Get familiar with it and stop it
The Musk-Trump administration is not looking to reduction-in-force its way to cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. That’s a smokescreen. What they’re attempting, says Paul Krugman, is an autogolpe, a self-coup. And with “the full support of every Republican in the House and the Senate.”
“The federal work force is no larger now than it was under Dwight Eisenhower,” writes the economist. Laying off federal workers doesn’t even put a dent in $2 trillion. So why do it?
It’s an attempt to capture the government wholesale. It’s a purge. Pure and simple. Throw out the old. Indescriminately. Bring in the newer, truer believers. Even if some Trump babies get tossed out with the bathwater. Republicans have long been willing to scarifice their own so long as they believe far more on the left will die a swift political death. *
Krugman writes:
Musk-Trumpocracy’s illegal shutdown of USAID should be seen through this lens. Musk clearly hates the idea of helping people in need: just look at the rage he has expressed over the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife. While he may believe that the agency is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”, it also serves the purpose of purging civil servants while demagoguing to Trump’s base. The same can be said of the confected furor over DEI.
It hardly needs pointing out that the attempted purge at the FBI, targeting anyone who investigated Jan. 6 rioters or Trump himself, is an integral part of the autogolpe. And so, obviously, is the terrifying attempt of Musk and his acolytes to seize control of the Treasury payments system and give crucial power to rewrite the code to a 25-year-old who turns out (surprise!) to be a racist and eugenicist.
(Please note that it was the Wall Street Journal that outed the racist-eugenicist.)
So, now what? Is it stoppable by people who still believe in our democratic republic?
The resistance to this attempted coup is still expanding. But so is the coup itself. Trump’ AG Pam Bondi just disbanded the task force that targets Russian oligarchs.
Pam Bondi ends FBI effort to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics
It’s a race to save the republic and we in the resistance are playing catch-up.
Krugman suggests:
The good news is that there are many ways in which an autogolpe delayed can become an autogolpe denied. The alliance between Musk and Trump, two men with giant but obviously fragile egos, could break down. Musk’s meddling at Treasury and the assault on federal workers may lead to some highly visible disasters. Voters may eventually realize that Trump’s claims of success are smoke and mirrors and wonder what happened to his promise to make groceries cheaper.
But waiting around for Musk-Trump to fail is whistling past the graveyard. Politics, it’s said, is not a spectator sport.
Anat Shenkler-Osorio tells Anand Giridharadas that if 3.5% of the population can change the course of a nation, then we’d best get to it:
“It turns out that no autocracy in the world has withstood that sliver of a population, engaged in active, ongoing, IRL resistance, refusal and ridicule.” (IRL= in real life, for the initiated)
That means you can do everything from learning and spreading Know Your Rights to stop ICE in their tracks, calling Dem lawmakers with concrete and specific demands to grind Congress to a halt, organizing very localized actions (think about your next school board or city council meeting) to beat down bad bills and demand good ones, just to name a few. This current administration of the bullies for the billionaires is hellbent on sweeping shock and awe — but what actually happens in our country comes down to what we do together in the places where we live.
Most politicians do not care what you think, she believes, but they pay close attention to what you do. MSNBC Thursday night reported that a large crowd of protesters rushed to where Musk’s DOGE goons where scheduled to visit the Department of Labor. Musk’s brigands for some reason never arrived. And a judge blocked access.
It’s going to take more than clicktivism. Visible protests matter. But so do small actions. In bulk. Flooding phone lines and clogging in-boxes matter. Like Anat said, they may not care what you think, but they watch what you do. Volume and numbers are persuasive.
* In North Carolina as we speak, Judge Jefferson Griffin, the Republican loser in last fall’s state Supreme Court race, is asking courts to throw out 60,000+ ballots in his contest — Ds, Rs and UNAs — because he believes on balance that the revised vote count will erase his 734-vote loss.