Thoughts for the Day, February 5, 2025: Coup? I think so.

Coup?

I have heard the word “coup” more in the last 48 hours than I have my entire life when it relates to the United States.

What is happening in our government today by the Trump/Musk presidency fits the definition of a coup but without the violence. There is no question it meets the other defined characteristics which include a decisive exercise of force in the overthrow or alteration of an existing government.

Smarter people than me are calling the first two weeks of the Trump/Musk presidency a coup. I don’t know if it is a coup but there is no question it is an overthrow and alteration our government as we know it.

Trump/Musk are transferring power from the legislative branch to executive branch in a manner we have never seen before. And we are naïve if we think the Republican controlled congress will do anything about it.

It really hit home with me when I watched a Republican congressman trying to make light of Musk and his team having access to the country’s financial systems, by saying it is important to remember that Musk and his team have only been given “read only” access and they cannot make changes to the system.

Since so many stories indicate Musk and his team have more than “read only” access, I am not sure what is true. What I do know is that giving Musk and his team “read only” access is like inviting the fox into the henhouse and saying he can look but not touch. Eventually the fox is going to make his way back into the henhouse and do much more than look.

This congressman on CNN went further in his defense of Musk, when he said it was OK for Musk to shut down USAID. He said that Musk was just evaluating how much waste there was in the agency. Since the USAID website was shut down for more than 48 hours and all the workers outside the country have been told to return home within 30 days, and those within the country have been put on leave, it sounds like more than an evaluation to me.

Our system of democracy only works when all three branches do their jobs as defined by the Constitution. When one branch acquiesces power to another branch, our democracy is out of balance and at risk.

As of today, our democracy is out of balance because the Republican controlled congress is allowing the Trump/Musk presidency to run wild with no guardrails and no resistance. Trump has proven time and time again that he is a bully, and he will bully anyone who allows themselves to be bullied. Like all bullies, Trump keeps bullying when he can get away with it, and he backtracks and retreats when he meets resistance and needs to save face. In the last weeks he has done both. Unfortunately, the Republican controlled congress is afraid of the bully. They are afraid to stand up to him. They are afraid he might bully them even more.

Our Republican controlled congress is not doing what the constitution requires them to do. They are like the kid on the playground who always gives in to the demands of the bully for fear of getting beat up. Trump/Musk know this. As a result, our democracy is out of balance and the executive branch has completely altered our democracy as we knew it.

It will continue this way until some members of the Republican controlled congress “grow some” cojones and work with the Democrats to bring balance back into our democracy.

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Jamelle Bouie takes it even further.

Here are excerpts from his NY Times opinion article today.

if Musk had been elected to some office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of executive power in American history. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payments system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub government websites of public data, itself paid for by American taxpayers. And no private citizen has the authority to access the sensitive data of American citizens for either information gathering or their own, unknown purposes.

But that is the situation... The public has no guarantee that its most sensitive data is secure. At best, they have the personal word of Donald Trump, which, paired with a few dollars, might buy you a cup of coffee.

The only institution capable of responding to this with any alacrity is Congress. But Congress is also led by Republicans, and both the Senate majority leader, John Thune, and the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, have declined to take any steps to arrest the president’s illegal arrogation of power or Musk’s destructive effort to run the federal government. Thune and Johnson, acting with the support of Republicans in both chambers, have, in effect, renounced their power over the purse and abnegated their powers of oversight. Their Congress is supine, submissive and subordinate, less the equal of the president than a tool of the executive branch — a subject of his will.

To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.

Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system.

For as much as some of Trump’s and Musk’s moves were anticipated in Project 2025, the fact of the matter is that marginal Trump voters — the voters who gave him his victory — did not vote for any of this. They voted specifically to lower the cost of living. They did not vote, in Musk’s words, for economic “hardship.” Nor did they vote to make Musk the co-president of the United States or to give Trump the power to destroy the capacity of the federal government to do anything that benefits the American people. They certainly did not vote for a world where the president’s billionaire ally has access to your Social Security number….

As dangerous as the president and his allies are, however, their hold on government is not as total or complete as they imagine. The president’s opponents, in other words, still have room to maneuver.

But as those opponents strategize their response, it is vital that they see the important truth that there is no going back to the old status quo. President Trump and Elon Musk really have altered the structure of things. They’ve taken steps that cannot be so easily reversed. If American constitutional democracy is a game, then they’ve flipped the board with the aim of using the same pieces to play a new one with their own boutique rules…

Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

Anything less will set us up for yet another Trump and yet another Musk.

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Joyce Vance Offers Hope

Here are excerpts from her blog Civil Discourse

But long-term success is not a foregone conclusion with coups, especially when citizens are unwilling to accept them. Already, we are seeing signs Americans have no intention of letting it happen here. It’s a slow, still-fragile start, but elected officials and American citizens seem to be figuring it out.

The lawyers are at work, too. So far, they’ve convinced courts to enjoin Trump’s birthright citizenship plans and his effort to stop federal spending that offends his sensibilities. Today, lawyers filed two separate cases designed to prevent the FBI from firing agents who worked on January 6 cases and to keep the Justice Department from making their names public. Placing faith in the courts feels like unsteady ground in light of the Supreme Court’s willingness to give Trump a pass on criminality. Having already given him immunity from criminal prosecution for any official acts he commits, perhaps the conservative majority will see the wisdom of declining to consolidate all of the power of government in the hands of the president.

There is still plenty of fight left in our democracy, but it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. This isn’t a coup with tanks in the streets and mobs overrunning government offices. It’s a quieter coup, a billionaires’ coup. Talk with the people around you about what’s happening and what it means if they’re not aware.

Call it what it is: A coup. Let’s make sure it doesn’t succeed.

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Quote of the Day: “That’s all that is happening here,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had campaigned on the promise “to look at the receipts of this federal government and ensure it’s accountable to American taxpayers.”

Orchid of the Day: Pamela Brown of CNN. I rarely watch TV news but today Leah was watching CNN with Brown as the host. I was impressed with her ability to smoke out BS and press for answers to her questions while maintaining professionalism. She was the host pressing the congressman I referred to above.

Onion of the Day: The Republican members of congress who are allowing Trump/Musk to bully them at the expense of the Constitution.

Lyrics of the Day: Oh Mama, I've been years on the lam and had a high price on my head. Lawman said, "Get him dead or alive". I was for sure he'll see me dead

Dear Mama, I can hear you a-cryin' you're so scared and all alone
Hangman is comin' down from the gallows and I don't have very long

Answer to Lyrics of the Day for February 4, 2025; “Too Much Time on My Hands”, by Styx.

Question of the Day: Coup or Not?

Video of the Day: Aerosmith - Dream On (with Southern California Children's Chorus) - Boston Marathon Bombing Tribute

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