The Coup Is Accomplished

(Free to the People: The Decision Now What to Do)

Is it a hundred percent? No. Some things, like missed the boat, the train, the plane, and dead are a hundred percent or not at all. Many things aren’t like that, and a coup is one of them.

Yesterday in the Washington Post (a free, gifted article — I no longer subscribe), Philip Bump reviewed the different institutional avenues to resistance. They are barricaded or, in any timely manner, clogged to impassibility.

The GOP Senate and House are all in for Trump. Even their small majorities are holding. Unlikely rejections of, say, Tulsi Gabbard as Director of Intelligence or Robert Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Resources secretary would demonstrate that a few GOP senators had home-state concerns that Trumped Trump. (After all, the reason these senators have implicated themselves is to retain their offices and power.) Nothing more than that. No break in his support. He’s still gaining power.

Ten years in, and there is less separation between Trump and Trumpism than ever, so the legislative branch under the control of the GOP will not be — is not — fighting to retain its Constitutional powers and equality.

The judicial branch and the entire legal system have been revealed multiple times in multiple ways to be inadequate to the task. Yes, we hear of all kinds of lawsuits being filed and readied. Have we heard that before? Even if ultimately successful in some cases, systemically they take too much time — far too much time — and the damage will already be done. In many cases, Trumpist judges (Aileen Cannon) will render systemically legitimized judgements in his favor, and his power will only be enhanced.

The Supreme Court? In Trump v. United States this past summer, it granted Trump near imperial immunity from prosecution, thus power. He has a demonstrated majority in sympathy with him to begin. And if, in any case, the USSC should find against Trump, who will enforce the finding?

The famous anecdote about Joseph Stalin has him quipping to Churchill at some meeting or other, ““The Pope! How many divisions has he got?”

Who’s sending what force by what authority to make Trump abide by a USSC decision?

Trump, effectively, is actually moving much more quickly than Hitler’s 53 days. Rather than acknowledge Congress’s Constitutional role and powers to consider legislation and pass new laws, he is issuing Executive Orders on a range of matters he has no legal authority to direct. Who’s stopping him? Out of fear, people and organizations are already complying. Elon Musk’s so-called “Department” of Government Efficiency was not created through any Constitutionally mandated legislation, or Musk confirmed by the Senate. The Trump administration’s use of the term “department” and its imposition of Musk-led worker-allies into department buildings and secured computer systems is itself the coup in progress.

In American Samizdat’s “The Hingle of Fate,” this past July, I wrote about the oft-repeated, unconsidered truism, coming to us from John Adams, that the United States is a nation “of laws and not of men.”

American Samizdat: The Hinge of Fate

I wrote,

Laws did not make the men. Men made the laws. They can unmake them. They can unmake them lawfully, to betray the law. Men can simply decline to enact and enforce the laws or violate their spirit. That the United States, or any liberal democracy, is a nation of laws and not of men is the necessary, ideal fiction by which each seeks to establish its gifts in perpetuity.

For whatever the law may be, still the cops on the street must not pocket the cash or re-peddle the drugs. Their fellows must erect no blue wall of silence. Prosecutors must not choose cases based on enmity or favor—or judges be bribable, or legislators paid to be played. Legislatures must accept the decisions of the courts, courts abide by the will of legislatures, executives agree to be bound in their power by both. US Marshals must serve the warrants and apprehend the fugitives, the military bend to civilian rule. The law rules because in every instance, at every instant, innumerable times a day, a person agrees to act as the law’s instrument, by obeying it and serving it, and by so doing both enacting its rule and affirming its legitimacy.

We are a nation of people in service to law no better than the people chosen to serve it.

The people now chosen to serve the law in the United States, at its highest levels, are rotten. They constitute an array of anti-democratic forces in the progress now of completing the ten-year-long destruction of the American republic, along with its social fabric and political culture.

Destruction of the political culture at the presidential level began with Trump’s norm-shattering 2016 campaign, for instance in failing to release his tax returns (and in regularly lying about it and having those lies accepted and ultimately excused and integrated into normalcy). Destruction of the Constitutional rule of law began on the very first day of his first term, when he entered office already in violation of Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. A fuss was made about it by many for months, it went unprosecuted by impeachment of any other sanction (by whom? how?) and that illegal presidential usurpation of power and behavior became normalized. Who speaks of it now, at a far more egregious level than before? The whole Trump presidency is an international business emolument for Trump. (Gaza as a “Riviera of the Middle East”?)

A whole mental culture has been created within the media, journalism, and the courts by which a manifestly criminal organization that lies as its very breath of life is daily treated as if that history of moral turpitude is not instantly disqualifying. Would a Mafia family’s application to own and operate a casino take years to wend its way to the Supreme Court for ultimate adjudication?

On Wednesday, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly listened to arguments regarding Musk’s DOGE intrusion into Treasury Department systems and accounts. Treasury Department lawyers, now under the leadership Trump-Musk defended against the concerns of three unions. Note the language hedges in responses to the judge.

A “government lawyer said only two Musk allies — both of them now Treasury employees — had any access to the data. Are these men “now Treasury employees” the way Johnny Ringo was deputized in Tombstone to pursue Wyatt Earp? Who’s fooling whom? Your government — everyday, everybody. [Emphasis added]

"Only those two individuals have been given any access," Humphreys said, adding that as special government employees of the Treasury Department, both were subject to federal ethics and confidentiality requirements. [Emphasis added]

“Special government employees” is the new technical term for ad hoc and unauthorized. And it’s comforting to know that they are “subject to federal ethics and confidentiality requirements.” We know how the Trump administration rigorously follows them, so rest assured.

Argued the union lawyers,

“We don’t take it as a given that two individuals by themselves, without outside assistance, will manage the supposed task of rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse in a system that handles over a billion payments a year, and trillions and trillions of dollars of payments,” he said.

That seems wise. But as lawyers argue and judges consider, the illegal activity and the usurpation of power — the coup — proceeds apace. That’s how these things work. The law is not just “a ass”[1] but often a slow ass and a dumb ass.

"Have they disseminated any of that information to anybody else?" the judge asked Humphreys.

"As far as we are aware, no they have not, outside of the Treasury Department," including to Musk, Humphreys said.

"So he has nothing to do with the records, if he's not at Treasury?" the judge asked of Musk.

"He is associated with the United States DOGE Service, and with the executive office of the president, as a special government employee" Humphreys answered.

"However, our understanding is that the information derived from the systems at issue in this case is not being transmitted to him outside of the Treasury Department," Humphreys added of Musk. "He is not in the Treasury Department."

"Does he have access to it? Can he go look at it? Has he gone and looked at it?" the judge asked.

"No, your honor. To our knowledge he has not," Humphreys answered. [Emphasis added]

The two men in question are a Musk business friend and a former Space-X and Twitter employee.

The Democrats stand before microphones and righteously declaim. Trump is already ruling and daily destroying.

Timothy W. Ryback’s 53 days of Hitler in the Atlantic do not constitute one hundred percent completion of Hitler’s accumulation of power. They leave us still in March 1933. Paul von Hindenburg remained President to Hitler’s Chancelor, and while Hindenburg lived, Hitler did not challenge him for that position. Only when Hindenburg died in August 1934, well over a year later, did Hitler declare himself president, and head of the army, too – Fuhrer.

Until then, Hitler was still negotiating with army leaders over their role. He was contending with the power and implicit challenge of old friend Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA, the Nazi street army that pummeled and murdered opposition among the citizenry.

It was also not until June 1934 that Hitler coordinated the famed Night of the Long Knives, in which Röhm and hundreds of SA members were murdered, to eliminate their threat to Hitler’s agenda and power. Even then, Hitler believed it necessary, with Hermann Göring, to manufacture evidence of a conspiracy against him by Röhm, in order to justify the purge to the Gestapo. the army, and others.

But the fragile German democracy had been over since March 1933.

I’ve been thinking about Röhm because I’ve been thinking about Musk and the role of digital Reichsleiter he is currently playing for Trump. As I keep saying, events will unfold in all kinds of unpredictable ways.

Forgetting to Learn the Moral

But this event has unfolded now. There is no basis for believing, as Bump’s review lays out, that the United States can recover in any orderly way from its current submission to Trump and submersion under his will and power. As I wrote in “Forgetting to Learn the Moral,” never in history has a nation as domestically, internationally, and militarily powerful as the United States slid from democracy into any form of autocracy. This is a first. The most common response in these circumstances is submission, with long decades and more of autocratic rule. Another is civil war, sometimes at some point after those long decades of submission – Syria a recent example. That course is almost unthinkable in the United States for a host of reasons, not least the unimaginable death and destruction it would unleash. Still, in line with the principle of unpredictable events and unforeseen consequences, one can never foresee.

In any event, the remaining best hope for saving the remnants of the American First Republic, to retain any chance of creating an American Second Republic, is — coordinated with the institutional track, organized, massive popular resistance on many levels, including in the streets, in efforts to disrupt the tightening of the autocratic grip. Such activity, as during the Civil Rights era, will provoke violent backlash. People will be injured and likely die. Success would hardly be guaranteed. The forces of democratic resistance have been trying and failing for nearly two decades now in Venezuela,

The alternative to that is to give in. Leave the country if you can or just live under a thumb. Maybe you’ll be among the lucky classes of people not directly targeted. Maybe, if not now, in time you will be. Still, after who knows how many decades, like the Soviet Union, the corrupt Trumpian state may finally just collapse of its own failure. But the Soviet Union had a free and democratic America to help bring about its collapse, and we can imagine, if we care to, the transformation of the world over those many decades with three authoritarian states, Russia, China, and the United States contending across it like the global empires of Orwell’s 1984.

That’s it. That’s where we are as of now. You may not feel it yet. And then suddenly, somehow, you will.

And you, we, I all have to make our choices. History has come for us, and it isn’t waiting for our decision.

AJA

Writers can get down in the face of their challenges. Your support lifts me up. Your readership and your likes, your comments, shares, and recommendations, and your free and paid subscriptions enable me in the project of my writing life. Thank you again.

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com

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[1] If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass — a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience — by experience.”

― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist