agency plans," he said. "We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on."
Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America's priorities.
"We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, 'That's an inappropriate use of what you're trying to do,'" he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd's murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.
In another video, Vought stated that the "entire apparatus" of the US government was vulnerable and "exposed to our strategy". And in this one, he talks about the president's need to be able to ignore laws.
Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote about Vought today too: The obscure manifesto that explains the Trump-Musk power grab.
In 2022, Vought published an essay in the American Mind, a publication of the arch-Trumpist Claremont Institution, that provides an answer to some of these questions. Read properly, it serves as kind of a Rosetta stone for the early days of the Trump administration — explaining the logic behind the contemptuous lawbreaking that has become its trademark.
Beauchamp continues:
Vought believes that executive agencies have, with Congress and the courts' blessing, usurped so much power that the Constitution is no longer in effect. He believes that presidents have a duty to try and enforce the true constitution, using whatever novel arguments they can dream up, even if the rest of the government might reject them. And he believes that threatening to ignore the Supreme Court isn't a lawless abuse of power, but rather the very means by which the separation of powers is defended.
Russell Vought can call this whatever he wants, but it's fairly clear what it amounts to: a recipe for a constitutional crisis. And it's one the president currently appears to be following to a tee.
You should read both articles in their entirety.
Part of what this underscores for me is that this is not just Elon Musk's coup. Musk seems to be following his own playbook but it's clear that there are multiple, intersecting, mutually beneficial things going on there with Trump, Musk, Vought, and many Republican members of Congress. As Osita Nwanevu wrote recently in the Guardian:
Democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.
Not sure what else to say about this...their plan is all laid out in Vought's remarks and in Project 2025. They've crossed some of this stuff off of the checklist already, so I guess we should be on the lookout for the rest of it, e.g. when/if protesting ramps up as the weather warms, we should expect Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and attempt to use the US military to quell dissent.
Elon Musk has claimed that his "DOGE" team has found evidence of "massive fraud" at the Social Security Administration, alleging that 150-year-old Americans were receiving benefit checks. I saw this claim easily debunked over the weekend, but Wired has a good writeup of it. Basically, the programming language that these systems are written in (COBOL) often uses an arbitrary date as a baseline...most commonly a date from 150 years ago.
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration's benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA's databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.
COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk's cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.
Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the "Convention du Mètre."
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
The SSA also automatically stops benefit payments whenever someone reaches the age of 115.
Brian Merchant, author of the excellent Blood in the Machine (about the Luddites), talked to a bunch of federal tech workers about the illegal purge of federal employees and shuttering of entire government agencies (also illegal): "what's happening, how they're processing it, and how they're pushing back".
"I will also say that as the Thursday deadline [for the initial fork in the road offers] approached OPM sent out these increasingly desperate emails that felt like nothing so much as a Democratic candidate at a fundraising deadline," one worker told me. He says his team of over a dozen will soon be down to just a handful of employees. Another tells me that people of color are disproportionately being targeted for layoffs in their department. But DOGE is also trying to winnow staff through other means, too: Demanding a return to office, even for those hired as remote workers and who have never stepped foot in a government office, while at the same time, instructing the GSA to sell off or close federal buildings — making it even harder for employees to find an office to come into.
It all underlies the callousness at the heart of DOGE's campaign, and the fact that this is an effort to hollow out the state, the firings unfurling often regardless of what a person or department really does.
"I am not a career-long gov employee by any means but even I can feel how the bedrock assumptions of what we do are being swept away," a federal technologist told me. "Like clearly the people in charge have no interest in the missions of the agencies and there isn't any recourse to stay the courts, as far as we can tell."
"If they even sweep away USAID, the velvet glove of US imperialism, because they occasionally piss off Putin and Orban," he adds, "then it's not clear how much hope there is for things like clean air and food stamps."
"I had BigBalls in a meeting," another worker told me. "When I saw him I balked, and I thought 'Oh hey, someone brought their teenaged son to work today.' He showed up along with some others, and was not introduced as anything but an advisor." In fact, that was one of the leading DOGE officials, wielding significant power over the US government.
(via the morning news)
Professor Christina Pagel of University College London has mapped the actions of the Trump administration's first few weeks into a Venn diagram (above) with "five broad domains that correspond to features of proto-authoritarian states":
- Undermining Democratic Institutions & Rule of Law; Dismantling federal government
- Dismantling Social Protections & Rights; Enrichment & Corruption
- Suppressing Dissent & Controlling Information
- Attacking Science, Environment, Health, Arts & Education
- Aggressive Foreign Policy & Global Destabilization
This diagram is available as a PDF and the information is also contained in this categorized table. Links and commentary from Pagel can be found on Bluesky as well.
Also very helpful is this list of authoritarian actions that the Trump administration has taken, each with a link to the relevant news story. I will be referring back to this list often in the coming weeks.
Jamelle Bouie has started posting video essays on his YouTube channel about the current US political crisis. His latest one is an adaptation of his NY Times piece, There Is No Going Back.
Now, even if Musk had been elected to office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of power in American history. That is unquestionable. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payment system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub Americans' data unilaterally. And no private citizen has the authority to access some of the most sensitive data the government collects on private citizens for their own unknown and probably nefarious purposes.
Bouie has also regularly been posting videos to his Instagram (bio: "National program director of the CHUM Group") and TikTok.
Speaking of Timothy Snyder, Literary Hub published the first chapter (the one on not obeying in advance) of his 2017 book On Tyranny. It begins:
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.
It's also worth reading the original list posted by Snyder in November 2016 that became the basis of On Tyranny: Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.
10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.
11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.
12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.
Writing from Ukraine on his way to the front in the country's war with Russia, Timothy Snyder muses about the differences in life & freedom on the Ukrainian & Russian sides of the war's front line.
Yet, on this, the Ukrainian side of the line, people lead completely different lives than under Russian occupation or in Russia. Ukrainians say what they want, including about the war and about politics. Journalists cover the war and write about politics. There is fear, although less than you might think; but it is fear of bombs and missiles and violence from Russia, not of denunciations or oppression or of one's own government. I have the strange feeling, this week in Kyiv, that Ukrainians are living freer lives now than Americans. At a book store where I was talking to a Ukrainian philosopher about freedom, a young woman put her hand on my arm and said "sorry about the U.S."
Snyder then goes on to wonder if the United States is now headed towards a similar line:
I have in mind something deeper: the transformation of our public and private lives. As in Russia, we have let local newspapers and local media die. As in Russia, their place was taken by a few commercial operations. As in Russia, the media are owned by oligarchs, who then become close to government or submit to it (not all of the media in America, of course, are submitting, but far too many are). As in Russia, our daily lives are flooded by such a rushing river of contradictory lies that we have trouble knowing where we are, let alone what we should do. As in Russia, a president supported by oligarchs and their media power is trying to humiliate the other branches of government. The executive is seeking to marginalize the legislature — forever — by ruling without passing laws. The executive is seeking to marginalize the judiciary — forever — by ignoring court rulings. Those things, of course, have already happened in Russia.
This passage made my stomach drop:
As I close my tablet and go to sleep, I am safer than every single one of you reading this in the United States, and indeed safer than I would be in the United States. My train will stop in five hours. But America will keep hurtling.
It's a great, provocative piece; read the whole thing.
This piece at The Verge from Elizabeth Lopatto is a great recap of Elon Musk's coordinated attack on the infrastructure of the US federal government. I particularly appreciate the dozens of links throughout the piece that provide context for the text, a demonstration of the powerful utility of hypertext.
But I do have a criticism and I think it's an important one: this is not solely Elon Musk's coup. Here's the lede:
Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, America has gotten herself a new king. His name is Elon Musk.
"Wait a minute," you may be saying. "What about President Donald Trump?" Trump ran, much like Silvio Berlusconi before him, primarily to avoid prosecutions. He has never liked being president and he has already gotten what he wants. He's not the power center. Musk is.
Consequently I will not be bothering with whatever statements Katie Miller of DOGE and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are putting out. We all have eyes; we can see what is going on. Musk has taken over the civilian government. This is a billionaire pulling a heist on the entire nation.
The Verge is not alone in asserting this — Carole Cadwalladr's latest piece is almost entirely about Musk's actions. While I agree that Musk is the sharp end of the spear and what he's doing (and has already done) is of unprecedentedly massive concern, this single villain view of the coup is incomplete, for two main reasons:
- The executive branch is fully participating in the coup. Musk is acting on behalf of Trump and with his public approval. This cover matters, even if Trump isn't actively directing what Musk is doing (he surely isn't), even if Trump doesn't actually know what exactly Musk is up to and why (he probably doesn't), and whether Musk's and Trump's agendas overlap (only partially).
Additionally, through his executive orders, Trump is also attempting to seize governmental power that doesn't reside in the office of the president. The data & systems that Musk now has access to will be useful to Trump in executing these power seizures. The chaos Musk is creating will also be useful in distracting from Trump's own authoritarian objectives.
- In standing by and allowing Trump & Musk to seize power that is not constitutionally theirs, the Republican-controlled Congress is fully participating in the coup. Most of the power being grabbed here is that of Congress...and they are just letting it happen.
Let me put it this way: let's say this afternoon Elon Musk is somehow stopped, fired, thrown out of the country, divested of all his companies. The coup would continue. Perhaps not as vigorously as before, but it would continue because the executive branch and Congress are fully on board. It's important that we don't lose sight of this larger picture.
Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost from The Atlantic talked to four experienced federal-government IT professionals who have all "built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure" that Elon Musk's team of young hackers are attacking. They are beyond concerned about the potential consequences.
Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. "This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country's history—at least that's publicly known," one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. "You can't un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want."
What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE's incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE's ambition.
The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government's IT operations told us, "I don't think the public quite understands the level of danger."
For example:
Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person's mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.
Karen Attiah wrote a short opinion piece about how the nationwide assault on diversity, equity and inclusion led by conservatives is actually aimed at resegregation and how being precise in our language about what's happening is crucial.
These facts, taken together, point to the removal of Black people from academic, corporate and government spaces: resegregation.
People are vowing to push back with their wallets — to shop at Costco and boycott Target, for example. But I believe the fight starts with language. Journalists have a role and an obligation to be precise in naming what we are facing.
Frankly, I wish the media would stop using "DEI" and "diversity hiring" altogether. Any official, including the president, who chooses to blame everything from plane crashes to wildfires on non-White, non-male people should be asked whether they believe that desegregation is to blame. Whether they believe resegregation is the answer. We need to bring back the language that describes what is actually happening.
When I write about difficult or contentious topics where I want to take great care to not be misunderstood and to be as accurate as I can be, I always think about this piece by history professor Michael Todd Landis on the language we use to talk about the Civil War & slavery.
Specifically, let us drop the word "Union" when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in "Union troops" versus "Confederate troops." Instead of "Union," we should say "United States." By employing "Union" instead of "United States," we are indirectly supporting the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a "sandy foundation" (according to rebel Vice President Alexander Stephens). In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished; etc. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared.
Landis notes that scholar Edward Baptist also uses different language:
In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books), he rejects "plantations" (a term pregnant with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of "labor camps"; instead of "slave-owners" (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human beings), he uses "enslavers." Small changes with big implications. These far more accurate and appropriate terms serve his argument well, as he re-examines the role of unfree labor in the rise of the United States as an economic powerhouse and its place in the global economy. In order to tear down old myths, he eschews the old language.
German museums and public remembrances of the Holocaust use similarly precise language:
Just as important, the language they used on the displays in these places was clear and direct, at least in the English translations. It was almost never mealy-mouthed language like "this person died at Treblinka"...like they'd succumbed to natural causes or something. Instead it was "this person was murdered at Treblinka", which is much stronger and explicitly places blame on the Nazis for these deaths.
This is why I've been so insistent on describing the events of January 6, 2021 as an attack on Congress and as a coup attempt:
This was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt. Can you imagine what the mob in those videos would have done had they found Nancy Pelosi? Kidnapping or a hostage situation at the very least, assassination in the worst case. Saying that this was an "attack on the Capitol" is such an anodyne way of describing what happened on January 6th that it's misleading. Words matter and we should use the correct ones when describing this consequential event.
In writing about the 2025 Coup, I've been careful to call it a coup because it is. I've been repeating words like "illegal" and "unconstitutional" because these actions attacks by Trump and Musk are just that. Our government's computing systems have been "seized" or "broken into to" or "hacked" (illegal!) rather than "accessed" (sounds routine). In his piece yesterday, Jamelle Bouie argued for more precision in how we describe the coup:
To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we're experiencing. "Constitutional crisis" does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress's decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.
One of the reason people get so upset at media like the NY Times and Washington Post is because the language they often use is so watered down that it's actually not truthful. Take the initial opening paragraph to this NYT piece about Trump's statement about wanting to ethnically cleanse Gaza:
President Trump declared on Tuesday that he would seek to permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of Gaza and take over the devastated seaside enclave as a U.S. territory, one of the most audacious ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.
(They later changed "audacious" to "brazen".) Audacious? Brazen? Advanced? Ideas? These words all have meanings! And when you put them together, it makes Trump sound like some genius superhero statesman. And "seaside enclave"? That is technically correct but it sounds like they're talking about fucking Montauk. This is terrible writing that fails to communicate the truth of the situation.
Here's why this matters: imprecise and euphemistic language is the language of fascists, authoritarians, and oppressors — power-craving leaders who either don't want people to know what they are doing or don't want them to think too hard about the illegality or immorality of their actions. The Nazis had all kinds of euphemisms — the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", "protective custody", "work-shy", "enhanced interrogation" — to mask their mass imprisonment activities and mass murder.
In 1946, Nineteen Eighty-Four author George Orwell published an essay called Politics and the English Language in which he decried the "lack of precision" of political writing:
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
And from his concluding paragraph:
...one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits...
You can read Orwell's whole essay here.
I don't always succeed, but I try really hard to use precise, concrete language in my writing. As Attiah urges, we should want and expect our media to do the same — anything less is an abdication of their duty to their readers to tell them the truth.
Historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, is urging people and the media to understand and acknowledge that what's happening right now is definitely a coup.
Imagine if it had gone like this.
Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil's Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like "all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler."
Historically, that is what coups looked like. The center of power was a physical place. Occupying it, and driving out the people who held office, was to claim control. So if a cohort of armed men with odd symbols had stormed government buildings, Americans would have recognized that as a coup attempt.
And that sort of coup attempt would have failed.
Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.
A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.
That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed.
This long post by Mike Brock at Techdirt does a great job in laying out the many reasons why we should be concerned about Elon Musk's power grab. Here's just part of the section about all of the federal laws he is breaking:
When Congress passed 18 U.S.C. § 208, they were imagining scenarios where federal officials might have access to some information that could affect their private interests. But Musk's situation goes far beyond anything the drafters likely contemplated—he has gained access to the actual machinery of government while simultaneously running multiple companies directly affected by that machinery.
Consider what this means in practice: Through DOGE, he has access to sensitive Treasury data while running public companies whose stock prices could be affected by that information. He can see classified materials while controlling SpaceX, which competes for national security contracts. He has visibility into federal agency operations while owning a social media platform that shapes public discourse about those agencies.
The Ethics in Government Act and STOCK Act were designed to prevent federal officials from using nonpublic information for private gain. But Musk isn't just getting occasional access to sensitive information — he's gained unprecedented access to core government systems while maintaining control of companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The potential for using this access to benefit his private interests isn't incidental — it's systematic and structural.
I really appreciate Heather Cox Richardson's daily newsletter for providing historical context to what's happening right now. In this morning's letter, after summarizing the Musk/Trump attacks on our government (most of which I linked to yesterday), Richardson talks about the history of the liberal consensus, the post-WWII agreement about how government should be deployed and how that consensus is coming to an end (gradually, then suddenly).
Musk's takeover of the U.S. government to override Congress and dictate what programs he considers worthwhile is a logical outcome of forty years of Republican rhetoric. After World War II, members of both political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. The idea was to use tax dollars to create national wealth. The government would hold the economic playing field level by protecting every American's access to education, healthcare, transportation and communication, employment, and resources so that anyone could work hard and rise to prosperity.
Businessmen who opposed regulation and taxes tried to convince voters to abandon this system but had no luck. The liberal consensus—"liberal" because it used the government to protect individual freedom, and "consensus" because it enjoyed wide support—won the votes of members of both major political parties.
But those opposed to the liberal consensus gained traction after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. Three years later, in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent troops to help desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those trying to tear apart the liberal consensus used the crisis to warn voters that the programs in place to help all Americans build the nation as they rose to prosperity were really an attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially Black Americans. Such programs were, opponents insisted, a form of socialism, or even communism.
That argument worked to undermine white support for the liberal consensus. Over the years, Republican voters increasingly abandoned the idea of using tax money to help Americans build wealth.
This is a great piece by Jamelle Bouie, which lays out in plain language what Musk and Trump are doing to the federal government, why it matters, and what can be done about it.
To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we're experiencing. "Constitutional crisis" does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress's decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.
Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.
If Trump, Musk and their allies — like Russell Vought, the president's pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget and a vocal advocate of an autocratic "radical constitutionalism" that treats the president is an elected despot — succeed, then the question of American politics won't be if they'll win the next election, but whether the Constitution as we know it is still in effect.
Very much worth reading the whole thing — I found his conclusion somewhat unexpected (but IMO correct).
It's a couple of days old by now, but this Bluesky thread by Abe Newman ("someone who spent a decade studying how centralized information systems are used for coercion") does a great job in laying out some of the stakes and potential consequences of Musk's & Trump's illegal seizure of some key operations of the federal government.
These systems seen arcane and technical but are critical to key operations of the federal government — payment, personnel, and operations. In good times they make the trains run on time, but now they may be exploited for control.
Newman links to reporting that detail that these operations are controlled by Musk: payment, personnel, and operations. But seeing them as part of a bigger strategy is important:
The first point is to make the connection. Reporting has seen these as independent 'lock outs' or access to specific IT systems. This seems much more a part of a coherent strategy to identify centralized information systems and control them from the top.
Newman continues:
So what are the risks. First, the panopticon. Made popular by Foucault, the idea is that if you let people know that they are being watched from a central position they are more likely to obey. E.g. emails demanding changes or workers will be added to lists...
The second is the chokepoint. If you have access to payments and data, you can shut opponents off from key resources. Sen Wyden sees this coming.
Divert to loyalists. Once you have a 360 view, you can redirect resources to insiders and cut off the opposition. Reports suggest the GSA has a whiteboard with properties being sold. Who are they going to? Watch out for sweetheart deals.
What happens though, when you try to manipulate these systems at the same time that you gut the administrative state? Bad stuff. You get miscalculations, overreactions and unanticipated consequences.
This is a key point: the way in which and the speed at which this is being done, combined with other actions (many of them illegal and unconstitutional) being taken by the administration (Trump's Executive Orders about freezing funding, etc.) is evidence of an overall strategy:
The overarching takeaway is that the plumbing is political and politicians and the media need to focus on what Musk is doing as a strategy.
A couple things that Newman doesn't mention specifically are how controlling these operations can be used to restrict people's speech & actions and the massive potential for theft and grift. If there's no longer any oversight, they can do whatever they want.
In her latest installment of Letters From an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson writes about the ongoing coup of the US government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
I'm going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.
But they are not doing that.
Instead, 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.
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.
But Republicans are allowing Musk to run amok. This could be because they know that Trump has embraced the idea that the American government is a "Deep State," but that the extreme cuts the MAGA Republicans say they want are actually quite unpopular with Americans in general, and even with most Republican voters. By letting Musk make the cuts the MAGA base wants, they can both provide those cuts and distance themselves from them.
But permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution. It also makes Congress itself superfluous. And it takes the minority rule Republicans have come to embrace to the logical end of putting government power in the hands of one man.
I am *begging* you to read Richardson's piece (and all the other stuff I've been posting this week) and to take it seriously. There has been remarkably little coverage of this in the national press (compared to, say, tariffs) and IMO this is much more serious because if they have control over the IT and payment functions of the US government, they can do almost whatever they want without having to pass laws or argue in front of judges or tell people what they're doing at all. I keep hearing people saying this is a five-alarm fire but I feel like it's a 500-alarm fire...we need metaphorical fire trucks coming from thousands of miles away to fight this blaze. I know this sounds cuckoo bananapants but like Jamelle Bouie said the other day:
honestly think some of the hesitation here is that no one wants to sound like a crank. i was talking at an event last night and even i felt like a crank while i was speaking!
simply repeating the straight reporting of what is happening in the executive branch makes you sound like you have lost your mind.
Will Stancil on Bluesky:
I don't know how to say this any louder
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS MORE RADICAL, MORE FASCIST, MORE VIOLENT THAN ANYONE IN MAINSTREAM POLITICS OR MEDIA IS WILLING TO ADMIT OUT LOUD
THEY ARE FULLY IN THRALL TO A MOVEMENT OF ONLINE NAZIS THAT WANT TO END AMERICA AND KILL MANY, MANY PEOPLE
They do not care about fixing anything. They do not care about running the government. They want to set the Constitution on fire, destroy the federal government, and torture and murder their enemies for fun. This is their only true political commitment
It's beyond insane - it's suicidal - that our leaders and our commentators and our media won't talk about what's really going on here. They maintain the pretense that this is all about policy differences, but MAGA is barely even bothering with the pretense of a mask anymore
I agree 100% with Stancil here — it is so completely obvious what Trump and the Republicans are trying to do (they are not hiding it!) and it's maddening to watch the media and Democratic politicians treat this like any other political situation: "that this is all about policy differences". They are trying to destroy American democracy and amass power for themselves and the oligarchs that support them — that's what autocracies are for and it's why Trump and Republicans want one.
We've seen this happen with brittle governments all over the world for the past century — it's not a novel situation — and Republicans have decided that now is the moment to strike our teetering democracy. They convinced voters to roll a wooden horse covered in MAGA stickers inside the city walls and now they are going to hollow it out from within. That's the game and the sooner everyone wakes up to this truth, the sooner we can try to fix the situation.
Update: Jamelle Bouie: If All This Sounds Delusional, That's Because It Is.
Put another way, the American system of government is not one in which the people imbue the president with their sovereign authority. He is a servant of the Constitution, bound by its demands. Most presidents in our history have understood this, even as they inevitably pushed for more and greater authority. Not Trump. He sees no distinction between himself and the office, and he sees the office as a grant of unlimited power, or as he once said himself, "I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."
The freeze, then, is Trump's attempt to make this fanciful claim to limitless power a reality. He wants to usurp the power of the purse for himself. He wants to make the Constitution a grant of absolute and unchecked authority. He wants to remake the government in his image. He wants to be king.
💯 Bouie is one of the few traditional media folks who sees this situation clearly.
Title quote courtesy of Bishop Mariann Budde.
Today is the fourth anniversary of the attack on Congress and attempted coup of the United States government and the man who incited it will be sworn in as President of the United States later this month. On this dark day, it is important to remember what happened and why, so I went back and looked at some of what I posted in the aftermath of the attack. Here are a few of the videos, articles, and thoughts worth a second look.
This video investigation by the NY Times (YouTube video) lays out what happened that day very clearly:
Most of the videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.
As Mr. Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his message to "walk down to the Capitol," they interpreted it as the president sending reinforcements. "There's about a million people on their way now," we heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump's speech played from a loudspeaker.
Another excellent video of Jan 6 footage was taken by Luke Mogelson, a war reporter for The New Yorker:
Mogelson's accompanying article, Among the Insurrectionists, is a must-read:
The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. "Nancy, I'm ho-ome! " a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson's character in "The Shining." Someone else yelled, "1776 — it's now or never." Around this time, Trump tweeted, "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. ... USA demands the truth!" Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker's lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she'd had a "close encounter" with rioters during which she thought she "was going to die." Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert — a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol — had tweeted, "Today is 1776."
Importantly, Mogelson's piece connects Jan 6th to other right-wing militant actions incited by Republicans and Trump:
In April, in response to Whitmer's aggressive public-health measures, Trump had tweeted, "Liberate Michigan!" Two weeks later, heavily armed militia members entered the state capitol, terrifying lawmakers.
In an Instagram video and a Buzzfeed news interview a few days after the insurrection attempt, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was quoted as saying:
Wednesday was an extremely traumatizing event. And it was not an exaggeration to say that many members of the House were nearly assassinated.
And:
The Democrat said that she worried during the storming of the Capitol about other members of Congress knowing her location and did not feel safe going to the same secure location as her colleagues because of members who believe in the QAnon collective delusion and "frankly, white supremacist members of Congress ... who I know and who I have felt would disclose my location," saying she was concerned there were colleagues "who would create opportunities to allow me to be hurt, kidnapped, etc." She said that she "didn't feel safe around other members of Congress."
AOC's comments and concerns highlight something I've been trying to be clear about in my own writing here: this was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt. Can you imagine what the mob in those videos would have done had they found Nancy Pelosi? Kidnapping or a hostage situation at the very least, assassination in the worst case. Saying that this was an "attack on the Capitol" is such an anodyne way of describing what happened on January 6th that it's misleading. Words matter and we should use the correct ones when describing this consequential event.
From the Washington Post, an account of the attack from the perspective of the DC police:
"We weren't battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel," he said in the first public account from D.C. police officers who fought to protect the Capitol during last week's siege. "We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene."
Someone in the crowd grabbed Fanone's helmet, pulled him to the ground and dragged him on his stomach down a set of steps. At around the same time, police said, the crowd pulled a second officer down the stairs. Police said that chaotic and violent scene was captured in a video that would later spread widely on the Internet.
Rioters swarmed, battering the officers with metal pipes peeled from scaffolding and a pole with an American flag attached, police said. Both were struck with stun guns. Fanone suffered a mild heart attack and drifted in and out of consciousness.
All the while, the mob was chanting "U.S.A." over and over and over again.
"We got one! We got one!" Fanone said he heard rioters shout. "Kill him with his own gun!"
Here are two of those DC police officers speaking to CNN:
For This American Life, Emmanuel Felton interviewed "several Black Capitol Police officers in the days after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th to find out what it was like for them to face off with this mostly white mob":
Emmanuel Felton: Have you ever been in a fight like that?
Officer Jones: No, not like that. No way. These people were deranged, and they were determined. I've played video games before. Well, you know, zombie games — Resident Evil, Call of Duty. And the zombies are just coming after you, and you're just out there. I guess that's what I could relate it to — Call of Duty zombies. And the further you go, the more and more zombies just coming. You're just running, running, running. And they wouldn't stop. You're seeing they're getting their heads cracked with these batons, and we're spraying them, and they don't care! It was insane.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson placed January 6th within the context of the history of right-wing terrorism in the US, setting it alongside Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Bundys:
Right-wing terrorism in American has very deep roots, and those roots have grown since the 1990s as Republican rhetorical attacks on the federal government have fed them. The January 6 assault on the Capitol is not an aberration. It has been coming for a very long time.
In a 1953 speech called On the Future of the American Negro, W.E.B. Du Bois spoke about wealth inequality and his vision for measuring prosperity:
Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private fortune. We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.
Democracy Now has a recording of part of Du Bois' speech (starting at 5:48).
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