Where we are now

Things are moving fast, as expected.

First, know that nearly everything happening was talked about out in the open in the months, even years before the election. Consolidating power in the hands of the executive, destroying the administrative state, installing Trump loyalists throughout the federal government, giving the executive direct power of the purse, all this was written out as part of the plan to make sure that Trump 2.0 would look nothing like Trump 1.0. The first time around, they ran up against checks and balances that limited their power. This time, they’ve concocted ways around the core mechanisms of our democracy. And we handed them the power to do it on a silver platter.

If you haven’t been paying attention, there’s a bit of catchup you’ll need to do. You need to understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what to do about it. In the next few posts, I’ll try to address these questions from several angles, with the help of others who are on top of these things.

If you’re not already following her, I recommend following Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American here on Substack. (You can also find her on Facebook and watch her daily video chats on YouTube.) She is a historian who has amassed more than two million Substack followersby providing clear and concise summaries of the day’s events.

Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s post where you can catch up on what appears to be a coup orchestrated by Elon Musk, who now has access to our tax money and sensitive payment information. This means, among other things, he (in his unelected position) can cut off congressionally-approved funding, at will.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s team yesterday took control of the Treasury’s payment system, thus essentially gaining access to the checkbook with which the United States handles about $6 trillion annually and to all the financial information of Americans and American businesses with it. Apparently, it did not stop there.

Today Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press reported that yesterday two top security officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) tried to stop people associated with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, from accessing classified information they did not have security clearance to see. The Trump administration put the officials on leave, and the DOGE team gained access to the information.

Vittoria Elliott of Wired has identified those associated with Musk’s takeover as six “engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college.” They are connected either to Musk or to his long-time associate Peter Thiel, who backed J.D. Vance’s Senate run eighteen months before he became Trump’s vice presidential running mate. Their names are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran, and they have little to no experience in government.

Public policy expert Dan Moynihan told reporter Elliott that the fact these people “are not really public officials” makes it hard for Congress to intervene. “So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world,” he said. Law professor Nick Bednar noted that “it is very unlikely” that the engineers “have the expertise to understand either the law or the administration needs that surround these agencies.”

After Musk’s team breached the USAID computers, cybersecurity specialist Matthew Garrett posted: “Random computers being plugged into federal networks is obviously terrifying in terms of what data they're deliberately accessing, but it's also terrifying because it implies controls are being disabled—unmanaged systems should never have access to this data. Who else has access to those systems?”

USAID receives foreign policy guidance from the State Department. Intelligence agencies must now assume U.S. intelligence systems are insecure.

Musk’s response was to post: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Also last night, according to Sam Stein of The Bulwark, “the majority of staff in the legislative and public affairs bureau lost access to their emails, implying they’ve been put on admin leave although this was never communicated to them.”

How do we make sense of the dismantling of the federal government, of the firing of faithful, nonpartisan government workers, of the tarriff war we now find ourselves in with our closest allies?

Two ways. The first: welcome to oligarchy. (Or perhaps more accurately, kleptocracy.)

In his latest post here on Substack, Timothy Snyder gives a sense for where we stand:

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.

The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.

The gap between the oligarchs’ wealth and everyone else’s will grow. Knowing what they themselves will do and when, they will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump’s deliberately destructive tariffs, and will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. But that is just tomorrow and the day after.

In general, 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.

The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trumpwashing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way.

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 second way to understand the why? At this point, let me just say that beyond our chosen oligarchs, there are two other parties that stand to benefit from an America destroying itself from within, attacking our allies, withdrawing aid, cutting off trade, and turning citizens against each other: Russia and China. Putin could not have devised a more effective strategy to achieve his imperialistic goals. Take from that what you will.

Another new Substack just launched to cover the slide into autocracy: Jen Rubin’s and Norm Eisen’s The Contrarian. Jen quit her job at the Washington Post last month to have the freedom to cover attacks on democracy. You may notice that all of the sources I’ve pointed you to today are on Substack. Many of us have found that this platform—for now—offers the opportunity to say the things that need to be said. We’re grateful to every one of you who choses to support our efforts financially. We live in a new media landscape, and that support does more than you realize, and will likely be increasingly important for some of us down the road. Now is also a good time to support traditional media that refuse to bend the knee: at the moment, I’m seeing excellent reporting coming from The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, and Mother Jones. Consider subscribing to one or more of these as well. The pressures journalists are facing are mounting, and those of us offering commentary are only able to do so because of careful reporting done by professional journalists.

Timothy Snyder wrote the handbook on resisting tyranny. One of his rules has become my mantra over the last few years: Do not obey in advance.

This has guided many of the choices I’ve made, and I’ve known full well that if we didn’t use our voices when we had the freedom to do so, things were likely to get much worse. I’ve been thinking a lot about that mantra in the last few days, wondering if we’re no longer in the advance times and how we’ll know when that line is crossed.

P.S. One final word to those wondering what Christian nationalism has to do with any of this. Christian nationalism—appealing to “traditionalist” values, demonizing liberals, “the woke,” immigrants, convincing certain Christians that they are the only “true Americans” and that the rest of us are out to take their rights away and destroy our country, all of this was the mechanism by which the oligarchs achieved their goal of being handed unprecedented power. This wasn’t just a bait-and-switch. Those who fully support the goals of Christian nationalism also do not believe in pluralist democracy. They support hierarchies (of wealth, gender, and/or race and ethncity) as part of “God’s order,” dismiss language of rights and equality, and have bought into the us vs. them rhetoric that defines fellow citizens—neighbors, family members—as enemies that must be disempowered if not destroyed. You can see some of these connections in my interview with PBS a vew months back:

In light of this, I’d like to make a plea to conservatives:

If you voted because you wanted to protect your own rights, if you voted because you care about the lives of the unborn, or to protect “women-only” spaces, or to restrict immigration, or because you believe that Americans should be “colorblind,” or you wanted lower taxes or hoped to bring down the price of eggs, or simply felt it was time for something different—know that it was a package deal. Whatever your own motivations, you also voted for this—for the complete dismantling of our government, destruction of our international alliances, dismantling of our system of checks and balances, and for a world where only a powerful few flourish by kissing the ring of our new rulers, at the expense of the rest of us.

If this is more than you bargained for, we need you. We need you not to abandon all your convictions, but rather to join us as conservatives, so that we can live another day to hash out our differences within a system that allows us to do so, one that protects our most basic rights to life, liberty, and property.

In future posts I’ll have more on what you can do, but the first step is understanding exactly where things stand.