Break, throw, kick, scream
As Paul Krugman said Friday, what the Musk and Trump are attempting is a self-coup with “the full support of every Republican in the House and the Senate.”
“The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, told The New York Times:
“We’re talking about the idea of whether the president has to follow the law at all,” Nyhan said. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to say about the United States, but here we are.”
The GOP has not only rejected democracy, as David Frum predicted tardily six years ago., but the American experiment itself. The very idea of it. All that’s left of the Republican Party is crumpled bunting. It’s not clear if their goal now is the return of the monarchy or feudalism. Oligarchy is too soft a term. Trump wants to be king. He’s always wanted to be king. But Musk? He and his Silicon Valley chums want to be gods. Ill-tempered ones at that.
And a large faction of our neighbors, both the complacent and the violent, are prepared to allow it.
This week has felt like one of those nightmares in which you’re trying to run from a pursuer but your legs don’t seem to work.
What’s stunned us (even those who warned what was coming) is the speed and nastiness of Trump 2.0. Trump with his vengeance-palooza and Musk with his deep hatred of people who spend their lives in public service not trying to maximize their wealth. Trump thinks they’re losers out to get him. (He thinks the world is out to get him.) Musk, as evidenced by his palling around with racists and a eugenecist, really does seem to embrace a “master race” ethos. He wants inferiors not just out of the government but out of the gene pool. He’s as gleeful about his work as a Bond villain mowing down the hired help. (He’d find the comparison flattering.)
Musk is malware burrowing deep into the software of the United States, and no one is quite sure what he’s doing in there.
Also stunning is how Senate Democrats (unless I missed it) did not make more of an issue of Pam Bondi’s confirmation evasions by drawing a direct, very public parallel with Bill Barr’s confirmation and tenure as Trump AG. Barr elided through his grinning teeth during direct Senate questioning and then went to work serving as Trump’s personal attorney instead of guardian of the law. No one should have missed that that’s just what Pam Bondi would do the moment she was sworn in. But they missed the opportunity to state the obvious. Now that she’s launching investigations into a list of enemies she swore her department would never have, it simply looks like for Democrats it was fool me twice, shame on me.
Josh Marshall has this advice from Thursday:
I had been somewhat pessimistic about what I was seeing from congressional Democrats on this front. But starting yesterday they began to change their tune and started saying explicitly that the budget and debt ceiling were a key lever for them in handling the situation. That’s real progress. But I think the terms need to be sharpened a lot. The standard should be: no help on the budget or the debt ceiling until the lawbreaking stops. Period. End of story. No wilding gangs marauding through the federal government. End the criminal conduct. Period.
That’s it. No nuance.
That is, if the party can find it within itself.
And yes, this isn’t creepy at all.
