Jonathan Baird lives in Wilmot.
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 President Trump and Elon Musk is a different kind of coup. Operating entirely outside the law, the coup plotters have tried to capture the computer and payment system of the U.S. By doing that, they effectively hold the nation captive. The strategy is to move quickly on many fronts and to break things.
They say they are combating fraud and abuse, but they have not gone through any legal channels and, instead, they bypass all norms. This is what they’ve done with USAID, which Musk says is in the wood chipper. Meanwhile his team gains access to the personal and private information of millions of Americans, data widely thought of as secure and protected.
The law moves slowly, and Musk’s hope is to destroy institutions before the law reacts.
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. We have only the vaguest notion of what Musk and his band of juvenile tech bros is doing. There have been no public hearings or debates about someone, anyone, gaining access to the federal payments system.
It must be pointed out that only Congress has the spending power under Article I of the Constitution.
Wired Magazine has reported that Musk’s team not only has reading access to the federal payment system but actual administrative privilege which they’ve used to re-write code on it. On 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 seemingly with Trump’s blessing.
Musk is a major defense contractor with billions in government contracts. Musk blessed Trump with $300 million. Musk got Trump to fire the head of the Federal Aviation Administration after his rocket company was fined. He is in a conflict of interest position.
It is not clear why Musk hates USAID so much, maybe because it helps poor people and promotes democracy. Either way, Musk, with Trump’s apparent agreement, fired 97% of the agency’s staff, cutting its global workforce of more than 10,000 to 294 employees.
As is the case with many federal workers, USAID workers are unionized. Musk and Trump could not be more anti-worker and anti-union, their hatred of the federal workforce extends across-the-board. Not surprisingly, unions representing USAID workers are suing the Trump administration. Public Citizen and Democracy Forward lawyers, acting on behalf of the workers, stress that not a single one of the present administrations’s actions received Congressional approval.
If Musk can get away with decimating USAID, expect this to be a road map for what they will do to other federal agencies. They are not cutting with a scalpel; they are cutting with a meat cleaver.
One remaining question is: How will Trump administration respond when courts reverse their illegal and unconstitutional actions firing federal workers and invading privacy? Will they respect court orders or disregard them? Blowing off court orders would reflect an absolute constitutional collapse, leading to fascism.
Congress should be standing up for its own power as a separate branch of government instead of allowing Trump and Musk to usurp its power. The Republican Party has disgraced and humiliated itself by collaborating with the coup. By pretending that what is happening is normal, Republican politicians are promoting congressional impotence. No doubt many Republicans are afraid the MAGA thugs would turn on them if they spoke out.
In a case about birthright citizenship, Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan-era federal court appointee, 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.