The Coup Within a Coup

Feb 07, 2025

I don’t see what could possibly go wrong.

Things are moving so fast that I’ve started adding an occasional Chaos Report, where I talk through the big events that are happening in short form, because there’s too much to cover in-depth in writing.

I can’t do this every day, but expect it every couple of days for a while, and let me know what you think of the format.

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I will still insist on addressing the big events in writing, which takes more time but allows for greater depth and precision. As I noted in the Chaos Report, the rapidity of action in this administration’s first few weeks is intended precisely to prevent this kind of analysis, so we have to fight back by still doing it.

This is also one explanation for why Democrats have been flat-footed in their response. We are currently in a revolutionary moment, and not in a good way, because it is a revolution against the Constitution, against the political liberalism of the Founders, and really against the whole modern world. One of the things about a revolutionary moment is that the revolutionaries realize how rapidly things are changing, and they move quickly—despite having a narrow hold on power and actually because of it, since they know this opportunity won’t come again. Defenders of the existing order often assume that the ordinary pace and procedures of the old political environment still apply, that they can wait for everything to trudge slowly through the old system—and then suddenly they look around and the old system is just gone. I think we’re in danger of that now.

In this regard, I was struck by a piece in The Atlantic that made the rounds a few weeks ago describing how quickly Hitler knocked over the German system, taking only 53 days after his elevation to chancellor to shatter the country’s old constitution. The parallels to today are not exact, of course—I certainly hope not, or else I’m due for the concentration camps next week—but what I want to highlight is precisely this issue of speed. The old leaders expected Hitler’s radicalism to get slowly ground down by the limits of the system, and they weren’t prepared to act quickly and forcefully to defend that system.

Let’s take that as a warning while we look at what Trump and his people have been doing.

The Phantom Menace

We all owe George Lucas an apology. We laughed at the idea that the fall of the republic might begin with a dispute over the taxation of trade routes. Yet here we are.

Actually, the tariffs may not quite be what collapses the republic this time. Let’s take a look at what has happened so far. See if you notice a pattern.

First, Trump stepped up deportation flights to Colombia, and when the Colombian president complained, he threatened to impose 25% tariffs on the country. Then he dropped the threat. Why? Did the Colombians back down? No, Trump did. The Colombians objected because Trump was returning their citizens on military planes where they were kept shackled for the flights and literally returned in chains. The president of Colombia even offered to send his own presidential plane to bring deportees back in more dignified and humane conditions. In response, it was Trump who backed down and met the Colombian demands.

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro initially refused to accept two US military planes with migrants, prompting Trump to threaten 25% tariffs on Colombian exports and other sanctions. Colombia then relented and said it would accept the migrants, but fly them on Colombian military flights that Petro said would guarantee them dignity….
One of the migrants, José Montaña of Medellín, said they were put in chains on the earlier U.S. flights. “We were shackled from our feet, our ankles to our hips, like criminals,” Montaña said. “There were women whose kids had to see their moms shackled like they were drug traffickers.”…
Last year, Colombia received more than 120 deportation flights, but those were charter flights operated by US government contractors.

But you can bet this was not how it was reported in the conservative press, where it was described as Trump using tariffs to force Colombia to take back illegal immigrants, as if this was something they were not already doing.

Then Trump declared that he would impose taxes on Canada and Mexico—and after telephone calls with leaders of both countries, he lifted the tariffs. Again, Canada and Mexico promised to do what they were already doing.

Many skeptics of the deal quickly noted that Mexico previously dispatched large numbers of troops to deal with migrants—15,000 to the U.S.-Mexico border in 2019, and 10,000 to its own southern border in 2021 to stem the flow from Central American countries.
Neither was the direct result of a tariffs threat. And the 2021 move was part of a deal with the Biden administration, which over the past year had made significant headway in getting Mexico to crack down on would-be border-crossers without such apparent economic brinkmanship….
Canada had already announced the $1.3 billion border plan in December. Part of that plan was proposing the joint strike force.
Canada also said in December that it already had 8,500 personnel on the border. (Which appears to be why Trudeau said these people “are and will be” on the border—the vast majority are already there.)

It’s all just for show. Trump’s supporters get to see him being mean to foreigners, and that’s enough for them.

In short, tariffs have so far proved, if you will excuse the phrase, a phantom menace.

(The deeper problem here is the unilateral power over tariffs that Congress has delegated to the president—a power granted very clearly to Congress in Article I of the Constitution. But the last time Congress set tariffs directly was Smoot-Hawley in 1930, which was such a colossal disaster that since 1934 they have sloughed off the tariff power to the executive. But that power can clearly be abused, and it’s past time to take it back. See a good overview of the history on this.)

By the way, I just came across a report that something similar might be happening—so far—with mass deportations.

News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for ICE operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include “ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation,” “New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens,” and in Wisconsin, “ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens.”
But a closer look at these ICE reports tells a different story.
That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states—ICE press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.

This and the tariffs—again, so far—are following the script I had hoped for, while still finding it annoying. Donald Trump likes watching TV and being on TV. He likes attention and an exciting script. But he doesn’t care much about details or substance, so long as he’s at the exact geometric center of attention and gets supplicating phone calls from foreign leaders, and he can squeeze it all into a narrative that makes him look like a tough guy. And his supporters love this and are very happy with it.

This fits a general pattern you might remember from his first administration. Trump has the ambitions of a dictators but not the attention span, the focus, or the attention to detail necessary to impose it.

Alas, not everyone around him suffers from this disability.

The Ketamine Koup

Trump has no capacity for understanding technical details. But Elon Musk and his people fancy themselves as being good at this. So that is what has really been happening in DC for the past few weeks.

I say that Musk fancies himself as being good at this. Some people are calling Musk’s power grab the Ketamine Koup, because Musk has admitted to being a regular user of ketamine, a powerful anesthetic sometimes used to treat depression. I don’t think it’s normal for ketamine to be used chronically, though, and all we have is Musk’s word that he’s doing this with proper medical control. (And it’s very easy for a rich and famous person to find a doctor willing to write him a bogus prescription. Michael Jackson’s quack went to jail for it.)

Ketamine has also been described as “schizophrenia in a vial” because it tends to mimic the effects of schizophrenia, particularly by inducing delusional thinking. I’m just going to lay this out there as a suggestion for what might be going on.

At any rate, I warned that Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” was never about efficiency and certainly isn’t about cutting the budget. It’s about control. The mechanism of that control has turned out to be more direct than I feared.

Musk has recruited a group of very young engineers and has been sending them around the federal government to muck around with the systems—and especially with a crucial federal payment system that handles about $6 trillion of transactions annually. The DOGElings have been pushing aside the career bureaucrats who objected that they lacked either the security clearances or the proper authorization to access these systems.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades and had been the acting secretary before Bessent’s confirmation, had refused to turn over access to Musk’s surrogates, people familiar with the situation told The Washington Post. Trump officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave, and then he announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues.

Regular workers have also found themselves locked out of systems at some agencies.

Some initial reports claimed that Musk’s people were given read-only access to the federal payment system, so they could see what was happening but couldn’t change anything. But this wasn’t true.

Not surprisingly, the tech media has been doing the best job of covering this. It’s partly because this is their area of expertise—but also because some of them have long experience covering tech billionaires and are familiar enough with them to neither to treat them neither with awe nor fear. So see also a report at TechDirt about 25-year-old DOGElings running around potentially breaking stuff.

[W]hile Treasury was making these claims, both Wired and TPM revealed a far more alarming reality: a 25-year-old DOGE team member named Marko Elez (who had refused to give any of his brand new colleagues his last name) had been granted something far beyond “read only” access—he had full administrator privileges to the system. That’s the keys to the kingdom (or, rather, the kingdom’s payments)….
Josh Marshall’s reporting at TPM reveals something that I can already hear developers howling about, even through the internet: Elez isn’t just looking at the code—he’s pushing untested changes directly into production on a system that handles trillions in federal payments:
I’m told that Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin-level access on Friday, January 31st. The claim of “read only” access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance, which the staff appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible — “damage” in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is not the gold standard of accurate reporting—but he’s not a crank, either.

This is the shoe we should all be expecting to drop, because there is a chance that in needlessly playing around with the payments system, the DOGElings will break it. Remember what I said above about ketamine. There’s a reason we don’t send random people to manage these systems on the fly. Bureaucracy may have its problems, but it’s good at providing safety and stability. The degree and nature of the risk from the DOGElings’ tampering is uncertain, but there is a real possibility that something could go spectacularly wrong.

But Musk’s real reason for sending his minions to change the payment system, and the real constitutional danger, is that Musk is attempting to seize the power to turn federal payments on or off at his whim.

The complaint so far has been that Donald Trump is seizing the power of the purse from Congress, deciding unilaterally what he will spend and what he will not spend—and in the case of USAID, he is dismantling a congressionally mandated agency. That is a coup against the legitimate authority of Congress.

But the way someone put it online is that while Trump is staging a coup against Congress, Musk seems to be staging a coup against Trump. He is the one who now actually controls, on the ground and in detail, the functioning of the government.

Secret White Nationalist of the Week

To be more exact, it is Musk’s DOGE minions who have been trying to grab control of the federal purse. Here, the tech media has been on the job, and Wired has already identified a bunch of the kids, mostly between the ages of 19 and 24, who are being sent around by Musk essentially to start restructuring agencies they know nothing about.

Some are calling them Muskovites, which I like for obvious reasons, or the Muskjugend—and that may turn out to be the more appropriate one. The kid sent to rewrite code in the federal payments system was quickly identified as 25-year-old Marko Elez. But then Elez was forced to resign after being outed as a vocal online racist; he literally posted last July, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”

This does not shock me. The only thing that shocks me is that Elez resigned rather than brassing it out. He had good reason to think he could get away with it, because the Trump administration has been putting on a re-run of my least favorite show, Secret White Nationalist of the Week.

For example, what apparently prompted Elon Musk to launch a crusade to shut down USAID? It was a tweet from Mike Benz spinning conspiracy theories about the agency. And who the hell is Mike Benz? He’s the guy who featured in the original run of Secret White Nationalist of the Week. He was identified last year as an anonymous neo-Nazi blogger posting under a pseudonym.

Frame Game avoided showing his face in his videos or appearances, during which he pushed a variety of far-right narratives including the “Great Replacement Theory” that posits the white race is being eradicated in America for politics and profits. In others, Frame Game said he was a white identitarian, railed against the idea of diversity and made montages urging white viewers to unite under the banner of race.
In interviews with white nationalists, Frame Game blamed Jews for “controlling the media” and for the decline of the white race. “If you were to remove the Jewish influence on the West,” he said in one video, “white people would not face the threat of white genocide that they currently do.”

Benz is far from the only one. The news recently broke that the toady Marco Rubio had hired another of the first Trump administration’s white nationalists for a prominent role in the State Department.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio will appoint Darren Beattie, a speechwriter in President Donald Trump’s first term, acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, two people briefed on the plans said….
Beattie, who has a Ph.D. in political theory from Duke University, where he also taught, was fired in 2018 after attending a conference with white nationalists.

Beattie was apparently on a panel with the founder of VDare, so this checks out.

State Capture

Consider what exactly these miscreants are doing. Let’s take a look at the takeover and dismantling of USAID.

The Trump administration has placed two top security chiefs at the US Agency for International Development on leave after they refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to Elon Musk’s government-inspection teams, a current and a former US official told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Members of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, eventually did gain access Saturday to the aid agency’s classified information, which includes intelligence reports, the former official said.
Musk’s DOGE crew lacked high-enough security clearance to access that information, so the two USAID security officials—John Vorhees and deputy Brian McGill—were legally obligated to deny access.

So all the legal procedures by which federal agencies run are being arbitrarily overruled. It is symbolically appropriate, then, that the guy appointed by Marco Rubio to temporarily run USAID’s activities, and essentially to preside over its destruction, is Peter Marocco, who has been identified as a participant in the January 6 insurrection.

Marocco held several national security positions during the first Trump administration, including at USAID, where his attempts to consolidate power and slash funding drove officials to write a dissent memo that ultimately pushed him out of office, according to multiple sources who spoke with NBC News….
In early 2023, online sleuths who aided the FBI in cases against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters identified Marocco and his now-wife as being among the rioters who stormed the Capitol in 2021, pointing to multiple images of them on the Capitol grounds that day and CCTV video that shows the man they identified as Marocco entering the Capitol through a broken window.

So this is the insurrectionists achieving their goal and taking down the US government.

A former Twitter executive calls this “a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.” But there is a more exact term for it: “state capture”: “a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their own advantage.”

This is what is so revolutionary, in the bad sense, about what’s going on. This is no ordinary partisan shift from one administration to the next. Authority over the system hasn’t changed hands from one elected leader to another. There is now no order, no authority, no system. A cabal honeycombed with white nationalists, backed by the world’s richest man and with the permission of Donald Trump, has seized control of the central financial apparatus of the federal government.

But normal people still really have no clue about this. So far, it has been too much of what you call “inside baseball.” People won’t really notice what happens, I am afraid, until it is too late—or until Trump and Musk break something really big and obvious.

There is a good chance this will happen, because everything is being done on the whims of basically a crazy person. And that brings me to Trump’s press conference with Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu Tuesday night.

Gaz-a-Lago

The big news is that Trump proposed the US taking over Gaza and owning it as a—I guess as a real estate project?

“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference Tuesday evening. “We’ll own it and be responsible” for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism. Sounding like the real estate developer he once was, Mr. Trump vowed to turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump’s own supporters named it “Gaz-a-Lago.” Who would have thought that Gaza would become the 51st state before Canada?

So a president who campaigned on stopping endless wars overseas now wants to occupy Gaza. But it’s not an occupation, actually. The roughly two million Palestinians who live there would be sent somewhere else. Nobody really knows where. Maybe nowhere. And that’s how the random ideas that spontaneously emerge from Donald Trump’s mouth can lead to dangerous consequences.

The big picture here—the really big picture, going back to the founding of Israel—can be summed up in one question: How do you deal with an insurgency? An insurgency is a distinctive form of warfare in which the people who live in a territory resist a particular state’s control over that territory. But they lack the ability to fight successfully in conventional warfare, using heavy arms to hold territory. Instead, they fight as irregular guerilla forces, hiding among a civilian population that supports them. The classical principles of insurgency were stated by Mao Tse-Tung, who said, “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”

Insurgencies can be defeated. Most of them are. There are roughly five solutions to an insurgency.

1) Fight an actual counterinsurgency war. This is a well-developed specialty in military tactics and strategy, in which you suppress the insurgents, recruit local allies, and eventually win over the population by addressing their grievances and offering them opportunities for peace, prosperity, and often some degree of local autonomy. The motto used by US troops in Iraq was: “No better friend, no worse enemy.” You are the worst enemy to the insurgents, but also the best friend to those who side with the government against the insurgents.

Israel tried this, somewhat half-heartedly, for decades. But they gave it up long ago.

2) Give up and leave. You can conclude that fighting the insurgency is not worth the cost and instead try to insulate yourself from the consequences of an insurgent victory. This is what the French ultimately did in Algeria. It’s what Trump and Biden did in Afghanistan, because there is no way that events all the way out in Afghanistan could possibly have an impact on life the US. (And yes, that’s sarcasm.)

This is also what Israel did with Gaza twenty years ago in a policy called “disengagement.” But it obviously didn’t work, leading to decades of bombardment from Hamas rockets and finally the big breakout from Gaza on October 7, 2023.

3) Install a “friendly dictator.” Get a local strongman to suppress the insurgents for you, in exchange for your sponsorship. This is what Putin did eventually in Chechnya, making Ramzan Kadyrov into the local warlord, in exchange for service rendered to Putin.

This was Israel’s solution with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. After a disastrous early implementation—their idea of a friendly dictator was Yassir Arafat—this has been the most successful Israeli strategy, such as it is. By keeping a lid on things in the West Bank since the October 7 attacks, the Palestinian Authority has definitely been auditioning for this role in Gaza. Hamas is their hated rival, and they would love the opportunity to cruelly suppress its remnants.

But Netanyahu didn’t want this solution because it would strengthen the Palestinian Authority’s claim to a full-fledged independent Palestinian state.

So that leave us with the two worst options, the actually criminal options for dealing with an insurgency. And Trump just opened wide the first of these options.

4) Ethnic cleansing. This is a new name for an old approach. Stalin used forced deportations, for example, sending the Crimean Tatars into exile in Uzbekistan. But it goes back much farther, and Jews should know all about this, because it was what Nebuchadnezzar did to them, forcibly deporting them from Judea to Babylon about 2500 years ago. The Babylonian exile is the central event in the Old Testament.

Yet that seems to be what Trump is proposing here. He just spontaneously blurted out a solution Netanyahu hadn’t dared to propose yet.

Aside from the fact that this is literally a war crime, the practical obstacle is that there is nowhere for the Palestinians to go. Egypt and Jordan don’t want to try to absorb two million angry Palestinians, for fear that it would destabilize their governments. So this is not going to happen.

5) That leaves us with the fifth and worst option: genocide. Take the troublesome population and simply wipe them out. I don’t think genocide is what Israel has been doing up to now. Its actions have been brutal and destructive, but not fundamentally more so than the ordinary course of war. (Russia has been far more callous toward civilians in Ukraine.) Yet Trump just made this actual outcome a little bit more likely.

It seems obvious in this case that Trump is just blowing smoke. Reports indicate this was an impulsive idea that came to him on that day and was developed on the fly in the middle of a press conference. There is a very small likelihood it will result in any concrete plan of action.

But this is a sign of the kind of chaos presidency we’re dealing with—and the increased risk that these guys will just blunder into something that is really big and disastrous.

As Un-Reassured as We Have the Wits to Be

I try to tread the line between waking up my more complacent readers to the dangers of the current moment—to paraphrase Dagny Taggart, we should be as un-reassured as we have the wits to be—while not wanting to plunge my more alarmed readers over the edge into despair. For the benefit of that second group, let me point out that countries have gone to the edge of ruin before, and sometimes over it, and still managed to pull back.

I’ve been following the failed attempt to impose martial law in South Korea, for example, and the subsequent impeachment and arrest of its renegade president. I’ll look more closely soon at the recent rejection and reversal of authoritarianism in Poland. But The Bulwark recently posted a fascinating history of a battle against corrupt “state capture” in South Africa.

Once upon a time there was a very bad president who caused much harm to his country’s democracy. Even before he became president, he was credibly accused of theft, fraud, and sexual assault, but people thought he was entertaining and supported him anyway. As president, he used the government to enrich himself and his cronies. He elevated corrupt incompetents who drove institutions into the ground. His once-proud political party—cowed by his fanatical, tribal following—tolerated him for too long. He attacked his own party, the free press, government officials, the judiciary, and anyone who tried to keep him accountable, eroding public trust in democracy itself.
No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, but rather his wily South African analog, Jacob Zuma, whose tenure as president from 2009 to 2018 presented an existential threat to the continent’s most solid democracy.

It doesn’t sound like South Africa is quite out of the woods yet. But if they can pull back from the abyss with a far less established cultural tradition and practical experience of liberty—well, we should be ashamed to think we can’t do it here.