Elon Musk, apparently still a private citizen, has seized control of the federal government. This is not an exaggeration: he and his team (who are?—we don’t know) now control the U.S. Treasury’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. He earlier commandeered the records of federal employees, and locked them out of these databases.
Donald Trump has started a trade war with Canada and Mexico, not just ancient allies, but integrated partners in our economy. (Economist Paul Krugman: “North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times.”)
I’ve been keeping a tally of the administration’s major acts in the past two weeks, and it is now up to 51 items. Things like:
2. Issued EO nullifying “birthright citizenship” of 14th amendment;
3. Pardoned all J6 criminals;
15. Withdraw from Paris Accords;
32. Created “memecoins” for himself and Melania with unknown major investors;
35. Disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee (working out well already!);
40. Froze all foreign aid;
46. Began firing FBI agents and supervisors who investigated Trump’s crimes;
49. Ordered Army Corps to “turn on the faucet” and flood fields with 1.6 billion gallons of water from Central California reservoirs, apparently believing it would somehow flow to Los Angeles.
Human brains are extraordinary mechanisms, perhaps most noteworthy for their capacity to synthesize data points into usable information, mainly in the form of story. This happens almost instantly and is so seamless that most people fail to notice the moment data transmutes into narrative. A flash of silver color is data, but our mind synthesizes it into meaning: a SUV driving down the road. And our mind might go further, telling a story about who must be driving that car, why they chose that model, what their values and ethics are. If that flash of silver turned out to be an EV or a Tesla, our story shifts immediately and we understand its meaning in very different terms.
Yesterday, I listened to an interview with judicial reporter Dahlia Lithwick. She discussed the legality of Trump’s two week reign (none in many cases), and expanded on the role of a judiciary placed by Donald Trump to rubberstamp these very acts. It was a dark and disturbing discussion, one of the few to lay out in stark terms how desperate things have gotten.
And then, at the end of the conversation, her mind broke. She went into this bizarre tangent about how great it was that government employees have been standing up to argue that the work they do is important. “I love that,” she said, going on to argue that the only thing that will stop a speedy restoration of the past two weeks are people failing to have “a discourse.” Her voice sweetened as she thought of democracy rising up to put things right. After a fifteen minute discussion where she made the case that Trump and the GOP have fractured our democracy and offered us no recourse, her mind retreated to a happy place where none of this was really happening.
We are in the early stages of a coup that will lead in directions no one can predict. Trump and his team, busily enacting Project 2025 precisely as they outlined before the election, know where they want to go, but they are not the only actors here. To me, the most destabilizing fact of this moment is that the other actors, the Democratic leaders in the Congress, local politicians, corporations, the media, the portions of the judiciary not captured by the Federalist Society—none of them seem to realize that a coup has happened. Like Lithwick, their brains can’t go there.
Our wonderfully creative, synthetic minds create realities we can comprehend, and ones that make the world comprehensible. Most Americans literally cannot conceive of a reality in which the federal government is overthrown by a dimwitted narcissist whose lies are as tangled and dumb as his hairdo. And so for them that reality doesn’t exist.
Since the election, I have been trying to think what I, a single citizen, can do amid a coup. It is very little because the mechanisms that used to empower the people are the very ones under assault. The one thing that would be very helpful, however, is if regular citizens could actually bring themselves to see what is plainly happening in front of our eyes. Many of us had the luxury of living in our little fantasy worlds before the election. There was no cost to thinking everything would be all right. The cost now is that the coup will succeed or fail depending on our response in the coming days and weeks. If we can’t see that a coup is under way, if our imagination isn’t large enough to accept this story of our reality, the cost will be very dear. It may not seem like much, but bearing witness in these times is so critical.
I believe a resistance will organize itself such that individual citizens can take action (meanwhile, write or call your leaders and put a fire under their dazed butts). In the meantime, we need to develop the skill of seeing reality for what it is. A coup is underway in the United States. Do you see it?
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