Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain
COUP D’ETAT: A sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the alteration of an existing government by a small group.
During last year’s campaign, Donald Trump faced growing scrutiny over his increasingly authoritarian and violent rhetoric. Last year, Fox News host Sean Hannity gave Trump a chance to assure the American people that he wouldn’t abuse power or seek retribution in a second term in the White House. Instead, Trump stoked the fire of the campaign by stating he won’t be a dictator “except for day one.”
Nearly three weeks into his presidency, Trump has established a dictatorial record that has no parallel in American history. He has shredded the balance of power that the Founding Fathers created 250 years ago, and has resorted to extra-legal, undemocratic practices to weaken America’s democracy. Trump, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller are conducting a bureaucratic war against the federal government. Laws have been broken in the process, and even the Constitution itself has been challenged.
The central aspect of the bureaucratic coup include a rolling purge of the civil service, particularly at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as such regulatory agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Even the Central Intelligence Agency has been threatened.
Just this week, the employees of the Agency for International Development (AID) were told to stay home, and the following day Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared himself to be the acting administrator of AID. Rubio, who was a strong backer of AID while in the Senate, blamed the change on high levels of “insubordination” among the senior leadership of the Agency. (Rubio is also leading the charge to take back the Panama Canal, but I’ll leave the foreign policy absurdities for another day.) Meanwhile, Musk has taken credit for gutting AID by “spending the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
In addition to putting Rubio in charge of AID, Trump announced that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager, would be acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Bessent replaces Rohit Chopra, an activist director who was expanding the Bureau’s authority over the banks and other financial firms. Chopra was serving a five-year term that was not set to end until late 2026. Bessent immediately ordered the Bureau’s staff to halt some of its most important work, and to start no new enforcement investigations.
The same playbook is being followed at the EPA, where career employees will be replaced by political appointees who have been lawyers and lobbyists for the oil and chemical industries. In Trump’s first term, EPA lost several thousand employees responsible for scientific research and enforcement laws. In his second term, he has already warned over one thousand employees that they could be “immediately terminated” at any time. Joe Biden’s legacy on environmental matters, which was sterling, will soon be shredded.
In addition to purging the civil service, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) cut off all federal grants, which is unconstitutional. A federal judge immediately issued a temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit filed by 22 states, both blue states and red states, for violations of the Impounding Control Act that reaffirmed the Constitution’s mandate for congressional control of funding. As a result, Trump’s efforts to freeze trillions of dollars in federal spending have been blocked for now. Meanwhile, Musk has moved beds into OMB so that he and his staff could work late into the evening hours. He deployed the same tactic when he ran Twitter and Tesla.
Bessent, who received 16 Democrat votes in his confirmation hearing, even gave Musk, an unelected foreign billionaire, full access to the Department of Treasury’s payment system. This is the largest data and privacy breach in U.S. history. Musk sent several young computer programmers—including a recent high school graduate—into the department, where they strong-armed civil servants into giving them full access to the system that cuts checks for all congressionally authorized government payments.
The leading civil servant in the Treasury Department was forced to resign when he refused to provide access to Musk’s “militia.” Senator Ron Wyden (D/OR) stressed that Musk’s “hatchet brigade has infiltrated a gold mine of data that every foreign spy and corrupt actor would love to see. It is a prescription for nightmares.” This episode alone would constitute a coup if it were to take place in a foreign country.
Two columnists from the New York Times, called the past two weeks “a presidency that’s off the rails.” No, it’s far worse; we are watching a coup d’etat. Simply because there has been no violence associated with the actions of Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, who co-wrote the playbook for what we are witnessing (See “Project 2025”), does not mean that the undemocratic takeover of government isn’t underway.
Vought, who will soon be confirmed as director of OMB, is the brain behind so much of Musk’s machinations to hollow out the U.S. government and destroy the republic. Vought once stated that he wanted the “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
One of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous and prophetic quotes was uttered in Philadelphia in 1787 in response to a citizen’s question regarding the outcome of the Constitutional Convention. Franklin’s reply was that the convention was creating a “republic, Madame, if you can keep it.” Franklin was emphasizing that the survival of the republic depended on the engagement and knowledge of its citizens. Sadly, more than 77 million Americans ignored the need for vigilance and engagement in defense of the republic and voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
