A Coup D’état by the World's Richest, Most Sinister Men

A classic coup d’état has guns. Uniformed men run wild seizing government agencies and claiming control over what government does and who government serves.

But in our new cyber age, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder reflected this past week, a coup can unfold without any armed overthrow. We can have “a couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives.”

These young men, operating upon “vague references to orders from on high,” can gain access to basic computer systems and “proceed to grant their Supreme Leader” effective power over just about everything that government does.

The historian Snyder is, of course, describing America’s current reality. He’s calling this reality a coup — and so are countless other defenders of America’s democratic faith.

We aren’t living through “a coup with tanks in the streets and mobs overrunning government offices,” charges former U.S. attorney and current Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance. We’ve living through “a quieter coup, a billionaires’ coup.”

“The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes,” adds in the University of Minnesota Law School’s Will Stancil. “Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.”

The Musk legions now hacking their way through the nation’s capital, the New York Times reports, have already “inserted themselves” into the databases of 17 federal agencies. These legions include fervent Musk admirers like Akash Bobba, a software engineer less than three years out of high school who once interned with a tech firm chaired by fellow Musk billionaire Peter Thiel.

One by one, the federal agencies that keep our nation running have been falling — with the full backing and blessings of Donald Trump — under Musk’s effective control. Trump, meanwhile, is making headlines about taking over Gaza and Panama, in the process, notes Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, “distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”

The Trumpsters, agrees Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, are moving us “into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.”

Elected officials and progressive activists are pushing back in the courts against the Musk putsch and scoring some initial victories. One federal judge, for instance, has just blocked Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s computer payments system. That access, the judge ruled, threatens “irreparable harm” to the personal and financial data of millions of Americans.

But lower-level court rulings may not pass muster with higher-level Trump-appointed judges. Stopping the Musk coup will require a broader popular mobilization, and that push back is indeed building, with protests drawing thousands in locales ranging from downtown Washington to a host of state capitols nationwide.

Our single best hope to counter the Musk coup’s billionaire corporate backers — “and their boundless options” to shape “our elections, legislation, and judicial appointments”? That may well be intensified trade union action, suggests a new analysis from long-time labor activist Michael Podhorzer — and that action is also building.

Labor’s national voice, the AFL-CIO, has just launched a new campaign, the Department of People Who Work for a Living, to challenge Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency.”

“Government can work for billionaires,” points out AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, “or it can work for working people — but not both.”