Our Generation's Test

The expanding assault by Trump and Musk on our founding principles and laws must deepen our resolve to act now

A crowd of protestors gathered outside the Treasury Department on Feb. 4 to hear Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other elected officials. (Photo by Anna Rose Layden via Getty Images)

On Jan. 20, Donald Trump mouthed the sacred words that every American president has said: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” We know—we have seen—that he didn’t believe a single word of the oath which is meant to be a solemn promise to the nation.

But Elon Musk, who stood among a pack of kowtowing billionaires that day right behind Trump, hasn’t even pretended the Constitution matters to him. The richest man in the world—who grew up in apartheid South Africa before emigrating to Canada and then the U.S.—has exploited the president who he bought and the access he’s been handed to run roughshod over our nation’s laws, values and principles.

Separation of powers? The singular right of Congress to control the purse and pass laws? The responsibility to not violate our laws? He could not care less, at least not as long as Trump, his immunized co-conspirator, okays him and his engineering punks to hack government computer systems, collect sensitive private data, and unilaterally decide what programs to keep and what taxpayer monies to spend. Despite the prerogatives of Congress, Musk thinks he and Trump alone should decide whether USAID and the people it supports should live or die.

Over the weekend, Musk posted about the actions, ignoring the question of their legality: “This administration has one chance for major reform that may never come again. It’s now or never.” Asked about Musk in a Fox interview aired before the Super Bowl on Sunday, Trump called him “terrific,” insisted he’s just looking for “fraud and abuse,” and blithely said he’d soon be digging into the Defense Department.

It’s not that Musk, who’s made billions from defense contracts and wants more, has no guiding principles. Beside the tech bro ethic to go fast and break things—an approach that has included locking elected officials out of the buildings that house major departments such as Treasury and Education—he’s fully embraced his partner in crime’s hostility toward anything that smacks of DEI and woke-ism. As if DEI is not an attempt to redress the nation’s failure to live up to its principles contained in the founders’ Declaration of Independence—”that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

And X-owner Musk is not a new convert. A year ago, he was virulently pushing anti-DEI hate and platforming neo-Nazis and other white nationalists. “DEI is just another word for racism,” he posted on X. “Shame on anyone who uses it.”

Yet notice what happens when you don’t let these extremists turn DEI into an ominous acronym, but spell out what this is all about. Say diversity, which is the lifeblood of American society and culture and innovation. Say equity, which a just society should pursue. Say inclusion, because decent people believe in increasing belonging, not isolating people who are different. These are principles worth fighting for.

Similarly, Musk and Trump have misappropriated the meaning of “woke” to turn that into a dirty word, a radioactive expression of thinking and policies that are allegedly destroying America, a metastasizing poison that supposedly justifies the need to ban books, fire university professors and other government employees, remove classes concerned with the study of gender, race and sexual identity, and demonize people who are not white, straight and committed to keeping America that way. The founders may have put “freedom of speech” at the center of the Constitution’s First Amendment, but that won’t deter this regime from rejecting progressive ideas they don’t like in the academy, the press and the public square.

Note that the same day last week Donald Trump announced he would attend the Super Bowl, the NFL announced that it was removing “End Racism” as the message emblazoned in the championship game’s end zone in New Orleans. The league replaced it with the more benign “Choose Love,” making sure that the game would not become a hotbed of attacks from Trump, Musk and all the MAGA crowd trained into believing that DEI and “wokeness” are the root of all evil and the source of both America’s troubles and the frailty of Western Civilization itself.

Of course, beyond its power as a culture war weapon and a vessel for hate, we can be sure this crowd is not interested in the reality of the notion of woke. The origins of “woke” date back to at least 1938. That’s when in a spoken afterword of “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song about nine Black teenagers who were accused of raping two white women in Alabama, blues musician Lead Belly said, “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

The idea of staying woke gained steam during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown and later by Black Lives Matter activists. As its power increased, politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis turned the movement into their nemesis and campaigned on fear. DeSantis said he would end the horrors of “woke-ism,” as if the fight for racial and social justice and the pursuit of compassion and empathy posed some grave threat to white people. In reality, it only ever threatened the white nationalists’ claim of their superiority. So much for prioritizing the idea that all people are created equal and people should be treated equally.

I’m alarmed that many Democratic leaders are reluctant to directly confront the likely Constitutional crisis that Trump and Musk have created—or to openly assert that their operatives’ intrusive actions behind locked doors don’t represent a coup. No one elected Elon Musk, and he and his henchmen have no obvious legal right to seize power by taking control of the federal government’s computer systems. “Of course it’s a coup,” On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder writes on Substack. “Miss the obvious, lose your republic.”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy is one Democrat who has risen to this moment and spoken out with the urgency and intensity required. He is a model for what we should expect from leaders who care about the survival our democracy and the Constitution itself.

“Democracies don't last forever, and what those who are trying to destroy democracies want is for everyone to stay quiet, for everyone to believe that the moment isn't urgent,” Murphy said on ABC’s This Week with Martha Raddatz yesterday.

He had much more to say, and I think it’s worth reading his full comment:

I think this is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced, certainly since Watergate. The President is attempting to seize control of power, and for corrupt purposes. The President wants to be able to decide how and where money is spent so that he can reward his political friends, he can punish his political enemies—that is the evisceration of democracy. You stand that next to the wholesale endorsement of political violence with the pardons given to every single January 6th rioter—including the most violent, who beat police officers over the head with baseball bats—and you could see what he's trying to do here. He is trying to crush his opposition by making them afraid of losing federal funding, by making them afraid of physical violence. So yes, this is a red alert moment when this entire country has to understand that our democracy is at risk—and for what? The billionaire takeover of government.

Murphy concluded by referencing the growing number of protests across the country. “We are watching the billionaires try to steal government from the people,” he said, “and I think the broad cross-section of the American public, as you have seen in the last week, is going to rise up and say, ‘enough.’”

Another truth-teller is Maryland Congressman and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin, who did not hesitate last week to call what’s happening a coup. “What I see are all the telltale signs of a coup,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “A coup is a seizure of state power by unelected actors who work to take control over the critical infrastructure of government outside of the rule of law—and that’s what I see going on right now.”

These are the kinds of diagnoses needed to attack Trump’s illegal firing of civil servants and other federal employees, as well as the Musk seizures and illegal efforts to centralize power. The growing number of legal challenges are critical to slowing down or stopping these criminal violations. The courts’ rulings might even help us avert this growing crisis, so long as the Trump regime abides by them.

But it will also take the continuing efforts of everyday citizens to reach out to their senators and congresspeople and other elected officials to demand their urgency. That means business as usual must stop, including, for example, collegial attempts at bipartisanship to stem a possible government shutdown a month from now.

We may be only three weeks into Trump’s takeover, but that’s three weeks of accelerated attacks on our constitution. Trump and his lawless regime has made clear that they are tossing away the normal cadence of governmental action, and the Democrats need to act with similar rapidity.

That also means putting aside the usual etiquette and civility that Trump has exploited again and again to abuse his power and violate the law. And it means public servants must do their jobs with the courage their positions require now. Where are the police officers and other law enforcement to ensure that elected members of Congress gain access to buildings that Musk and his henchmen have locked themselves in?

As I wrote in a 2020 column for the Washington Post during the first Senate impeachment trial, “The smooth veneer of civility, rather than being uplifting, might actually facilitate the downward spiral. In this context, civility is dangerous, a weapon that serves both as a shield, covering up malign acts, and a sword, parried at the opponent who dares to be ‘uncivil’ and so shifting the focus away from the true danger.”

My mind keeps circling back to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the fear of how our current troubles could continue to escalate if the urgency of this moment is not aggressively confronted. I hope that Lincoln’s words can provide the kind of stimulus that reluctant politicians need to be activated for emergency service.

America’s founders, Lincoln said, were “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Civil War was a test of whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” He asked that the many tens of thousands who died on that Pennsylvania battlefield “shall not have died in vain.” His hope? “That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Each generation confronts its own test, its own version of what’s required to sustain and advance the human species. This moment is ours. As Lincoln said, “It is rather for us, the living…dedicated to the great task remaining before us.”

That includes confronting racism, the hateful agenda of the Trump regime, Musk’s usurpation of Congress’ power, the efforts of a vengeful president to abuse his power and prosecute his political enemies—and much more. This would be a good day for all of us to call our representatives and ask them to do something about the growing danger—and for them to act, not next week, next month or when midterms roll around, but now.

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