Is America in the midst of an attempted coup? Yes, I think that’s pretty obvious and I’m not alone just ask Tim Snyder, Kara Swisher, Scott Gallaway, Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, oh never mind, a lot of people are calling it a coup. And when I say a lot of people I do mean actual people, unlike how a certain someone uses that phrase as a prefix to inaccurate statements. Yes, many real people who know what they’re talking about are calling this a coup d’etat.
As some of these people have pointed out Merriam defines a coup as “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.” So is it violent enough? I think that depends on who you ask and we’re still in the attempted part, we have a lot of room left to get much more violent.
So let’s look at the rest, namely is there a decisive exercise of force by a small group to alter our existing government? That is undeniable to everyone except those people who made this possible by believing every ounce of disinformation that this regime has fed them.
So maybe it’s a good time to recap how our government is supposed to function and then compare that to what is happening now. Okay, so on a Federal level, we elect representatives that go to the House and the Senate and they make these things we call “laws.” And through these “laws,” we often appropriate money to finance the things that Congress deems necessary based on their understanding of what the public, who voted them into office, might want. That’s how we get things like foreign aid, or the Department of Education, or a million other things. Does everyone always agree? Of course not. Has our system been gamed or exploited or compromised over the years? Yes, of course, and we have added ways to correct for that even if those ways are slower than we would often like. And yes, money has corrupted our system to the point where our elections are flawed and we need to address that corruption. But what’s happening here is an attempt to change the very nature of our government by force.
Before I get into what’s happening though it’s important to understand that most Democracies fall into something very undemocratic through the election of corrupt government officials who seek to strip power from the masses. In our case that’s been the republican party for the past 40 years, we just happen to live in the moment where they are finally getting very close to succeeding.
So what is happening right now? Well, anyone who followed Project 2025 predicted that they would try to do everything possible to test our checks and balances. We knew they would try to purge government employees and supplant them with loyalists in all of our institutions. We knew they would attempt to gut all social safety protections, consumer protections, environmental protections, and so on. And we knew they would work to make future elections inconsequential. That was all laid out in the Project 2025 blueprint they put forth. What I didn’t see coming was how adding Elon Musk to the mix could act as an accelerate. Why so many people have bought into that guy has always amazed me, he’s such an obvious huckster, but his ability to fool people has drastically tightened the timeframe of their ability to dismantle our government.
Let’s start by saying that Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency are not legally authorized to do anything, let alone access our systems, freeze funds and kick out legitimate government employees. There is no legal framework for this to be happening and it has already spurred on dozens of lawsuits. But check this out, people who orchestrate coups don’t follow the law. I know right? That complicates things. So we knew going into this that the first test would be in the lower courts. That’s because the Republicans have captured the Senate, the House, the Presidency and the Supreme Court. Although, oddly enough, our biggest mystery player in all of that mix is Amy Coney Barrett. Everyone else throughout the entirety of the Republican party is one hundred percent dedicated to ending our Democracy, except for her. We don’t know for sure where she is on all of this. When things go to the Supreme Court, as they likely will, she’s the only wildcard. That kind of blows my mind.
So how’s it going with the lower courts? We’re going to find out in the coming days. For now though the Republicans are disregarding any court stays and are lying about it. By many accounts, Elon Musk is still accessing our systems against the stays that the courts have called for. So what has he been doing with the backing of the Republican party? Well, the one example that we have the best documentation of is that he infiltrated USAID, put everyone on leave, froze all funds and locked employees out of their emails and all systems. He then took to Twitter and wrote, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” That doesn’t sound threatening at all, I’m sure he was joking. Anyway, there are a lot of ways to criticize USAID, like every component of our national defense it has been used to do bad things. But it also provides aid, including AIDS medication, malaria prevention, food programs and much more, to millions of people and all of this was cut off overnight. Think of the chaos that has ensued for some of the poorest people on the planet, perpetrated by the richest man on Earth. But, besides the suffering of people in far-off lands, let’s talk about what this means to our Democracy right here at home.
USAID is a real agency signed into law and was funded by ongoing appropriations that had oversight and were debated in Congress. It was just closed down by a thing called DOGE, named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a meme coin, that has no legal authority within the framework of our constitution whatsoever. See? Do you get that? Which one of these things sounds like an agency within a functioning Democracy? And is this violent enough for you? Because there are many more details of harassment and doxxing and horror stories of stranded employees and all kinds of things that no one would want to experience happening right now to the people in this agency. There was an interview on Meet the Press today with a USAID employee who felt the need to conceal their identity out of fear for their family. Do we think that’s a joke? That it’s all fake?
Meanwhile, Republicans are getting on TV and trying to claim that this is normal. You probably have delusional friends sharing memes about how great this all is. Or the twelve ridiculous items that USAID paid for that the Washington Post has already debunked. And right now Elon Musk is still infiltrating various government computer systems. He has private information of all federal employees, including the CIA and FBI. That means he may have access to not only their financial information but also portions of their security clearance records. He already has access to our Medicare and Medicaid systems, the Treasury, NOAA, Office of Personal Management and the Department of Education. He said he plans on going into the FAA and the SBA next. Is he going to unwind programs, fire employees and freeze funds that have already been appropriated by Congress in those agencies like he did with USAID? Will the Republicans claim that it’s all legal? If they continue to defy the lower courts what authority exists to stop them? If they clear that hurdle then what, if anything, can stop them from doing whatever else they want to do?
And then, do we have a Democracy? No, we’ll have what can only be described as a successful coup d’etat. The next few months are crucial, tens of millions of our fellow citizens are in a fog of misinformation and have come to believe, thanks to the disinformation apparatus of the Republican party, that somehow all of this is restoring Democracy.
Yes, Virginia, this is a coup and the villains are out of the shadows. Which in a way is good, because now we know who they are in no uncertain terms. None of this is inevitable, they don’t really have the power they claim to have, it’s mostly just persuasion and smoke and mirrors and being bullies. They can be stopped. And when we do stop them we’ll have to put new measures in place to make sure this never happens again.
But first, we have to stop them.