I’ve posted a few pieces by Gil Duran at the New Republic over the past year or so exposing the Silicon Valley overlords and their philosophy led by a creepy guy named Curtis Yarvin. The NY Times actually interviewed Yarvin recently, headlined, “Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.” (gift link.)
But if you want a brief overview of what’s these freaks, now exemplified by Elon Musk, are up to, this video by Duran is very helpful. They have a plan and they have a lot of money. I’m not sure they have the slightest idea of how normal people think or how they will react to all this, but it’s important to know what they have in mind in order to oppose it effectively.
Zack Beauchamp at Vox has a great piece today that I would suggest you read in its entirety if you’re feeling as overwhelmed as I am. He recaps the atrocities. You know what they are and they are legion. But he has some perspective that I think is worthwhile:
[T]here are ways to fight back — to do more than is already being done. An effective strategy would revolve around three key points:
First, Trump is weak. He has deputized Musk to grab power illegally because he doesn’t have the votes to win it through legislation. The illegality of Trump’s agenda means that there are lots of levers his opponents can pull to stop him. The most significant of these are lawsuits, many of which have already yielded injunctions against unlawful Trump-Musk orders.
Second, delay means victory. The problem with the courts is that they are slow and reactive; Trump can do damage before they intervene that may prove impossible to repair. So democracy’s defenders need to think of their jobs as buying time for the courts — blocking and delaying everything to prevent him from doing irrevocable harm to the constitutional order before he can be ordered to stop.
Third, delaying strategies help prepare America for the worst. Trump might defy a court order, sparking a constitutional crisis. In that event, the only levers remaining are extra-legal popular resistance — mass protests, strikes, and the like. The more ordinary citizens work to delay his policies now, the better prepared they will be to escalate in the event of an even deeper crisis.
He points out that one of the main strategies of this attempted takeover is to create new “facts on the ground” — to change things “so rapidly and irreversibly that even a court order can’t restore the status quo. ” But Beauchamp points out that a truly strong president would be able to get this program through congress and confer legitimacy.
[H]e wouldn’t need to unlawfully dismantle USAID; he would get Congress to pass a law abolishing it. He wouldn’t need to assert impoundment power; he could get Congress to pass a budget that reflects his priorities.
Thanks to the Republicans’ exceedingly narrow House and Senate majorities, he doesn’t have those options. To wield the degree of power he wants, he needs to depend on flagrant lawbreaking — on getting Musk and the DOGE crew to change the facts on the ground so dramatically that no one can unwind it.
The weak link here is the need for speed. To execute a “change everything before the courts get involved” strategy, you need to make the most of the time you have. But if Musk and Trump can be slowed, the entire thing could fall apart.
Beauchamp has been studying other countries’ experience with similar attempted autocratic takeovers and has advice on how to thwart this one. First he suggests that Democratic officials in Washington have a bad hand to play and that nobody should expect them to lead. He writes:
Minority opposition parties do not have a great track record in spearheading movements against democratic backsliding. They tend to place too much faith in the system and trust that the normal rules constraining power will constrain a would-be authoritarian even as the authoritarian busts through them.
“What happens is that the demagogue’s popularity drops as the corruption mounts, and the opposition parties say, ‘Oh my god, he’s at 40 percent, there’s no way we can lose, there’s no way he can steal it.’ Then what do you know — he steals it. And they never fully planned for the day after,” the anonymous democracy expert explains.
If that sounds a little like the Democratic Party’s institutional attitude in the past few years — well, you’re not wrong. And it underscores that waiting for Democrats to set the tone, or focusing on demanding more from them, is a tactical mistake.
He says we need protests:
Instead of looking to Democrats, Americans outside of government can take action on their own — directly protesting or otherwise frustrating Trump administration actions and, in doing so, setting an aggressive tone that Democrats can amplify and support from the inside. Indeed, the best international evidence suggests that only a combination of citizen and institutional pressure can halt democratic erosion once it’s begun.
And “the groups” need to come together quickly to establish a united front. Time is of the essence.
Federal workers are key:
Collectively, citizens and civil society have tremendous power. But few Americans are in better positions individually to help delay Trump than the civil servants being asked to implement his power grabs.
When asked to implement unlawful or antidemocratic orders, these workers can either openly refuse or feign incompetence to throw sand in the gears. They can look for bureaucratic chokepoints and man them. If Trump is going to treat them like the deep state, they can be the deep state.
This doesn’t depend on everyone in the federal government acting in unison immediately. Just a handful of defiant civil servants can spark something bigger.
In a recent piece for Jacobin magazine, Rutgers professor Eric Blanc argues that a series of 2018 strikes by teachers in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma — which successfully won concrete victories like higher pay — show how individual American government employees can spark broader movements of non-compliance.
Specifically, he argues that a handful of determined federal employees speaking out, paired with relatively easy actions designed to encourage others to join in, can create momentum that can translate into real disruption.
Delay tactics will only work to allow the courts time to hold the line. At this point that are the last institution standing. And if they don’t? Or if Trump goes with the “let him enforce it” strategy after all? Then we have no choice:
a massive, society-wide mobilization. Millions-strong protests, government officials refusing to work en masse, threats of general strikes: these are the kinds of radical actions that become necessary when an executive declares that the law simply doesn’t apply to it.
He suggests that contingency planning for such a mass mobilization should start right away. We just don’t know how this is going to go.
He offers all kinds of evidence from other attempted power grabs like this one to bolster his assertion that defeating this is possible. We are a unique country in a million ways but we aren’t the first, by any means, to face an authoritarian threat from within. We have strong democratic traditions and the president is weak politically and very stupid and vain. It can be done.
David Weigel wrote a piece today for Semafor called “the Resistance is working” pointing out that the Democrats are actually doing what they said they would do to push back — a well-coordinated legal strategy, which happens to be the most potentially rewarding — but that people aren’t seeing it because they are focused on the weakest link, the Democrats in Congress who have little real power and aren’t very good at resistance anyway.
Maybe it’s time to refocus ourselves as citizens on protests to support democracy?
Our friend Anat Shenker-Osorio once wrote, “Democrats rely on polling to take the temperature; Republicans use polling to change it.” Democrats are reactive, Republicans proactive. If ever there was a time for Democrats to get proactive and go on offense, it’s now.
“If the Democrats’ claim that they were fighting for democracy in 2024 seemed too abstract for many voters before Jan. 20, it is terrifyingly concrete now,” writes E.J. Dionne. He reminds we who don’t need reminding of the recent unlawful predations of the Musk-Trump cabal. But getting to the meat of it, he sounds a lot like ASO:
Democrats have a bad habit of pulling back from thorny matters by saying: “Oh, voters don’t really care about this issue.” What Republicans understand is that voters often notice an issue only if a party is persistent enough in forcing it into the public conversation. The trans debate and Hunter Biden’s problems were hardly front of mind for most voters. Republicans worked hard to put them there.
Citizens in large numbers will only start noticing how truly radical Trump’s designs are when Democrats find dramatic ways of standing up to them …
Yes, Democrats need to be for something. But Dionne suggests that FDR and Reagan first won support based on what they ran against. “In both cases, the power of negative thinking created paths to sweeping affirmative agendas.”
Where Dionne goes wrong is in heeding “party strategist” James Carville who hasn’t been right since the 1990s. Carville believes Democrats can restore their brand ahead of 2026 midterms by hammering Trump’s failure to fulfill his “No. 1 promise” to bring down “the price of everything.”
Midterms? That’s a mite presumptuous at this point.
I’ve suggested that Democrats don’t have a messaging problem so much as a “tree falls in the forest” problem. It doesn’t matter what Democrats say if no one hears it, whether it’s about the price of eggs or the collapse of the post-WWII international order. Republicans have the bigger megaphone. It’s asymmetric messaging warfare.
In this attention-driven political economy, and facing spotlight hogs like Musk and Trump, if Democrats have any chance of slamming the office doors on the Muskovites’ greasy fingers, they need to find creative, dramatic ways of upstaging them. Democrats have to get nuts, get attention, and make Americans care more about losing their country and their freedoms than the freakin’ price of eggs. As ASO put it, “to make popular what we need said.” Anything less is nation-state suicide. Never mind 2026.
But they’ll need help, Dionne suggests. The “resistance” worked the last time around:
Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist who studied the anti-Trump movement, noted recently in the New Republic that what worked the last time were the “persistent, community-based efforts by 2,000 to 3,000 grassroots Resistance groups in every town, city, and suburb across virtually all congressional districts.” The events of the past three weeks summon Americans again to diners, churches, libraries, union halls and taverns to organize, to pressure their elected officials (especially the 15 House Republicans who won last year by five percentage points or less), and to reach out to their friends and neighbors to warn them about what Trump is doing to their democracy.
“Move fast and break things” is the tech slogan inspiring what Trump and Musk are doing to our government and our constitutional arrangements. Those who want to stop their wrecking ball need to act with the same urgency.
The American military cemetery in Normandy. (Public domain via Wikipedia.)
John Harwood assesses the GOP’s “descent into nihilism” at Zeteo. It is by now so taken for granted as to go unnoticed. Not in Kiev, of course.
I don’t have a Zeteo subscription just yet, but the teaser sums up the situation nicely. Or not so nicely, if you’re still a member of what once was the party of Lincoln that now is a pathology:
The Republican Congress is dominated by sycophants, extremists, performance artists, and opportunists. Those who know better bow down out of fear, not only for their careers but also for physical safety from attack by their own constituents.
That’s because the Republican voting base is shot through with anger.
Luis Alberto Castillo, a father of one from Venezuela, entered the United States on Jan. 19, one day before Donald Trump became president for a second term — swept into office on a promise to treat undocumented migrants with a heavy hand.
By Feb. 4, Mr. Castillo was on a plane to a U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, best known for a detention center that has long held terrorism suspects accused of launching the deadliest attack on American soil.
That day, the Department of Homeland Security declared that those who had been transferred to the island represented “the worst of the worst” and were all members of a Venezuelan criminal group, the Tren de Aragua.
But in an interview from her home in Colombia, Mr. Castillo’s sister Yajaira Castillo said her brother was not a gang member to be feared, but rather an everyday Venezuelan who had fled his country because of its economic crisis.
He was targeted because he had a Michael Jordan Tattoo on his back which is apparently something that some gang members have — as well as many non-gang members in Venezuela because basketball is very popular there and Michael Jordan is an icon. I’m not kidding.
The NY Times checked and this man has no criminal record in Venezuela. He didn’t sneak across the border but presented himself and obtained an appointment as the law allowed. He is now in a concentration camp being treated like a terrorist.
The only way the sister found out about it was by happening to see a picture of his shared by Kristi Noem on social media. He’s the one in the lower right above.
Speaking of Noem, get a load of the nasty piece of work they’ve hired as the spokeswoman for DHS:
“This administration abides by the rule of law,” said the spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin. “During further assessment, intelligence officers could not definitively determine whether the individual is or is not a confirmed member of TDA,” or Tren de Aragua. “He may very well be a member of this vicious gang. He may not be.”
In a follow-up message, Ms. McLaughlin said that the department had received new information that Mr. Castillo was a member of the gang. She did not provide evidence.
“TDA is a pathetic gang for human trafficking, drug trafficking and kidnap for ransom among other heinous crimes,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “The New York Times is more interested in writing sob stories about its disgusting members than justice for its victims.”
I’m sure they’re passing this story around the White House today, and high fiving each other over it.
Trump used to say on the campaign trail that the markets were going up and inflation was coming down in anticipation of his arrival to save the country. Guess what?
Inflation heated up more than expected in January, as prices for groceries, housing and energy all picked up for Americans in early 2025, potentially complicating President Donald Trump’s agenda.
A key gauge of inflation — the consumer price index — showed Wednesday morning that prices rose by 3.0 percent in January from a year earlier, according to the Labor Department. That’s hotter than the 2.9 percent annual gain reported in December, underscoring economic concerns of Americans who voted out incumbents in federal elections last fall…
Wednesday’s data showed that consumer prices rose 0.5 percent on a monthly basis from December, the biggest increase since August 2023. Shelter costs, which grew 0.4 percent, accounted for nearly 30 percent of the monthly gain.
I’m going to guess that all this talk of tariffs has prices going up in anticipation of whatever daft declaration he’s going to make next. Certainly, calling for 25% tariffs on Canadian lumber and instigating a campaign of terror on the workers who make up most of the housing construction force in the country hasn’t helped either.
Stocks on Wall Street slumped at the start of trading on Wednesday, dragged lower by data that showed consumer prices rose more than expected in January, leaving the Federal Reserve little cause to lower interest rates again soon.
The S&P 500 fell roughly 1 percent as trading got underway. The Nasdaq Composite index, which is chock-full of tech stocks that have come under pressure recently from rising global competition to develop the chips that will power the development of artificial intelligence, also fell around 1 percent.
Oops:
Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, said President Donald Trump’s latest tariffs on Mexico and Canada could deal a serious blow to his company and the auto industry. Farley, who was speaking at a conference organized by Wolfe Research in New York on Tuesday, said that while Trump has talked about making the “US auto industry stronger,” the president’s trade policies would hit Ford hard. “So far, what we are seeing is a lot of cost and a lot of chaos,” Farley told conference attendees.
President Trump promised voters that, if elected, he would enact policies that would bring prices down on “Day 1” in office.
But three weeks into his term, Mr. Trump and White House officials have become more measured in how they discuss their efforts to tame inflation. They have begun downplaying the likelihood that consumer costs like groceries will decline anytime soon, reflecting the limited power that presidents have to control prices. Those are largely determined by global economic forces.
It’s all going very well. Eat those omelettes, folks. Nothing to see here.
He’s giving Ukraine to Vlad as we knew he would. Here’s Hegseth (after he got booed by middle schoolers) today:
I think we all expected this but watching the cable newsers like Dana Bash excitedly announce this as a “historic” moment that will change the world, as if that’s a good thing. But then I suppose they said the same thing when Neville Chamberlain declared “peace in our time” too…
The hypocrisy dials at the West Wing propaganda office are turned up to 11. Donald Trump, our first convicted-felon president, and his Muskovite DOGEes mean to screw Americans while promising to root out corruption and improve “efficiency” they have yet to properly define or document. Look Elon Musk and Trump in the eyes. Have you ever seen men more trustworthy?
What was it Michael Douglas said in Black Rain (1989)? “I usually get kissed before I get fucked.”
Here’s just some of what Musk-Trump’s torching government agencies will cost you without kissing you first.
Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum could cost consumers “an extra $8 billion per year.” That’s just for warm-ups.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Musk-Trump means to close returned to consumers over $21 billion in corporate rip-offs, junk fees, overdraft fees, and credit card late fees over its dozen-year history. It’s a net money-maker for taxpayers, returning far more than it costs. Trump is killing it off to satisfy his billionaire pals.
“Wall Street and now Big Tech don’t hate the CFPB because it’s an ineffective waste of money. They hate it because this relatively small agency punches way above its weight,” Helaine Olen writes, having “proven time and time again the government can be effective on behalf of the welfare of the people. No wonder oligarchs hate it.”
Trump’s shutting down USAID not only weakens U.S. influence worldwide. American farmers who supply food aid are out $2.1 billion in food aid the government purchases from them for the program. Thousands of American jobs will be lost, over 11,000 tracked so far, impacting over 40 states.
And the Muskovites are coming for programs millions of Americans rely on: Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. “Trump claims Elon Musk’s DOGE ‘geniuses’ have found ‘very fraudulent stuff’” declares Forbes. Anything Musk tells Trump, the con-man-in-chief believes:
Speaking en route to the Super Bowl, Trump explained: “The whole country looks like it’s a fraud. It’s fraud, waste, abuse. What Elon and his group of geniuses have found is unbelievable—and that’s just in USAID.
[…]
“Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no [Social Security number] or even a temporary ID number,” Musk posted on Saturday.
“If accurate, this is extremely suspicious,” Musk added, “if accurate” covering a multitude of fuck-ups by people who don’t really know what they’re looking at. With not “even a temporary ID number” sounding suspiciously like the effort by North Carolina Republicans to throw out 60,000+ votes based on data entry errors in the voter registration file.
This may turn into an ongoing series.
American carnage wasn’t a description. It was a vengeful promise.
Even Republicans are trying to tell their representatives something. (Have some pride and dignity fergawdsakes)
Yes, it’s true that members of that 40% may threaten to kill you if you cross Dear Leader but again, have some pride and dignity…
I read yesterday that Hakeem Jeffries and others in the leadership are angry at “the Groups” for rallying their members to call Congress.
“People are pissed,” a senior House Democrat who was at the meeting said of lawmakers’ reaction to the calls. The Democrat said Jeffries himself is “very frustrated” at the groups, who are trying to stir up a more confrontational opposition to Trump.
A Jeffries spokesperson disputed that characterization and noted to Axios that their office regularly engages with dozens of stakeholder groups, including MoveOn and Indivisible, including as recently as Monday
“There were a lot of people who were like, ‘We’ve got to stop the groups from doing this.’ … People are concerned that they’re saying we’re not doing enough, but we’re not in the majority,” said one member. “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.).
Yeah, no. They should be thrilled that the people are engaging and have their backs when they confront the Republicans over this Constitutional crisis.
My criticism of “The Groups” is that they don’t see always see the bigger picture. When they are mad *because they are observing a constitutional crisis* you have to hand it to them because they are right.
In response to’ the flurry of cases being brought against the Trump administration for its radical attempts to slash and burn all aspects of the federal government without constitutional authority, we’re seeing some arguments from Republicans that lead to the conclusion that there is at least some consideration being given to simply ignoring the courts orders. Some have evoked the likely apocryphal statement attributed to President Andrew Jackson in which he was said to have declared “[Chief Justice] “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it” which raises the question if Trump is planning to abide by Court rulings he doesn’t agree with.
The NY Times described the famous quote as “potent” because it does perfectly illustrate perhaps the most important “norm” in our system of government, the acknowledgement and acceptance of the idea set forth by The Marshall Court in the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret the rule.”
Jackson asked the frankly logical question of how such a thing could be practically enforced by the co-equal judicial branch against the executive if it has no coercive power of its own. Obviously, it depends upon the agreed upon norm by all three branches of government as well as the states that the federal judiciary is the ultimate interpreter of the U.S. Constitution.
Therefore, this concept that the judiciary is the final arbiter has always been built on a somewhat shaky premise that really comes down to “somebody’s got to be the one to decide” and I assume the idea is that the Court was considered to be the most insulated from crude political concerns so it was the most likely to make a dispassionate decision. We know that’s a very dicey assumption but continue to hope that they will, at least, have an eye on the bigger picture when it comes to momentous Constitutional crises. We may be about to find out if that’s true.
This concept has been contested, particularly by the states, even as recently as the 1950s and 1960s. For instance, when Arkansas refused to desegregate the public schools under order of the Supreme Court in Brown vs Board of Education President Eisenhower had to order federal troops to enforce it. But what if it had been a decision that required the President himself to act against his understanding of his own powers under the Constitution? It happened in 1974 when the Supreme Court ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the tapes of his conversations to the U.S. Congress during the Watergate Scandal. Had he refused, there was no way for the Court to have enforced it but Nixon acquiesced and the rest is history. (He also knew he was on thin ice with the Congress which also had a stake in the outcome. If he had a supine Congress such as the one we have today, I suspect he would have told the Court to pound sand.)
Presidents Lincoln and Roosevelt Both questioned the idea of “judicial supremacy” and took actions which arguably ignored judicial rulings by continuing to pursue them through the courts and attempted to change them through legislation during grave national crises. But there was never an outright dare to the Court to force them to acquiesce.
The Vice President is the most high profile official to advance the notion that the president isn’t required to adhere to judicial orders. Over the weekend, in response to the various judicial actions requiring the Trump administration to pause much of its program to destroy the federal government and he tweeted:
If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.
If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal.
Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.
As the Times noted, this issue was addressed by Chief Justice John Roberts in his year-end report:
“Every administration suffers defeats in the court system — sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s.”
“Within the past few years, however,” the chief justice went on, “elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”
He added, “the role of the judicial branch is to say what the law is,” but “judicial independence is undermined unless the other branches are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.”
Good luck with that. Any thought that this Congress will act to restrain Trump or have the Court’s back is fantasy. The GOP majority has turned over its Constitutional prerogatives to Trump and Musk and is slinking away like a pack of beaten dogs.
Constitutional lawyer and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, pretty much turned over his gavel to Elon Musk and his teen-age Dogeboys:
When asked by CNN’s Manu Raju, Speaker Mike Johnson said he agrees with JD Vance’s tweet suggesting the Trump administration should defy court orders.
Or, take for example the comment from Thom Tillis, the allegedly moderate GOP Senator from North Carolina saying that what Trump is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense” but “nobody should bellyache about that.”
Even Elon Musk’s own platform X says the courts decide what the law is in response to an ignorant comment from Trump’s personal lawyer and counsellor to the President Alina Habba:
Alina Habba: "There's a separation of powers for a reason. The executive branch is the ultimate authority on federal issues." pic.twitter.com/fzCb0bxu9K
But an interesting thing happened on Tuesday afternoon that made me think there’s a possibility that all isn’t as it seems with this strategy. Trump held one of his Executive Order pageants in the Oval Office and he was joined by a bizarrely attired Elon Musk and his little toddler son X. He asked Musk to take some questions which he did as his son crawled all over him as Trump looked on, visibly annoyed. It was very strange.
We know that Trump often degrades and insults judges who rule in ways he doesn’t like. (Musk has suggested that they need to be impeached.) So when Trump was asked if he planned to comply with court orders I assumed that he would rant and rave about crooked judges and rigged cases as he usually does. But he didn’t.
“I always abide by the courts and then I’ll have to appeal it. But then what he’s done is he’s slowed down momentum. And it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books. The answer is I always abide by the courts, always abide by them. And we’ll appeal. But appeals take a long time.”
He went on to say that he didn’t think any court would tell him that they aren’t allowed to audit the agencies and look for fraud. But nobody’s saying the president doesn’t have the right to do that. This is about whether the Executive branch has the authority to usurp the power of Congress to appropriate and spend money, create or end agencies and fire people with civil service protections without cause (among other things.) It’s about whether they are required to follow the law and procedures that govern how the executive branch operates under the Constitution.
The answer was very unlike him and it occurred to me after watching him look on as Musk was bizarrely attempting to justify his radical actions that Trump isn’t really on board with all this. Does he want the courts to slow everything down? Is he hoping that the Supreme Court will rule against this Musk and Project 2025 dumpster fire?
I wonder. He ran against the “deep state” to wreak revenge on the DOJ and the Intelligence Community for pursuing his criminal behavior. But I never got the idea that he was hellbent on destroying the federal government. He doesn’t care about deficits, that’s for sure, repeatedly assuring the voters that tariffs and “growth” were going to eliminate them. This isn’t really his agenda.
Watching the look on his face as Musk held court, I couldn’t help but think that Trump is rueing the day that he hooked up with this weirdo. He doesn’t really understand what he’s doing and he doesn’t know how to stop him. Maybe his pals on the Supreme Court will do him another solid and stop Musk for him.
