The Trump-Musk hate-filled power grab

Intoxicated by his return to the White House and the imperial power that comes with it, Donald Trump believes he has a popular mandate for his entire far-right agenda. And he is moving at breakneck speed to implement it on all fronts.

This strategy, designed to force Trump’s many targets into stunned paralysis, is the same one used in his first term, as explained by Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Steve Bannon: “All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

This time around, however, Trump is aiming higher, and he came back to the White House with a developed plan, to be enabled by a network of loyalists in his “smash and grab” operation: hand-picked cabinet appointees who had already proven their fealty to Trump and his authoritarian tendencies—because they share them. Within hours of being sworn in as Trump’s attorney general, for example, Pam Bondi announced the formation of a “Weaponization Working Group” that will review and act upon so called “‘politicized’ actions of officials who investigated President Donald Trump at both the state and federal levels.”

And already, during Trump’s first term, he packed the federal courts with his own reactionary appointees willing to rubber stamp his sweeping assault on democratic rights. Now he has begun exacting revenge on those he perceives as ever having crossed him—demanding, for example, the names of all FBI employees who investigated the January 6, 2020, Capitol rioters to whom he recently issued a blanket pardon. He wants them all to be fired.

Trump’s actions have been labeled a “coup” and a “constitutional crisis“. These descriptions are not conspiracy theories but attempts to understand events unfolding in real time. While it is unclear exactly how to label Trump’s actions, it is clear that the outcome depends on how far he is allowed to continue on this destructive path.

Trump’s vision for Gaza as a Middle East “Riviera”: including a new Trump beach resort?

“America First” is Trump’s slogan. And his first weeks have seen him rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America;” set his sights on buying Greenland; “taking back” the Panama Canal; and imposing punishing tariffs on U.S. allies and foes alike, including a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum.

“America First” was initially coined by Trump to criticize overseas “nation building” by the U.S. government. But, as Trump has now made abundantly clear, his new ambitions reach far beyond domestic policy, with his global aims likewise ignoring legal limits. But his bloated sense of self-importance, along with his “shock and awe” strategy, have him convinced that he can accomplish them–or at least make dramatic headway toward accomplishing them, before anyone can stop him.

Who could forget Benjamin Netanyahu’s giddy response at the press conference where Trump announced that the U.S. will turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” after it takes ownership, as Adam Shils described on this website.

One can only imagine Netanyahu’s euphoric reaction when Trump later clarified that Palestinians who leave Gaza during its reconstruction will have no right to return, echoing the Nakba policies of Zionism. And Trump has threatened to withhold billions in U.S. aid to neighboring Egypt and Jordan if they refuse to accept the forcible transfer of Gaza’s 2.1 million Palestinians to enable the U.S. takeover. Interestingly, Trump also quickly froze a 1977 law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, that bars corporations from bribing foreign officials.

Is Trump envisioning the construction of a glitzy resort emblazoned with his own name in this new “Riviera of the Middle East”? This possibility is not to be dismissed, given Trump’s own track record.

Trump’s shadow president: Elon Musk

Donald Trump has finally met his match, in the equally maniacal narcissist Elon Musk. Both were born into wealthy families and love accumulating money and power. Together, they intend to upend the political and perhaps constitutional order to reshape the U.S. government in their own personal interests, in pursuit of their own personal profits.

Trump appointed Musk, the world’s richest man (and the first whose net worth topped $400 billion), also Trump’s largest campaign donor ($250 million), as a vaguely named “special government employee” to a newly revamped government department called “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge)—which is ostensibly charged with slashing so-called “waste” in the federal bureaucracy.

Musk has never received a single vote to serve in any public office, and he has zero experience in running any aspect of government. His companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and X, hold U.S. government contracts worth $20 billion—certainly a conflict of interest. And Musk’s support for far-right organizations has been well-documented—including a January 25 campaign speech for the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—while he appears to have given a fascist salute during Trump’s inauguration.

But Musk is now charged with taking an axe to the federal government, aided by a group of gung-ho tech nerds who remain largely unnamed but are estimated to be between the ages of 19 and 25. They have been nicknamed “the Goons” for their zeal in entering government agencies in order to shut them down.

As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd described a couple of choice members of the Goons: “A 19-year-old with the internet pseudonym “Big Balls” lost an earlier internship for leaking company secrets; a 25-year-old was ousted over racist posts. He wrote on X, “I was racist before it was cool,” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate.” Vice President JD Vance, however, helped him get his job back.

The Guardian described of Doge,

Musk has gleefully posted on X, the social media platform that he owns, throughout the chaos. He has accused USAid of corruption, and of being a “criminal organization” and “radical-left political psy op”, without any evidence. Why? He tweeted an explanation of simply doing Trump’s bidding: “All @DOGE did was check to see which federal organizations were violating the @POTUS executive orders the most. Turned out to be USAID, so that became our focus.” He said it was “time for it to die”.

Musk also suggested that opposition to his team will be punished, reposting a letter sent to him from the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor for Washington DC, who vowed to “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people”.

Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.

Who needs Congress?

There are three branches of government in the U.S. Constitution: Executive (president), Judicial (courts), and Legislative (Congress). Only congressional lawmakers have Constitutional authority over federal spending.

Together, Trump and Musk have run roughshod over Congressional decision-making, eliminating or defunding entire agencies with the stroke of a pen, while slashing federal and civil service jobs. USAid, for example, was established by Congress, and only Congress has the legal authority to dismantle it. And while it acts as an arm of U.S. imperialism, USAid also provides humanitarian aid to millions of people around the world who rely upon it for survival.

Musk is using his Twitter takeover (which he renamed “X”) as a model for “downsizing” the federal government. The subject line in the email sent to federal workers offering them the opportunity to resign (presumably before being fired) was “Fork in the Road”—the same one he used in 2022 before he eliminated 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce.

According to the Financial Times,

Despite being a reconfigured branch of the White House, Doge officials have installed themselves inside the federal government: at the US Treasury, the state and health departments, the Federal Aviation Administration, and a host of smaller bodies — with some even sleeping over at federal buildings. An entire $40bn agency, USAID, has in effect been closed, with contracts cancelled and its workforce set to be slashed from 10,000 to about 600 staff. In an assault that has shocked senior lawmakers, Doge staffers have begun auditing trillions of dollars’ worth of remittances, had access to social security numbers, bank account details and even health records of US citizens…

But the devastating real-world consequences of taking a sledgehammer to several key agencies have quickly become apparent, with HIV medication left undelivered in South Africa and elsewhere, life saving clinical trials paused, and critical government websites flickering on and off.

An administration fueled by vitriolic hatred

Trump has long championed the fiction of “reverse racism” against white people. Much of the media attention on Trump’s war on so-called “DEI wokeness” has focused on his administration’s purge of DEI workers from the federal government. But it is also a sweeping assault on affirmative programs set up to combat gender and racial discrimination—one of the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.

On January 21, Trump signed the executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” In so doing, he repealed the pivotal 1965 executive order signed by President Lyndon Johnson prohibiting employment discrimination by federal contractors and subcontractors and requiring them to take affirmative actions to prevent employment discrimination—including a requirement that federal contractors create affirmative action hiring programs. In 2014, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that also prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

In repealing Johnson’s order, which created the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (“OFCCP”), Trump effectively defanged it. Then Acting Labor Secretary Vincent N. Micone went further and sent an email directing staff to “cease and desist all investigative and enforcement activity.” The OFCCP was involved in more than 2,000 investigations at the time. “We had to mail the companies we audit to tell them they no longer have to comply with our rules or regulations,” explained OFCCP employee Aliyah Levin.

Trump was also doing Elon Musk a favor, since Tesla was being investigated by the OFCCP along with a group of other Bay Area companies. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Tesla in 2023 for fostering a racist environment toward Black employees, specifically at its plant in Fremont, California, stating:

[S]ince at least 2015 to the present, Black employees at Tesla’s Fremont, California manufacturing facilities have routinely endured racial abuse, pervasive stereotyping, and hostility as well as epithets such as variations of the N-word, “monkey,” “boy,” and “black b*tch.” Slurs were used casually and openly in high-traffic areas and at worker hubs. Black employees regularly encountered graffiti, including variations of the N-word, swastikas, threats, and nooses, on desks and other equipment, in bathroom stalls, within elevators, and even on new vehicles rolling off the production line, the EEOC said.

The EEOC’s investigation also found that those who raised objections to racial hostility suffered various forms of retaliation, including terminations, changes in job duties, transfers, and other adverse employment actions.

Trump and Musk’s crusade against trans people

Trump has also displayed utter contempt toward trans people over the years. Musk shares that loathing, alleging he was “tricked” into approving gender affirming care for his now estranged transgender daughter (one of his 11 children, at last count)—claiming his son was “killed by the woke mind virus.”

Now Trump has launched a witch hunt against trans people. The New York Times editorial board noted, “he has also waged as direct a campaign against a single, vulnerable minority as we’ve seen in generations.” As they summarized,

Within hours, this language began to be codified in a series of executive orders and actions attempting to exclude transgender people from nearly every aspect of American public life: denying them accurate identification documents such as passports, imposing a nationwide restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, investigating schools with gender neutral bathrooms, criminalizing teacher support for transgender students and commanding the Federal Bureau of Prisons to force the estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men.

Together, Trump and Musk are hell-bent on inflicting not only maximum harm to trans people but also perpetrating immense public humiliation—demonstrated vividly by Trump’s order to transfer transgender women prisoners to male prisons, where they will surely endure horrifying abuse. After Trump banned transgender females from girls and women’s sports, as if they pose a dangerous threat, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) President Charlie Baker, told a Senate panel that by his estimate, 10 or fewer trans athletes are currently competing in college sports, out of 510,000 total.

The Democrats won’t save us, and neither will the courts

Are Trump and Musk’s recent actions in downsizing the federal government merely paving the way for yet more massive upcoming tax cuts for the wealthy? No, while they are planning on more tax cuts, there is more going on with this unhinged and unbridled duo. Each passing day brings more clues in deciphering their longer-term agenda, but it is premature to predict exactly what their ultimate aims are or even if they have any. Either way, we know it’s bad.

Trump is an avid admirer of Hungary’s autocratic leader Viktor Orbán, even inviting him to meet along with Musk at Mar a Lago two months ago. Perhaps Trump would like to emulate an “elected autocracy” like Orban?

So, what way forward? Unfortunately, we have only negative examples—i.e. where not to turn. As Moira Donegan argued in the Guardian,

The first nonstarter is the Democrats, who have buried their heads in the sand since Trump’s election. They pledge resistance to the Trumpist takeover of the state, and then pledge to work with Trump on what they insist are their shared priorities. “I suspect we can find common ground on some things,” said Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, often cited as a future Democratic presidential candidate. “You have to look at the issues,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, the leftwing standard-bearer from Vermont. “It can’t simply be, ‘Oh, it’s a Trump idea, we oppose it.’”

These are not fighting words. Sanders, who was the populist hero of the U.S. left just a few years ago, seems to advocate collaborating with Trump whenever possible.

Donegon continued, “The result is not so much that the Democrats are a weaker party as that they are not much of a party at all: it is the extremist Republicans, and they alone, who are communicating a vision of America to the public, and the whimpering, servile politicians who pass for an “opposition” never counter with their own vision but only whisper, barely audible, the feeble response: “Not so far.”

Can we look to the courts, then? Some pundits point to the numerous “temporary court orders” from judges that have fended off some of Trump’s worst excesses (such as erasing birthright citizenship and placing transwomen prisoners into male prisons) as proof that he will be kept in check by the judiciary. But these orders are, again, only temporary and might well reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which is firmly stacked in Trump’s favor. This is, after all, the same Court that ruled last year that Trump was broadly immune from criminal liability for official acts while in office.

Moreover, as Ellie Mystal argues in the Nation,

In theory, these [temporary court] orders should be effective stopgaps. The problem is that the court has no enforcement mechanism. It has no army, no police force, no power to impose its will. Instead, the executive—in this case the president—is supposed to enforce the court’s orders. But what if Trump doesn’t? There is little reason to believe that Trump will enforce an adverse court ruling against himself. There is no reason to believe he’ll enforce one against Musk. He’s clearly not interested in enforcing the court order (and, you know, the entire piece of legislation passed by Congress and signed by his predecessor) against TikTok.

Mystal added, “I predict rulings from this Supreme Court that narrowly limit what Trump can do while simultaneously expanding what unelected courts can do, specifically Republican courts, to frustrate a number of democratically passed laws in the future.”

So, even if Trump and Musk are eventually stopped through court action, they will already have inflicted plenty of damage.

As Mystal concluded, “A court order cannot enforce itself. It cannot change a mind… It cannot recapture things that have been lost, or stolen. The only thing that can save us is us.”