The Sociopaths Think Victory Is Theirs
Elon Musk and his sidekick Donald Trump are remorseless in their pursuit to dismantle our government. But they're wrong to assume their coup has succeeded.
Let’s start here: In a sane world, Elon Musk and his merry band of marauding miscreants would have already been arrested. For crying out loud: They have taken control of government computer systems at the United States Treasury and invaded the databases containing the private records of nearly every American, including personal medical records and financial information from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, all under the pretext of rooting out waste and fraud.
But for the moment anyway, his lawless co-conspirator Donald Trump—immunized by the Supreme Court—is all-in. He’s more than willing to let Musk ignore privacy laws and constitutional constraints that do not permit an unelected private citizen to usurp the power of Congress and unilaterally decide which programs and departments should be discarded and how much taxpayer funds they receive.
This coup—a sudden, unlawful seizure of power of our government—hasn’t stopped at the doors of the Treasury. Musk and his twenty-something engineering punks have reportedly invaded the databases of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that document the factual reality of the climate crisis and those at the Department of Labor and its Bureau of Labor Statistics that document unemployment, consumer prices and more—you know, minor things like the data that moves the stock market and tells the country the truth about how the economy is doing. (How dire is this? As Kai Ryssdal, host of National Public Radio’s Marketplace ominously put it on Bluesky yesterday, “If true, this is the economic ballgame.”)
This is the tech bro dream: Manipulate reality. Go fast and break things. So much power. So. Much. Fun.
We shouldn’t be shocked by what’s happening. And we surely shouldn’t be awed. The evidence was out there; they weren’t hiding their plans. Recall what Russell Vought, a key author of Project 20205 and just-confirmed Office of Management and Budget boss, said over a year ago. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said, to be “viewed as the villains.” He is a Trump true believer dedicated to the maximal idea of presidential power—and that includes employing the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests, prioritizing Christianity in government and making all government departments subservient to the president’s will.
And Vought did not hide his hostile, anti-democratic ambitions or choose his words more carefully to ensure he’d land the OMB slot. Quite the contrary.
“The president has to move as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers,” he said right after the election. “Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies.”
The Democrats spent the whole night Wednesday filibustering in order to slow down Vought’s confirmation, but that didn’t stop every Republican voting for him last night. At this point, neither Vought nor Kash Patel nor Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. seem able to say anything crazy or dangerous or sick enough to convince the obedient supplicants of Trump—who happen to be senators and once-upon-a-time protectors of the Constitution—to stop this mad parade.
There is a current of sociopathy that has come to rule in America. It’s not news to say that the American electorate voted for a known sociopath to occupy the White House for a second time. Nor is it news to say the Republican Party has fallen in line—their spines, their independence, nowhere to be seen—refusing to acknowledge the danger of a lawless, remorseless, vengeful ruler.
But it is new for our body politic to have the world’s richest man, a private citizen and a major defense contractor enriched by taxpayer dollars, ignore the rule of law and violate the basic systems upon which Americans depend. It would be another thing if he were working in genuine good faith to improve public services.
But Elon Musk has made clear his fascist intentions. He has empowered and amplified the worst abusers on his X platform, endorsed Germany’s emergent neo-Nazi party and fervently given Nazi salutes while standing behind the presidential seal—all part of his obvious desire to help build a global, anti-democratic, extremist movement.
The wife of a Holocaust survivor who visited Auschwitz last year with her husband and Musk described him as a sociopath who was “unmoved” and '“utterly detached” during his hours at the Nazi death camp, mostly concerned about how he would look in the photo-ops. But it doesn’t take that phony stunt or his increasingly hostile behavior to grasp that he lacks the basic human compassion needed to provide responsible, humane leadership. The richest man in the world has gleefully, callously announced his (illegal) efforts to put the foreign assistance program USAID “in the wood chipper,” insisting it must “die.”
So what if it means that he’s increasing starvation, the spread of disease and death throughout the developing world for millions of humans? All that money, all that power, which could be used to improve and save lives has instead bought him an alliance with Trump and his sadistic mission to inflict pain, suffering and trauma.
Count me among those who’ve been alarmed by the foot-dragging failure of Democratic leaders to act with greater urgency. While Musk and his miscreants locked themselves behind closed doors at the Treasury, given the key by Trump’s new Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to access the department’s treasure trove of data, a smiling Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was holding up an avocado to complain about the likely impact of Mexican tariffs on grocery prices. He was not the only one to miss the real narrative; that’s why the pillagers plotted to do everything everywhere all at once.
Yes, Trump used his first days to flood the zone with executive orders illegally firing inspectors general, trying to drive out thousands of FBI agents connected to the Jan. 6 investigation, as well as seeking to fire thousands of CIA employees. This is not only Vladimir Putin’s wet dream of weakening American security, it’s part and parcel of Trump’s depraved goal to act with total impunity, with no one questioning the nature or scale of his criminality or corruption. No dissent. No accountability.
Never mind that America’s adversaries are recognizing that this narcissistic lunatic is more focused on self-glorification than protecting the homeland. Is it any surprise that one of the first acts of Trump’s sycophantic Attorney General Pam Bondi was to shut down an FBI team responsible for combatting foreign election interference threats? All this makes America less safe.
But there are reasons to take heart. Just yesterday, a federal judge restricted the access to Treasury payment records by operatives of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, at least for now, thanks to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of federal unions and the advocacy group Public Citizen (although it remains unclear what the Musk team may have already taken and hidden). Another federal judge paused the Trump regime’s “fork in the road” offer to federal employees of “deferred resignation,” at least until Monday. Acting director of the FBI, Brian Driscoll, refused to hand over to the Justice Department names of agents who worked on the Jan. 6 investigations, later stating the agency’s mission is “protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution.” On Wednesday, there were protests against the demolition of USAID and other parts of the fascist Trump agenda in every capitol and every state in America.
And just yesterday, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour explained in blistering terms his nationwide injunction to block Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. “It has become ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain,” said Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee. “Nevertheless, in this courtroom, and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.”
Still, the failure of some Democratic elected officials and legacy media to step outside of their usual rhythm to grasp the Trump-Musk plot to destroy America is alarming and dispiriting. We shouldn’t waste one precious second hoping that these people—consciously or unwittingly complicit in the coup—will come to our country’s rescue. They have failed—or refused—to grasp the gravity. I won’t dwell on how much valuable time was lost when legacy media outlets were distracted by Mad King Donald’s insane idea this week to occupy Gaza and turn it into a real estate bonanza.
It remains up to each of us to focus our attention on the helpers, the first responders, the people who recognize there’s a five-alarm fire. That includes reaching out to your senators to demand that they do whatever they can to block Trump’s nominees. That also means supporting undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ+ communities, public officials and others who are facing the threat of Trump retribution, as well as letting your representatives know that you reject efforts to pursue bipartisan collaboration with Trump and his enablers.
We need to expand the community that recognizes the danger we’re in. As Yale historian and On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder wrote yesterday, “A coup is underway, against Americans as possessors of human rights and dignities, and against Americans as citizens of a democratic republic. Each hour this goes unrecognized makes the success of the coup more likely.”
This is a moment that calls on us to dig in, not despair—to keep going and not give in to fear or exhaustion. We have nothing less than our democratic country to save.
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And let’s stop calling these punks “engineers.” They’re hackers. Full stop.
We were warned. You warned us, Steve, as did others. They put their plans in writing, for crissakes. It was willfully ignored by many “leaders” and we the people are paying the price. “The enemy is us…”