Susan Zakin
It’s beautiful in southern California right now. Spring, perhaps false spring, rife with cognitive dissonance. How could I have a dishwasher, a Tuff Shed, a view of the mountains, all my possessions in one place, kids in college, while every damn day I am best with visions of storm troopers banging at my door and sending me off to a concentration camp?
It is so American to reach for movies to understand the world. Anyone who’s been to a country where people still live like, well, people, will recognize that our lives are denuded of sound and color and smells. When I came back from three months in Madagascar I went to see Sexy Beast, a film about British gangsters living the good life in Spain. The picture was so huge, and the voices so loud, it overwhelmed my senses. And this was a regular movie theater, not Dolby or IMax, whatever. I thought: “This is what Americans do instead of actually living their lives.”
So perhaps, like all of us, I’ve seen too many movies. What I’m channeling now is 1999’s Sunshine, starring Ralph Fiennes as the scion of a wealthy, assimilated Hungarian-Jewish family. A champion fencer who leads the Hungarian team to victory in the 1936 Olympics, he believes his accomplishments will protect him.
What I remember most clearly is Fiennes standing in the freezing cold of a concentration camp, remonstrating with the guard. He tells him that he is a loyal Hungarian military officer, a fruitless effort to assert that he is “one of us.”
As Americans, we simply have no handholds for what is happening now. No context, no way to assess the danger. Our magazine’s intern, Joshua, was tasked with making a list of Trump’s executive orders so we could track which were going through, the ones temporarily halted by legal action, and the orders so outlandish they had been abandoned entirely.
By Friday, this felt unfair to the kid. As The New Republic’s perspicacious Timothy Noah wrote on Feb. 1:
Washington’s newest pastime is counting the number of impeachable offenses Trump commits in his first 100 days. It’s a parlor game rather than a government proceeding because you don’t impeach a president less than three months into his term, and besides, the Republicans’ three-vote majority in the House means the House wouldn’t impeach Trump even if (in Trump’s own famous formulation) he were to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody.” On Tuesday Trump sat on Pennsylvania Avenue and shut off Medicaid, Head Start, and federal rental assistance, in blatant violation of the law, before a federal judge issued a one-week injunction against him.
No president in history—not even Trump in his first term—ever logged so many illegal actions in so short a time. On January 20, a public-interest group called Free Speech for the People called forTrump’s immediate impeachment based on his ever-bolder violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses, which included, just a few days before the inauguration, the selling of a crypto memecoin that increased Trump’s net worth by several billion….
Since then, the salient part of the story became clear: the real story is Elon Musk’s coup-within-a coup. Gen Z knows this. When I asked a student what his college buddies thought about recent events, he said simply: “Everyone knows Trump is Elon Musk’s bitch.” To his credit, he looked sheepish saying the B-word to an ancient like myself.
The kids are digital natives. They know it’s all about the hard drives. So does Steve Bannon. Bannon may be bad but he isn’t stupid. When he calls American society “techno-feudalism” he isn’t wrong. Former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, now senior lecturer and assistant dean at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs, calls it “the Nerd Reich.”
In brief: On Jan. 20, the day Trump took office, Musk’s team invaded the Office of Personnel Management. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is the agency that manages the federal civil service and is responsible for human resources, policy, recruitment, and benefits for 2.2 million civil servants.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) rather cleverly called Musk’s invasion of OPM a “hostile takeover.” Because this is business, make no mistake.
That was just the beginning. Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Musk permission to access to Treasury files as “read-only” (if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you). That means Elon now knows your Social Security number, among other crucial pieces of information. Next was the General Services Administration, which manages technology in government buildings.
Under the flimsy pretext of his non-department, DOGE, Musk has now captured virtually the functions of government, installing his own employees and pressuring civil servants to resign in a series of emails.
If information is power, Musk has it all. Initially, the Resistance seemed to consist mainly of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin with the occasional cameo by Bernie Sanders. Ocasio-Cortez has been trenchant, writing: "This is a plutocratic coup. If you want the power, run for office and be chosen by the people." The irony is that she was writing on the Musk-owned social media platform X.
The infamous Stasi, the secret police that turned East Germany into a paranoid nest of spies and informers in the pre-digital age, had nothing on Trump, Musk, Thiel and his front man and lackey J.D. Vance.
This is more than a matter of personnel records. On Jan. 31 Wired reported that, based on a leak they received, the the General Services Administration takeover gives Musk and his DOGE apparatchiks the potential to remote into government employee laptops, and read emails.
When do they get around to everyone else’s? Given that Peter Thiel, the CEO of Palantir, is one of the coup’s intellectual architects, probably not very long. Palantir, if you recall, is the shadowy Big Data software company that has government security contracts which, according to AI, “help(s) governments detect and respond to threats like cyberattacks, disinformation, and insurgencies.” In other words, they have lots of data on lots of people. Maybe you. Maybe me.
Vladimir Putin’s 1985 Stasi ID card. Putin worked for the KGB spy service as a liaison with the East German State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst), nicknamed the “Stasi.”
The infamous Stasi, the secret police that turned East Germany into a paranoid nest of spies and informers in the pre-digital age, had far less to work with than Trump, Musk, Thiel, and Thiel’s front man and lackey J.D. Vance. In case these they miss anything, there is the Trump executive order urging government employees to inform on each other and their departments. The effort is ostensibly to root out attempts to hide diversity programs, but it seems unlikely that this directive, reminiscent not only of Stasi but also Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when children were urged to inform on their parents, would end there. But, really, the hard drives and algorithms should be enough.
The truism in Washington, D.C. used to be that Democrats sold out for power and Republicans sold out for money. After the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed virtually unlimited campaign spending with the 1990 Citizens United decision that, in the words of the Brennan Center “tilted political influence toward wealthy donors and corporations” by dispensing with limits on certain kinds of campaign contributions, one could argue that virtually every elected official found themselves whoring for campaign cash.
Money and power are indistinguishable these days, but make no mistake: while Trump appears to be happy enough ripping off the rubes with gold sneakers and profiting through his bitcoin scam, Musk stands to profit in a more sophisticated way. Unlike Trump, whose wealth was created (and lost) through hucksterism with a few gold-leafed buildings thrown in, Musk, although he may have taken credit for other people’s inventions, actually runs companies. Some analysts predict that Musk’s gains through government actions benefiting Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Boring, the tunnel-building company that reportedly has interest from China, India, and UAE, could be as high as half a trillion dollars. We’re way past Bond villain territory here.
As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote recently, Musk “has taken over the payment and other administration systems that allow the American government to function…Musk is subject to no Congressional or other oversight because he seems to have no real official function other than as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a plunder operation (our italics) that was named after the cryptocurrency DOGE.”
The hits keep coming. On Monday, the Trump administration set up a sovereign wealth fund, which the ever-bombastic Trump said would be used for “great national endeavors.” Sovereign wealth funds are usually set up by countries with natural resources and a budget surplus, while the U.S. has a deficit. It seems clear that the fund is yet another vehicle for grift.
The upshot? The poor will get poorer, and the middle class will shrink while the rich get even richer - if there isn’t a revolution first. The war on the poor is already underway, both internationally and domestically. The Trump administration has moved to shut down U.S. AID, and is moving to quash non-profits in the U.S.
We can, of course, hope that sheer incompetence will save us. Wired reported on Tuesday that the highest positions at OPM are now held by people close to Musk, including a 21-year-old who had worked for Thiel at Palantir, another one of Thiel’s bright boy protégés.
Then there is the 2024 high school graduate whose resume consists of a summer job at Musk’s Neuralink, along with stints as a camp counselor and bike mechanic. Because they are under 21, Wired didn’t use their names.
“But her emails!” is taking on new meaning.
There are, of course, a few grownups, although many would say that wouldn’t include Musk himself. OPM’s new chief of staff, Amanda Scales, worked for Musk’s AI-company, venture firm Human Capital, defense technology company Anduril, and Uber. According to Newsweek, a lawsuit alleging that the administration is collecting information on federal employees in violation of the law names Scales as the recipient.
Invasion of privacy? Check! Union-busting? Check! Censorship? Check! Ripping off regular middle-class folks? That, too. In one of the first actions in his blitzkreig, Trump fired Rohit Chopra, director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
While Musk seizes control of the technology that allows the government to function, Trump’s Project 2025 appointees are going after unions and the media. Our friend Marc Cooper reports, “Trump put the National Labor Relations Board effectively out of business, making it near impossible for workers to unionize. His yes men at the FCC are opening investigations of NPR and PBS that could put them off the air.”
But, hey, promises kept! On Monday, Trump kept his promise on tariffs. Here is what Yale historian Tim Snyder writes:
…the economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan’s ark. The self-chosen few will ride out the forty days and forty night. When the waters subside, they will be alone to dominate.”
Trump’s tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump’s attacks on America’s closest friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible.
Deportations are a spectacle to turn Americans against one another, to make us afraid, and to get us to see pain and camps as normal. They also create busy-work for law enforcement, locating the criminals’ in workplaces across the country, as the crime of the century takes place at the very center of power.
….In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else.
The backlash is starting, despite the initial flaccid business-as-usual response from congressional Democrats wedded to the conventional wisdom of choosing your battles. U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) not only voted against Pam Bondi for Attorney General, Padilla now joined Jeff Merkley (D-MA), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chris van Hollen (D-MA) and Tim Kaine (D-VA), in a boycott of the Republican-dominated Senate Budget Committee’s vote to advance Project 2025 architect Russell Vought as federal budget director.
This may be the most important cabinet appointment to oppose. Vought is regarded as the mastermind of Project 2025. As Director of the Office of Management and Budget, he would be responsible for creating the president's budget, and ensuring that agencies comply with the president's policies. The OMB director also oversees agency information security and technology practices.
While we get distracted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his American Royalty Meets Jerry Springer vibe, there is one precept that needs to be remembered: Follow the money. This is the cardinal rule of journalism. Prosecutors like Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse know it, too. Whitehouse has been Mr. Corruption Watch for years now. Whitehouse and Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law scholar, are brave, sane, and accomplished. They will be worth watching, and listening to, as the coup attempt rolls on.
In the end, if lawyers and institutions don’t save the country, Gen Z might. This is purely anecdotal, but another college student recently told the Journal that the last 10 days have been a revelation to him. His parents voted for Trump. He was uncertain, so he didn’t vote.
Now? He gets it. Next time, he’ll vote against Trump or anyone associated with Trumpism.
Here’s what’s important. The student is Latino, and a shift in Latino voting patterns, especially among Latino males, helped Trump win the popular vote.
Immigrants and their advocates around the country are certainly getting the memo. Reporter Pablo Manríquez documented 17 spontaneous pro-immigrant demonstrations around the country over the weekend.
“It’s worth noting that this weekend’s protests were entirely grassroots,” Manríquez wrote. “That is, the tens of thousands of migrants and allies out in the streets Los Angeles to New York City, St. Louis to Idaho Falls, Charlotte to Phoenix, aren’t waiting for institutional permission or support to get loud for their families, friends, and neighbors under siege by ICE.”
In the meantime, I found myself racing over the my nightstand a few minutes ago to see if my passport was up to date. I’m guessing the headline “Elon Musk’s Bitch” will hit one of these algorithms hard.
You might want to check yours, too. You know, just in case.
Susan Zakin is the Journal's editor.