How the Stupid Coup Is Going: Week Five
The Executive Branch
There are steely evil masterminds who marshal strategy and discipline to stage successful coups, but in the USA, insofar as we have any luck at all we have the luck that this coup attempt is led by buffoons. Musk and Trump's clown car been doing donuts a lot in week five of their One Ring to Rule Them All campaign, and it's not clear that either of them can drive.
This week Elon Musk went onstage in outsize dark glasses at the far-right CPAC conference where, after waving a golden chainsaw given to him by Argentina's own buffoon authoritarian, Javier Milei, he babbled incoherently and was widely said to be high as a kite. His recklessness in attempting to destroy systems he doesn't understand and along with it world stability is driven by hubris and nihilism--but also stupidity, possibly chemically enhanced. He would seem like a very sad lost lonely little boy if he weren't trying to destroy the world.
He's giving orders that are illegal in part because he doesn't have the right to give them. One of the ways too many in the mainstream media and in positions of power are failing us is by treating all decrees issuing from Trump and Musk as legitimate and consequential when they are often illegal or incoherent or because biology is among the things not determined by executive order. This might be a measure of how intimidation usurps the role of the law and, sometimes, reality.
Take Musk's most recent abuse of power--the email sent to federal employees, including some judges, insisting that they must reply with a list of five things they accomplished this week or else. It's a patronizing demand Musk doesn't have the right to make and stunningly simpleminded in its one-size-fits-all assumption that the labors of hundreds of thousands to a few million people in wildly diverse positions can and should be summarized for DOGE. Of course it's not likely most of those replies will ever be read, but the real goal seems to be further degrading and destabilizing the workforce.
[Update: looks like AI will read them, for what it's worth. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/federal-workers-agencies-push-back-elon-musks-email-ultimatum-rcna193439]
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo exclaimed, "This is a wild, WILD situation. The President is at least allowing, licensing these emails though clearly not directing them. Meanwhile parts of the uniformed military are directing civilians within DOD to ignore them. Same at State and according to Dilanian FBI. But DOJ is saying do what the boss says. It's almost like watching state disintegration in real time."
This incoherence and chaos, these contradicted and withdrawn orders, this pursuit of personal vendettas, this public cluelessness about how it all works--well stupid in this context is also weak. Trump clearly doesn't want to be president in the sense that it's a job. He wants to be president in the sense that it's a status, and would prefer to be king. The White House actually tweeted out the words "LONG LIVE THE KING!" with a picture of him smirking with a dinky little crown perched on top of his head.
What did Trump do this week? At CPAC he declared, “I beat George Washington. I love beating George Washington” and otherwise rambled incoherently and also for about 90 seconds just wandered around stage making awkward dance moves to the Village People's 1978 disco hit "YMCA." At the conference, banners depicting Trump as a Roman emperor announced the "Third Term Project." Also this week , the White House, presumably at Trump's behest, issued a readout of a phone call he had with Prime Minister Trudeau that included the sentence that the Canadian leader "acknowledged that President Trump is the only world leader who can push through a just and lasting peace.” Behind Trump are some very skillful and determined fans of authoritarianism, including many from Project 2025, but the incompetence, distraction, and narcissism at the top are probably rendering the project less effective and certainly less stealthy.
Speaking of incompetence, it remains to be seen how the military will respond to new Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former major in the Army Reserve with enormous white supremacist tattoos and a lot of baggage, issuing a bunch of orders likely to make the military less functional. Friday he fired the Black four-star general who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs. "The ouster," the Associated Press noted, "is sure to send shock waves through the Pentagon." We'll see how Hegseth's assumption that everyone who is not a white man is less qualified than mediocrities like him impacts a military that is about half Black and Latino/Latina and almost twenty percent women. He seems to be trying to create a more corruptible, malleable (and weak) military, but he may also be alienating a lot of service members. Whether this damaged military will carry out illegal orders is the unanswered question.
[Another update: "The Trump administration is developing plans to build immigration detention facilities on U.S. military bases around the country, according to an internal memo obtained by NPR." https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5307156/immigration-dhs-memo-trump-migrant-detention-military-bases]
The Legislative Branch
Like almost everyone else out there who doesn't like coup attempts, I'm frustrated by the lack of perceptible leadership from Democrats in Congress, notably House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, but also from the failure of the party to act as a party--to speak in unison and tell us they will stand strong, work together, obstruct the wrecking balls, hear our pleas. I'd like to see a big weekly "here's what we've done; he's what power we have; we hear you; we know this is not normal and we're not pretending it is" press conference but Jeffries and Schumer--I wish they'd at least convince me they fully understand this is neither normal nor about the price of eggs. The coup attempt is first and foremost against them, against Congress's considerable powers, as its leaders attempt to consolidate power in the administrative branch.
For a lot of other elected officials, in Congress and elsewhere, what began as a sense of overwhelm or paralysis or even fear has apparently turned to fury and scorn at the clown coup leaders. This week Timothy Snyder said, "Something is shifting. They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading." Senator Tina Smith said on social media of Musk's latest antics, "This is the ultimate dick boss move from Musk - except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a dick."
That's unexpected from a nice Minnesota lady and maybe a measure of her disgust (and the boldness of someone who's not running for reelection). Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren declared, "Donald Trump’s firing of military leaders — four-star General Brown and four-star Admiral Franchetti — along with top legal officers is a betrayal of legions of first rate service members who dedicate their lives to our nation’s defense. This is a growing national security risk." She also put out a scathing response to Musk's demand for a list of the five things federal employees did last week, writing up a list on behalf of Donald Trump.
Jasmine Crockett is speaking out all over the place and showing this country she's got what it takes, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has been her usual extraordinary self on social media and at rallies. But the real test of Congressional resolve will come soon, with the budget battle. Democrats have the power to block it while making demands of their own, and Indivisible is asking us all to keep pressing our representatives to do so.
(Here's Indivisible action links for senators https://indivisible.org/resource/call-now-tell-senate-democrats-use-their-leverage-government-funding-fight-stop-trump-musk and lower-house members: https://indivisible.org/resource/call-now-tell-house-democrats-use-their-leverage-government-funding-fight-stop-trump-musk.)
Congress has been drenched by a tidal wave of phone calls and met with huge turnout at town hall meetings. Congressman Eric Swalwell posted a video in which he said that at his recent town hall there was one message from the attendees: "I'm scared. It's your job to protect us. What's the plan?" The public is telling our representatives that the rules have changed and we're in an emergency. Republican representatives are getting a lot of heat, notably in the in-person town halls some of them have been doing, and that's great. Let them feel the tension between what Trump and Musk are trying to do and what the Constitution says and their voters demand. Sooner or later they will have to decide where they stand.
Maine's Governor Janet Mills famously said, "See you in court" when Trump threatened her for publicly refusing to comply with one of his attacks on trans people. She later expanded, “No President – Republican or Democrat – can withhold Federal funding authorized and appropriated by Congress and paid for by Maine taxpayers in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will. It is a violation of our Constitution and of our laws, which I took an oath to uphold." That's what we want elected officials to sound like.
The Judicial Branch
While Congress has seemed far too meek and passive, the courts have, for the most part, been bold in upholding the laws, the Constitution, the limits on executive power, and general coherence and sanity, often with biting commentary by the judges. As Robert Reich summarized it, "So far, at least 74 lawsuits have been filed by state attorneys general, nonprofits, and unions against the Trump regime. And at least 17 judges — including several appointed by Republicans — already have issued orders blocking or temporarily halting actions by the Trump regime. The blocking orders include Trump initiatives to restrict birthright citizenship, suspend or cut off domestic and foreign U.S. spending, shrink the federal workforce, oust independent agency heads, and roll back legal protections and medical care for transgender adults and youths."
This week's judicial star was U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Biden appointee, hearing a case filed by trans military service members challenging the ban on trans people enlisting or serving in the military. She told the defendants: "Can you and I both agree that the greatest fighting force...ever seen is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1% of the soldiers using a different pronoun than what others might want to call them. Do you agree with me that if our military is negatively impacted in any kind of way that matters by certain people having to use certain pronouns, we all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use, we have a military that is incompetent?" In the course of questioning the competency and coherence of both the attacks on trans people and the lawyers defending them, she also noted that the assertion in Trump's January 20th executive order that there are only two sexes, and the categories are airtight, “is premised on an incorrect biological assessment.”
Remember that the judges rule in these cases, but they only act when a case comes before them, so give some love to the people– the ACLU, Earthjustice, unions, the NAACP among them--who bring the cases to court. And they're bringing them. The Washington Post notes that after the first major power grab in this coup attempt, in the evening of January 27th, "Lawyers from six states — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Illinois and California — worked through the night to draft a complaint. By the next day, they had filed the 44-page document in federal court, one of two lawsuits that within days had blocked the administration’s move temporarily." In many cases the judges' decisions have been met with meek backing off by the administration. But the crisis will deepen when they ignore the courts altogether. We're already seeing Vance and others try to build the justifications for it.
Civil Society
The impact of the attack on the federal government, the Constitution, the rule of law, and rights is beginning to be felt. Federal employees are everywhere, and even people whose lives are otherwise comfortable and pleasant are beginning to realize what it'd be like to have, for example, the national park system fall into chaos because staff levels have been slashed. (Many parks are not opening up reservations for campgrounds or rafting permits because of the crisis.) Yosemite National Park employees hung a huge American flag upside-down over the great stone face of El Capitan this week as a distress signal. The economies of many rural regions and small towns depend on national park visitors, and the ripple effect of rendering the parks understaffed and unsafe or just closed are already being felt. Too, park service employees are generally not who people hate on when they hate on government employees as useless bureaucrats.
We're starting to see federal workers with kids and mortgages suddenly out of work, whether it's a park ranger in rural America or a USAID worker overseas or a healthcare administrator in a regional office. Countless more are fearful, destabilized, uncertain about their future, and that's going to have a ripple effect, socially and economically. "The Trump administration’s mass firings may ultimately amount to the biggest job cut in U.S. history," notes CNBC, adding that it could devastate local economies. A friend who lives near the capital writes, "I’m not sure the rest of the country fully grasps the panic and anger building in DC, MD, and VA. The entire economy of this area is about to collapse. Paychecks are stopping. Careers are ruined. Taxes are about to plummet."
Regular people are seeing services they depend on under attack or are losing confidence that they will remain functional. Now almost all of us have something in common, and who knows but that this coup attempt will unite us in some new way? Most of us like safe transportation, mail delivery, public health, a stable world, competent management of our nuclear weapons stockpile, national parks, an economy that isn't in collapse. One result of all this is that approval ratings for Musk and Trump are plummeting. Under authoritarianism what we think and want is not supposed to matter. Our job is to make it matter.
I do not know where we go from here. No one does. I think the clown show has to implode at some not too distant point, but at every point we need to be there to insist on the the rule of law and the rights of all of us, especially the most vulnerable and the most targeted. Some of you may be in the same boat I'm in, as people who didn't exactly expect to be defending the government (against the government), but we're doing it so we can get back to the good old days of vehemently opposing a specific policy or politician in the confidence that the Constitution holds and with it our rights and the system of laws.
No one knows what's going to happen, but I know we have the capacity to participate in deciding what happens. That is the best this nation has ever, incompletely and imperfectly, offered, and it's worth fighting to keep it. And then to try to make it better.
