Autogolpe

What’s really happening beneath the Musk/Trump chaos

My very first post after I left the Times and brought this newsletter out of dormancy was about DOGE, the not-a-government-agency created by Donald Trump and run by Elon Musk (Vivek Ramaswamy has been run out of DOGE.) The supposed goal of DOGE was to save taxpayers huge sums by going after “waste, fraud and abuse.” I argued that this effort was doomed to failure as Musk and his cronies appeared completely ignorant about how and why the federal government spends taxpayer dollars.

While everything I said was true, I would like to offer a mea culpa. What should have been clear to me even then, and is unmistakable now, is that everything Musk and Trump say about what they’re doing is false, including what they say about their motivations. The ignorance and chaos are real, but you should never lose sight of the underlying thrust of their actions.

For what’s happening in America right now is an attempted autogolpe.

Latin American readers are surely familiar with the term. An autogolpe is literally a “self-coup” — when a legitimately elected leader uses his position to seize total control, eliminating legal and constitutional restraints on his power. Are Musk and Trump trying to pull off an autogolpe here? Of course they are. And they are doing so with, as far as I can tell, the full support of every Republican in the House and the Senate.

You should look at everything they do through that lens. Yes, we can ask whether a policy move makes sense in terms of its announced goals. But you should also always ask, “How does doing this serve the autogolpe?”

Take, for example, DOGE’s obsession with finding ways to lay off federal workers. This makes no sense as a priority if you know anything about where the taxpayer dollar goes:

The federal work force is no larger now than it was under Dwight Eisenhower.

But making “headcount reduction” a policy goal is a way to purge civil servants who remain loyal to the law and the Constitution and replace them with Trump and Musk loyalists.

Fortunately, the Trump Administration’s push to induce federal workers to take buyouts appears to be a bust. Many of the relative handful of workers who took the sort-of-a-deal before a judge put it on hold were probably planning to leave anyway. But behind this “policy” is an attempt to drive out the most idealistic, most dedicated workers.

Musk-Trumpocracy’s illegal shutdown of USAID should be seen through this lens. Musk clearly hates the idea of helping people in need: just look at the rage he has expressed over the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife. While he may believe that the agency is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”, it also serves the purpose of purging civil servants while demagoguing to Trump’s base. The same can be said of the confected furor over DEI.

It hardly needs pointing out that the attempted purge at the FBI, targeting anyone who investigated Jan. 6 rioters or Trump himself, is an integral part of the autogolpe. And so, obviously, is the terrifying attempt of Musk and his acolytes to seize control of the Treasury payments system and give crucial power to rewrite the code to a 25-year-old who turns out (surprise!) to be a racist and eugenicist.

So what should those of us who would like America to remain America, to not see us descend into dictatorship, be doing?

First, acknowledge the reality. If my use of the word “dictatorship” disturbs you, if your first reaction is to say “Isn’t that a bit shrill?”, you’re part of the problem. The constitutional crisis isn’t something that might hypothetically happen; it’s fully underway as you read this.

But don’t despair. We are in the middle of an attempted autogolpe. It hasn’t succeeded so far. In fact, I’d say tentatively that the autogolpistas are having a harder time than they expected. America’s oligarchs may mostly have preemptively surrendered to the new regime, but many of the rest of us have not.

The attempt to get large numbers of civil servants to self-deport appears, as I said, to have been a bust. The courts, which haven’t been completely corrupted, are throwing up roadblocks to some of the ongoing power grabs. Workers at the FBI and elsewhere are circling the wagons, as are federal unions. Whistleblowers and at least some media organizations have been reporting on Musk’s attempts to seize the digital high ground, and the efforts of political appointees at Treasury to cover up what has actually been happening says that they still fear the consequences of public exposure.

And while we haven’t yet seen the mass demonstrations that faced Trump early in his first term, there are a growing number of protests against both Trump and Musk.

It is time more elected Democrats took a vocal stand.

Now, the enemies of democracy will keep trying to find new ways to undermine rule of law. I have to admit that I never even thought about the federal payments system as a target before the news of Musk’s antics was broken. Special credit goes to Nathan Tankus, an expert on “the technical details of monetary policy”, who has become the man of the moment.

But resistance to the autogolpe will throw sand into its gears. I’ll talk in a minute about why that’s important.

For those writing or talking about what’s happening, it is important not to get distracted by Trump’s bright, shiny objects. No, Trump isn’t going to take over Gaza, annex Canada, try to retake the Panama Canal or seize Greenland. But Trump’s bizarre announcements are a feature, not a bug: they distract from the ongoing autogolpe.

Until a few days ago I thought a gratuitous trade war would actually happen, since tariffs have been a Trump obsession for decades. But his ignominious climbdown over tariffs on Canada and Mexico suggests that I may have taken it all too seriously. Did he fold, or was he fooled into thinking he won? It may not matter. At this point, trade conflict is less important than the assault on democracy.

The good news is that there are many ways in which an autogolpe delayed can become an autogolpe denied. The alliance between Musk and Trump, two men with giant but obviously fragile egos, could break down. Musk’s meddling at Treasury and the assault on federal workers may lead to some highly visible disasters. Voters may eventually realize that Trump’s claims of success are smoke and mirrors and wonder what happened to his promise to make groceries cheaper. And at some point the American people may notice that Russell Vought, the father of the immensely unpopular Project 2025, is actually making policy.

These are scary times. But the bad guys haven’t won yet.

MUSICAL CODA