The Musk/Trump coup will not be televised | Will Bunch Newsletter

In a streak that started on Jan. 15, 1967, or six days before my 8th birthday, I have watched on television every single Super Bowl that has ever been played. Thus, I can tell you authoritatively that the Big Game has both nothing and everything to do with the current state of American politics. Let’s consider Sunday’s Super Bowl LIX a three-plus-hour break from our national crackup, but also as a celebration of the amazing talent and diversity that makes the United States worth saving.

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because/The revolution will not be televised, brother — Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” 1971

Growing up, I never believed there would be a coup d'état in America, but if it did happen, I thought I knew what it would look like. A general would pull up the White House driveway in a tank, the president would be sent packing on a flight to somewhere like Dubai, and we’d all be forced to salute the new uniformed ruling junta.

Who knew that coups in real life were a lot more complicated?! What happened in this country on Jan. 6, 2021 sure looked like one, with violent thugs aligned with the losing president in the 2020 election storming the Capitol in a bid to stop the peaceful transfer of power to the winner. No wonder Donald Trump and his MAGA allies spent the next four years shredding those ugly headlines and tossing them down the memory hole.

The next coup would be more serious, more complicated, and more insidious. More insidious because IT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW, and yet both the traditional media and the alleged opposition Democrats are struggling to define and deal with it. And also more insidious because — so far, at least — this diabolical plot is working.

The field general here, sans tank (so far), is Elon Musk, the richest man in the history of our planet, who spent at least $277 million to get the nominal 47th president elected in Trump, aided also by Musk’s ability to burn another $44 billion on taking the popular social-media site Twitter and turning it into a pro-Trump propaganda site renamed X. Since Nov. 5, Musk has been acting as a kind of co-president with a made-up platform to slash government spending called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, promises by Musk to slash $2 trillion or more in federal spending seemed silly and overblown, but now that the new regime is empowered, this DOGE has been on the hunt. Late last week, official Washington was shocked to learn that a top career official in the U.S. Treasury Department, then-acting secretary David A. Lebryk, had quit after balking at repeated requests from Musk’s team to access the highly sensitive system that handles trillions of dollars in federal payments. Then, new Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave DOGE that access.

The news that an unelected private citizen, in Musk and his young team of engineers, without security clearances now has access to the flow of federal dollars, as well as the sensitive personal data for millions of Americans that comes with that, alarmed both current and ex-government officials as well as outside experts and commentators. The move not only seemed at odds with privacy law but looked utterly unconstitutional.

That said, to call the Musk/DOGE cash-flow invasion a “coup,” as critics from the left quickly did, seemed a hard sell to a wider public that prefers politics you can squeeze on a bumper sticker, from “Build the Wall” to “Save the Whales.” “Reclaim the Treasury Payment System” probably wasn’t going to send the masses out into the streets, even if the bigger reality — an unelected billionaire asserting control over our government — is something almost no citizen asked or voted for.

But since the Treasury news, Musk and his team have been everywhere — taking over the government’s human-resource levers to threaten layoffs, impose administrative leaves, oust key officials and make very real-sounding threats to shutter key agencies, even though their funding and their very existence has been authorized by Congress. (On Monday night, the New York Times published a very good, if somewhat belated, overview of how this power grab has gone down.)

Musk’s DOGE team has essentially taken over the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, where they’ve sent mass emails to federal employees urging them to resign or seek jobs in the private sector. Who are these marauders working with the tech billionaires? WIRED reported he has a team of six young dude-bro engineers who range in age from 19 — that would be Edward Coristine, a freshman at Northeastern University who was a summer intern at Musk’s Neuralink — to 24, and have been barking orders at veteran government workers. They and their leader Musk often sleep in beds brought into the OPM offices as they work almost around the clock.

Their most intense focus has been on the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which oversees food aid, emergency relief, health programs and other projects in more than 100 countries but which Musk charged on X is “a criminal organization,” adding: “Time for it to die.” This was accompanied by missives to top USAID officials telling them to stay home, as many discovered they’d been locked out of their agency email. Monday night, the new Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was taking over USAID with an eye toward abolishing it.

It’s not 100% certain why Musk and the Trump regime seeks to destroy this key vehicle for foreign aid — some have noted the role USAID played in helping Black leaders demolish apartheid in Musk’s native South Africa — but what is clear, again, is that he has no legal authority to dismantle an agency authorized and funded by Congress. Critics say the move will be a boon to our adversaries such as Russia and China — where Musk has extensive business ties —in the competition to gain influence in developing nations. But more troubling is the wildly undemocratic way this is going down.

“Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what’s happening because these aren’t really accountable public officials,” Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told WIRED. “So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”

A hostile takeover of the government by folks who weren’t elected — whether it’s the loser in a recent presidential election, or the world’s richest man with a slew of conflicts-of-interest — is the classic definition of a coup. But the slow-moving, off-camera and behind-closed-doors nature of Musk’s insurrection — in marked contrast with the violent public clashes at the Capitol in the Jan. 6 uprising — has made it a story that TV news and other media are ill-equipped to cover.

Trump has been more than happy to provide cover for Musk by throwing CNN producers and New York Times editors slabs of juicy red meat, whether it’s imposing and then delaying massive tariffs against Canada and Mexico or making threats against Panama, while a comatose democracy gasps for air in a hospice bed far off-camera.

There were some signs Monday that this is starting to change. A small gaggle of key Democrats from Capitol Hill went to the USAID offices, tried unsuccessfully to enter the building — blocked by an officer from Homeland Security — and denounced Musk’s moves before reporters and a growing number of protesters. “This is a constitutional crisis that we are in today,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy told the gathering. “Let’s call it what it is.”

Exactly. A majority of Americans don’t want democracy toppled, but you can’t stop a coup until you call it out for what it is. Hopefully we will see more shut-it-down resistance from congressional Democrats, more protests, and more news coverage before Musk’s junta has taken full control of our government. In other words, stopping a coup requires a revolution, and maybe this time it will be televised, brother.

Question: [A]nything giving you hope at the moment? — Jamie O. (@jamieober8590.bsky.social) on Bluesky

Answer: Almost every question this week was about Elon Musk — hopefully addressed in the column above — so I’m answering Jamie’s here. That’s because what I am currently feeling just over two weeks into the nightmare of Trump 47 is a need to juggle the focus on what’s wrong with America with constant reminders about what’s great about Americans. It’s why I was driven over the weekend to tell the sad yet life-affirming story about D.C. pilot Jonathan Campos as a contrast with the ugly words emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It’s why I was glad to see The Inquirer’s editorial praising the helpers who raced to the scene of Friday’s plane crash in Northeast Philadelphia. We can’t fully fight for America’s future unless we get off the mat and take some pride in what’s right about the silent majority of Americans.

I know this will surprise you, but 100% of those who bothered to respond to a Philadelphia-based newsletter’s query about Sunday’s Super Bowl believe that our Eagles will prove victorious over the Kansas City Chiefs. Among those who felt compelled to explain, Charles Clauser wrote that the Birds are “a physically and mentally tough team, especially on the offensive and defensive lines, with the ability to wear teams down by the fourth quarter.” Dear readers, I could not agree more. Go, Birds!

📮 This week’s question: I think most readers agree that Elon Musk’s moves to control the federal checkbook and demolish entire agencies like USAID are alarming. But how should Democrats and concerned citizens try to stop this? Please email me your answer and put the specific phrase “Musk coup” in the subject line.

Despite the madness of King Donald, the beleaguered Democratic Party did manage to make the news for at least a few seconds over the weekend. The Democratic National Committee gathered just outside of Washington to anoint its Minnesota state chair, Ken Martin, as the DNC’s new leader. Martin seems to be no firebrand, but he did hit some of the right notes in his victory speech about taking the fight to Trump for the next four years. I hope Martin and other Democratic strategists took a break some 24 hours later to watch the music industry’s annual Grammy Awards.

The Grammys, like most awards shows in recent years, brought occasional bursts of politics — too much for the “shut-up-and-sing” crowd, but maybe not enough given the moment America is facing. The clip where Martin and the DNC needs to hit rewind came when 26-year-old Chappell Roan won Best New Artist for her campy 1980s-flavored pop ditties. Missouri’s former Kayleigh Rose Amstutz sings with a drag-queen aesthetic, often in a gender-bending political revolt against her repressive red-state upbringing.

Politically pressured in 2024 to take a stand as she topped the pop charts, Roan seemed to epitomize a certain kind of Gen Z voter who was decisive in such a close election. She initially expressed disdain for both parties, voiced disgust at the ongoing carnage in Gaza, and declined to endorse a candidate, although she eventually pulled the lever for Kamala Harris, reluctantly. The great mass of her Gen Z compatriots with similar vibes who didn’t vote at all arguably explains why Trump won.

In accepting her Grammy, Roan took on the CEOs of her own industry with a fervor that felt lacking last fall on the campaign trail. “I told myself if I ever won a Grammy and I got to stand up here in front of the most powerful people in music, I would demand that labels and the industry profiting millions of dollars off of artists would offer a livable wage and health care, especially to developing artists,” she said, as the audience loudly applauded. She spoke to many 20-somethings when she talked about her job and medical struggles in the depths of the pandemic, before she became famous.

Her words reminded me of the flood of health insurance horror stories that poured out immediately after December’s shocking assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the voter rage that the Democrats failed to tap in 2024 as they were busy holding Wall Street fundraisers. If Martin and the Democrats truly want to end the Trump era, they need to speak out against CEOs, like Roan did Sunday, and stop soliciting them. They need the Chappell Roan vote.

It’s hard to believe now, but a dozen years ago the GOP was in such a sorry state, at least when it came to presidential elections, that they were planning to change the rules of the game. On Feb. 4, 2013, I blogged at Attytood about Pennsylvania Republicans pushing for a system to allocate the state’s Electoral College votes proportionally, so that some would go to the state loser (like the previous year’s Republican nominee Mitt Romney). This was before Donald Trump showed them you didn’t need new rules, just a narcissistic demagogue. Read what I wrote: “Pa. Republicans have a Plan B to steal the 2016 presidential election.”

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.