Jonathan P. Baird

Many years ago, there was a very popular film thriller, Seven Days in May, based on the novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey. The movie told the story of a military coup in the United States where the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs turned against the President. During my lifetime, coups have been run by militaries. There were the Brazilian generals in 1964, Gen. Suharto’s coup in Indonesia in 1965 and Gen. Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973. We don’t tend to think of coups outside a military context.

What we are seeing now from Trump and Musk is a different kind of coup. Operating entirely outside law, the coup plotters have tried to capture the computer and payment system of the United States. By doing that, they effectively hold the nation captive. The strategy is to move quickly on many fronts and to break things.They are trying for a fait accompli where their actions dictate irreversible results regardless of what courts might later do.

They say they are combatting fraud and abuse but they have not gone through any legal channels authorized by federal law. Instead they bypass all norms and focus on declaring jobs are eliminated. This is what they have done with US AID which Musk says is in the wood chipper. Meanwhile Musk’s team gains access to enormous data including the personal and private information of millions of Americans who are either taxpayers or federal benefit recipients which people widely thought was secure and protected.

Data is power and there is no doubt this information could be of enormous value to Musk’s business operations. For all we know he may already have downloaded Americans’ data onto his personal servers and computer network.

Because the law moves slowly, Musk’s hope is to destroy institutions before there can be a reaction. As of this writing on February 9, courts are beginning to respond to both job loss at US AID and the monkeying-around inside the Treasury Department.

So we have the world’s richest man, an unaccountable private citizen and a questionable security risk, who is a major defense contractor, making unilateral decisions unvetted by anyone. Clearly, he is not calling Trump to ask permission for his actions. We have only the vaguest notion of what Musk and his band of juvenile tech bros are doing. There have been no hearings or public debate about someone, anyone, gaining access to the federal payments system.

No legal process gave Musk the authority he is exercising. His actions are a smash-and-grab. It must be pointed out that only Congress has the spending power under Article I of the Constitution.

Whether the issue is special education, consumer protection, air traffic control, food safety, environmental pollution or myriad other areas, federal laws have been in place for a long time and are protections for the public. Musk belittles federal workers but without these workers, many more people would die or be seriously injured. About the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) , Musk just tweeted “RIP”. That followed a tweet saying “delete” CFPB. He will make it “DOA”. He is entirely out of control.

Anyone who thinks Musk would care about consumer protection is out of their mind. Musk is not just anti-consumer protection, his thinking is post-constitutional and post-ethics..

Wired Magazine has reported that Musk’s team has not just “read-only” access but actual administrative privileges to the entire payment system and they have been re-writing code on it. On Twitter/X, Musk himself has said that “the DOGE team is rapidly shutting down certain “illegal payments””.

Musk has no authority to decide what is illegal. We don’t know if he is stealing money, compromising national security, gaining future financial advantage or retaliating against his enemies. He is trying to re-design the entire U.S. government with Trump’s seeming blessing. Musk blessed Trump with $300 million.

Because Musk is a major defense contractor with billions in government contracts, he is in a conflict of interest position. He got Trump to fire the head of FAA after his rocket company was fined.

He has been tweeting hateful posts about US AID. It is not clear why he hates it so much, maybe because it helps poor people and promotes democracy, Musk, with Trump’s apparent agreement, fired 97% of the agency, cutting its global workforce of more than 10,000 to 294 employees. You will not see Musk cutting any Musk businesses to save money.

As is the case with many federal workers, US AID workers are unionized. Musk and Trump could not be more anti-worker and anti-union. They try to rip up collective bargaining agreements like they are confetti. Their hatred of the federal workforce extends across-the-board. Trump’s pick to head the OMB, Russell Vought, has said he wants federal workers “traumatized”.

Not surprisingly, unions representing US AID workers are suing the Trump administration. Public Citizen and Democracy Forward lawyers, acting on behalf of the AID workers, stress that not a single one of the Administrations’s actions received Congressional approval.

If Musk can get away with decimating US AID, expect that to be a road map for what they will do to other federal agencies. They are not cutting with a scalpel, more like a meat cleaver. Many lawsuits have been filed by a wide array of actors to stop Musk and DOGE.

It was telling that Musk stated he would re-hire the 25 year old DOGE employee who resigned for having a viciously racist social media account. The individual had posted: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool”. That post, which Musk never repudiated, speaks volumes.

Musk and Trump are trying to rehabilitate racism and white supremacy. Musk’s nazi salute was no accident. He has been actively supporting the neo-nazi party in Germany.

One big question is how the Trump administration will respond when courts reverse their illegal and unconstitutional actions firing people and invading privacy. Will they respect court orders or disregard them? Blowing off court orders would reflect an absolute constitutional collapse, opting for fascism.

Congress should be standing up for its own power as a separate branch of government because Trump and Musk are usurping power from that branch to the Executive. The Republican Party has disgraced and humiliated itself by collaborating with the coup. They are pretending what is happening is some kind of normalcy but they are promoting congressional impotence. No doubt many Republicans are afraid MAGA thugs would turn on them if they spoke out.

In a case about birthright citizenship, a Reagan federal court appointee, Judge John Coughenour, made a statement that is equally applicable here:

“It has become ever more apparent that to our president the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain.”

The months ahead will determine if there is any rule of law left in the United States.