Republicans:This is going to come back and bite you.
Democrats: Fight back!
• Elon Musk Has Broken the Constitutional Order (Matt Ford, New Republic, 2-5-25) The tech oligarch has unleashed his slow-rolling coup d’état across the federal government, and it’s not clear anything can prevent a total takeover.
"There is no precedent in American history for anything like this. Musk is a private citizen who has not been elected to anything. He is not a federal employee; he has not been confirmed by the Senate to any office or post. (DOGE itself is technically a hollowed-out version of the former U.S. Digital Service, a White House office, instead of the outside consulting group that was originally pitched.) He is not abiding by any of the ethical or legal restrictions to which public officials are subject. Spending a quarter-billion dollars on Trump’s reelection efforts has effectively allowed the world’s richest man to buy the federal government itself."
"In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it," says Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who writes in a new blog post that "Elon Musk is staging a coup."
What you can do to stop Musk and Trump? Scroll to bottom for tips.
• Bernie Sanders Dismantles Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos Oligarchy (YouTube speech to U.S. Senate, 2-5-25, 20 minutes, with transcript) During remarks on the Senate floor, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) accused President Trump and the billionaire 'oligarchs' such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, of leading the United States to ‘authoritarianism’.
• All the executive orders Trump has signed after 1 week in office (NPR Staff, 1-28-25) A chart of all the orders, explained.
• Trump’s Executive Orders: Reversing Biden’s Policies and Attacking the ‘Deep State’ (Zolan Kanno-YoungsMichael D. Shear and Noah Weiland, NY Times, 1-20-25) The president moved swiftly in his first hours in office, signing a slew of executive orders in front of a roaring crowd and then in the Oval Office.
• Overview of President Trump’s Executive Actions on Global Health (Jennifer Kates, Josh Michaud, Kellie Moss, and Lindsey Dawson, Global Health Policy fact sheet, KFF, 2-5-25)
• Is Elon Musk Staging a Coup? Unelected Billionaire Seizes Control at Treasury Dept. & Other Agencies (12-minute video, Democracy Now, 2-3-25) "Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority. The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after refusing to hand Musk's team the keys to the government's entire payment system and the $6 trillion in payments the system processes annually, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits. Musk and his team have also seized control at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, key institutions that function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government."
• Steve Bannon's 'Flood the Zone' Strategy Explained Amid Trump Policy Blitz (Peter Aitkin, Newsweek/MSN, 2-6-25)
"The 'flood the zone' strategy seemingly being used by the Trump administration, which has resulted in a relentless onslaught of new directives and policy announcements, is drawing renewed scrutiny during the beginning of his second term. The "flood the zone" strategy seemingly being used by the Trump administration, which has resulted in a relentless onslaught of new directives and policy announcements, is drawing renewed scrutiny during the beginning of his second term.
"The term was reportedly coined by former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in 2018 when he said the best way to deal with media was to "flood the zone."
"The strategy from Bannon was to continually attempt to overwhelm opposition from Democrats as well as the media through a flurry of moves that would be difficult to respond to all at once.
"Trump appears to have embraced the strategy in his second term, issuing a seemingly relentless number of policy announcements and signing a large number of executive orders in the first weeks of his second administration.
Said Steve Bannon: "The media can only—because they're dumb and they're lazy—they can only focus on one thing at a time."
"And all we have to do is flood the zone," Bannon said. "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. So it's got to start, and it's got to hammer," he continued before being cut off.
• Fight Against Elon Musk’s Government Takeover (Annabelle Timsit and Matt Viser, WashPost, 2-4-25) The SGE [special government employee] designation, which has come under scrutiny under Democrats as well, exempts short-term federal employees from certain disclosure rules.
• Elon Musk is a ‘special government employee.’ What does that mean
(Washington Post, 2-4-25)
A special government employee is “anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period,” with or without compensation, according to the Justice Department. It is not clear how long Musk’s mission as head of the Department of Government Efficiency is expected to last.
The classification means Musk is not a volunteer but is considered less than a full-time employee. It also means he is exempt from some of the rules — including around financial disclosures and conflicts of interest — that apply to full-time government employees.
• Senate Democrats raise concerns about Musk team access to Treasury payment systems (Federal News Network)
• Trump says he’s firing Kennedy Center board of trustees members and naming himself chairman(Will Weissertap, AP News, 2-8-25) He also indicated that he would be dictating programming at one of the nation’s premier cultural institutions, specifically declaring that he would end events featuring performers in drag. Trump’s announcement Friday came as the Republican president has bulldozed his way across official Washington during the first weeks of his second term, trying to shutter federal agencies, freeze spending and ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the government.
• NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately (Dan Diamond, Carolyn Y. Johnson and Lena H. Sun, Washington Post, 2-8-25) Trump allies hailed NIH’s move. The U.S. DOGE Service, the office led by billionaire Elon Musk that has focused on slashing government spending, said NIH’s new policy would save billions of dollars in “excessive grant administrative costs” and praised the “amazing job by NIH team” in a post on social media.
NIH’s policy shift centers on how it awards grants to support scientific research on cancer, heart disease and diabetes. It also provides overhead funds to cover the costs of facilities, administration and other approved costs. Researchers say it would hurt facilities that work on medical issues such as cancer research and heart disease. Elon Musk contends the old policy was “a ripoff.”
---A sense of foreboding hangs over the National Institutes of Health (Rob Stein, Shots/Health, NPR, 2-5-25) "Most scientists are very worried," agrees Bruce Alberts, a professor emeritus of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, who served as the president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1993 to 2005. Kennedy and Bhattacharya "both have a record of ignoring the best science and making statements and opinions that are not based on the best science and more are based on emotion and the misreading of science.
• Trump has tapped an unprecedented 13 billionaires for his administration. Here's who they are (Peter Charalambous, Laura Romero, and Soo Rin Kim, ABC News, 12-17-24) The nominees make up the richest presidential administration in modern history (a cabinet of cronies--read about them!). How likely are they to focus on supporting the welfare and rights of the average (much less the poor) citizen as well as they focus on the well-to-do? Peak achievement: Waiters won't have to pay taxes on their tips.
• Trump’s Pardons and Purges Revive Old Question: Who Counts as a Terrorist? (Hannah Allam, ProPublica, 2-10-25) The president’s sweeping clemency for Capitol rioters and his administration’s ongoing removal of career national security specialists foretell a permissive new climate for extremist movements, say current and former officials and researchers. For the Justice Department, Stewart Rhodes' seditious conspiracy conviction was bigger than crushing the Oath Keepers — it was a hard-won victory in the government’s efforts to reorient a creaky bureaucracy toward a rapidly evolving homegrown threat. (Rhodes was founder of the far-right Oath Keepers movement.)
On his first day in office, Trump erased that work by granting clemency to more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, declaring an end to “a grave national injustice.” Chat forums filled with would-be MAGA vigilantes who fantasize about rounding up Democratic politicians or acting as bounty hunters to corral undocumented migrants. Researchers noted one Proud Boys chat group where users had posted the LinkedIn pages of corrections officers who purportedly oversaw Jan. 6 detainees.
• What you can do, Revised and expanded (Robert Reich, 2-6-25)
Some of the headlines (each followed by instructions):
1. Protect vulnerable members of your communities who are undocumented or whose parents are undocumented.
2. Protect LGBTQ+ members of your community.
3. Help protect public officials whom Trump and his administration are targeting for vengeance.
5. Urge your Democratic senators to continuously demand quorum calls and object to unanimous consent, to deny Senate Republicans the ability to enact Trump initiatives.
6. Urge Democratic House members to vote against all Republican initiatives.
11. To the extent you are able, fund groups that are litigating against Trump. Much of the action over the next months and years will be in the federal courts.
The groups initiating legislation that I know and trust include the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, Public Citizen, Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Common Cause.
13. Urge friends, relatives, and acquaintances to avoid Trump propaganda outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, X, and, increasingly, Facebook and Instagram.
• Flooding Trump and Musk’s zone (Robert Reich, 2-9-25) How to deal with their tyranny. Do read this!
• Stop Elon Musk's Coup (Video)
• Don’t Believe Him (The Ezra Klein Show, 2-2-25) Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different from what he wants you to see. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him....
"Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.
"But Trump’s odds are bad....Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021....
"That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.
"The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him."
"I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?"
• Fraud and Musk (Robert Reich, 2-11-25)"The Trump-Musk regime is accusing federal civil servants of fraud, based on no evidence, while at the same time allowing corporations to pay off foreign officials, dropping bribery charges against Mayor Eric Adams, pardoning a former governor of Illinois who tried to sell his Senate seat, and stopping investigations into foreign influence-peddling in the United States."
"Today, Musk held forth in the Oval Office, claiming that drastic reductions in the federal workforce were justified because it was rife with fraud.
"I’ve spent more than a dozen years in the federal government, and I can tell you that the vast majority of civil servants I’ve had the honor of working with are dedicated and hard-working. They are delivering critical services to Americans and protecting them from corporate malfeasance....
"Musk has the integrity of a slug. Since Trump was elected president, Musk’s fortune has increased $270 billion. If you think that’s an accident, you haven’t been paying attention.When Trump was sworn into office, Musk’s six corporations were under more than 32 continuing investigations conducted by at least 11 federal agencies, according to a review by The New York Times. Most of these cases are now closed or likely to be closed soon, and the agencies that initiated them are being defanged by Musk and Trump."
See also an earlier post: Warning: Severe Trouble Ahead in Trump 2.0