Focus on the coup

One of these things is not like the others

From the beginning, the idea has been to overwhelm you. To flood the zone, as Steve Bannon promised, with so much stuff that the media would not be able to process it in time—like a butcher saddled with too much meat for the throughput of a single grinder.

Some of this flooding was to occur at levels of highly emotive, if actually less substantive, things, in the hope of distracting you from truly substantive things that had, for the flooders, the added benefit of being boring and obscure.

Well, indeed, they are flooding the zone. The water levels of tyranny are rising over a country that once called itself the land of the free and the home of the brave. Even, we should note, as millions thirst for actual solutions to their actual problems. It can sometimes happen like that: a terrible flood, yet still great thirst.

But you do not have to consent to being flooded. Do not participate in the fragmenting of your attention so far and so wide that you cannot prioritize, you cannot see bigger patterns, you cannot identify the merely unwise policies from the flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional ones.

Of all the things going on—including other baldly unlawful actions such as attempting to gut birthright citizenship and to fire people who did their jobs investigating insurrectionists—the single thing we should be most focused on right now, the first among equals of this corrupt and boorish new administration, is this:

The handing over of the keys to the American Republic by a mendacious president to a megalomaniacal oligarch. Elon Musk is a wealthy private citizen who, relatively late in the game, happened to become a Trump supporter when he saw which way the wind was blowing. Now he has burrowed his way into the bowels of the federal government and is waging what can only be called an anti-constitutional coup.

He is deep in the systems of the United States Treasury Department, including payment systems related to your taxes. He is within reach of the most sensitive and private information you have—information you may have always trusted was safe and should not trust anymore. He is rampaging through other federal agencies, claiming the authority to fire people. He has attempted to shut down the federal aid agency USAID, boasting of feeding it to the wood chipper.

There are now fevered speculations about where he and his young coder minions will go next: the Department of Labor? HR records of every federal employee?

What Musk is doing right now, along with Donald Trump—but also usurping Trump’s at least elected authority—is waging a coup against the Constitution of the United States. Undermining the basic distribution of power within the American constitutional order. Usurping the power of Congress for a private citizen who happens to be very rich.

You may have voted for whoever you voted for; you may have done so for whatever reasons you did. But surely the desire to be ruled by Elon Musk was not one of them.

There are any number of abuses and nightmares being spewed right now. Just yesterday, the president seemingly proposed what is effectively the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip by the United States, which would then occupy it. It would become America’s third 51st state, one supposes, along with Canada and Greenland. The trade wars are disastrous. The pardons were ghastly derelictions of duty.

But what Musk and Co. are up to is the unraveling of the constitutional order itself—the system that makes all these other choices possible. It is of supreme importance, and you need to keep your eye on that ball. More importantly, the media that serves you does.

Much of our traditional media is failing us, more worried about sobriety and balance than identifying vast threats that require a little bit of dot connecting to name and frame. It is fulfilling Bannon’s prophecy, overwhelmed by too many things to tell us what matters most.

It is not presenting what Musk is doing for what it is: a coup. Rather, it is describing it in procedural terms and then leaving it to critics to denounce. This is the old model of reporting: stating what one party says or does and then giving the other party a chance to respond. But a coup is an actual thing with an actual meaning. Our news outlets have no problem naming this thing when it happens in a country far away. We need to grow comfortable describing it here. It is happening here. It is now.