Mitch's Blog

The New York Times:

Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.

If Trump, Musk and their allies … succeed, then the question of American politics won’t be if they’ll win the next election, but whether the Constitution as we know it is still in effect.

The extent to which the United States is embroiled in a major political crisis would be obvious and apparent if these events were unfolding in another country. Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse. But that, in fact, is what’s happening right now.

…

At this point in any argument like this one, the question arises of what should be done and, more critically, what can be done? The sad answer is not that much. Those with the direct institutional power to slam the brakes lack the will and those with the will lack the power.

If Trump and Musk’s opponents have a tool to use, it is the power to shape public opinion – to show as many of the American people who will listen that something truly malign and radical has hijacked the normal functioning of the federal government. And it is to the advantage of those opponents that Trump and Musk’s efforts to commandeer the executive branch are taking shape side by side with serious accidents – like the deadly airplane crash near Ronald Reagan National Airport last week – that dramatize the importance of a competent, apolitical civil service.

… 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.

… his voters did not anticipate anything other than a return to the status quo before the pandemic. What they’re getting instead is a new crisis pushed on by a dangerous set of corrupt oligarchs and monomaniacal ideologues. 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.

And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. 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.

Platformer:

… deep research is available only to subscribers of ChatGPT’s $200-a-month P⁠⁠ro tier. (Users are limited to 100 deep research queries a month, reflecting the high cost of the computation involved; for now, it’s accessible only on the web.) To use it, you type out your query as usual in the ChatGPT chat box and then click the “deep research” button.

ChatGPT then analyzes your query and asks you follow-up questions. When I asked for a report on a current subject of interest – how publishers can benefit from the Fediverse – the bot asked me four clarifying questions, such as whether I was looking from the perspective of a legacy publisher or a digital-only outlet, and how technical it should get in its analysis of the tradeoffs between using two different federated protocols. I answered those questions, and deep research got to work.

Like DeepSeek, OpenAI’s deep research exposes some of its chain of thought as it answers your query. This let me see some of the websites that the agent was visiting, what conclusions it was drawing from them, and how it was beginning to organize its reasoning. Five minutes later, my 4,955-word report was available. (Read the whole thing here.) It outlined how the Fediverse can help people find new news sources; offered real-world examples of how sites like The Verge and 404 Media are leaning in to federation; explored different monetization strategies and described the trade-offs involved with each; and analyzed the pros and cons of building on the two main federated protocols.⁠⁠

Today in Tabs:

It’s both more and less than it seems, and as alarming as the facts are, I can’t find any evidence that anything permanent has been done yet. It’s a coup that’s only happening on the computer so far, which is real but it’s not… entirely real, you know?

A couple of real things have happened. They’re attempting to shut down USAID, because it was instrumental in helping to end apartheid in South Africa, which Elon Musk and his mother are still mad about because they are literally apartheid South African white supremacists, notoriously the Worst People In The World for all of recent history. He’s also going after South Dakota Lutherans? The reasons for that one are less clear to me, but as the old poem goes, “…Then they came for the midwestern Lutherans, and I said ‘Ope!'" That poem was actually written by a Lutheran, so maybe that’s the connection. At this point who knows.

Here’s a website clarifying what will be lost if USAID is actually shut down, but right now, USAID is a still a Federal Government agency chartered by Congress, and it still exists by law. Whoever is preventing it from carrying out its Congressionally mandated work is breaking the law…. Every coup has a period where the people perpetrating it are breaking the law, and either they will succeed in taking over the apparatus of the state and change the law, or not. Right now we’re in the period of uncertainty, as we have been for at least five days, and the longer that uncertainty stretches out, the more exposed these criminals are.

…

Donald Trump is a gutless bully … who has never experienced love or contentment or true human warmth, and never will, and that’s a fatal weakness.⁠⁠

Ian Welsh::

I think a lot of this comes down to something we’ve talked about before. “You go for the King, you’d better not miss.” I warned, repeatedly, that prosecution of Trump was an all-or-nothing matter. You either take him out, completely, or you’re fucked, because you’ve destroyed an elite norm against going after ex-Presidents seriously. (Note that Trump said he’d prosecute Hilary Clinton, but never did.)

Trump’s first actions have included a purge of law enforcement and prosecutors who went after him, the people who tried to help him steal the 2000 election, and his January 6th shock troopers.

What the hell did Democrats expect? That they could prosecute Trump and his people and that if he got back into power he’d shrug it off? How fucking stupid are these people?

If you prosecuted Trump, you had to make it stick and throw him in prison and take every red cent he had. You don’t go after an ex-President who still has a power base without making sure you finish him off.

The bloody fools.

In some respects Trump is just self-protecting. He has to take control of the Justice system so that when he leaves office he’s safe, at least, from any sort of Federal prosecution and with his loyalists in charge of the Justice system, attempts to end-run using the State system can be countered by simple threats. “If you do, we’ll go after your people, and we’re a lot more powerful.)

Trump is taking control of government: the treasury system and all expenditures, and the legal enforcement system. No one will be prosecuted who he doesn’t want prosecuted. No one will get money whom he doesn’t want to get money. Anyone he does want prosecuted will be and anyone who wants to have money, will have money.

Is it a coup? That depends on intention. Does he intend to step down in 2028 and allow free and fair elections? Or does he intend to make sure that elections are only a fig-leaf and he, or more likely given his age, his chosen successor is essentially appointed?

Trump could just intend to punish his immediate enemies and make sure the government does exactly what he wants, or he could intend to turn this into a permanent Republican state, with at least his successor chosen by him.

If he really wants to be safe, well, he needs to appoint his successor.⁠⁠

Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge::

At Musk’s functional companies — SpaceX and to some degree, Tesla — he’s put in a playpen where he can’t damage the real work. At Twitter, we saw what happened when there was no padding between him and the company: he began switching things off at random, firing engineers willy-nilly (and then trying to rehire them), and turning its revenue into a giant bonfire. Now Musk has brought this strategy to the federal government.

…

Let’s say Musk gets direct access to treasury payments, which seems very likely to be his aim. Will he stop paying bills, as he did with Twitter’s leases? Might be fun to discover what the military does when they don’t get their paychecks, or how many grandparents get evicted when the Social Security checks don’t go out. How many of Musk’s unsecured servers do you think foreign spies have penetrated already? All of them, maybe?

…

Does Musk have the authority to do this? Doesn’t matter. As we know from previous Musk experience, the real question is: who will stop him? So far the answer appears to be no one. The CIA, FBI, and NSA appear to be doing nothing. The US attorney’s office in DC is threatening individuals and groups who “appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.” The Democratic party is making strongly worded statements and issuing letters of concern.

The stiffest resistance Musk is getting to his unconstitutional romp through the inner workings of the American government is from the workers themselves — both through union lawsuits and through a simple refusal to do as he asks.

…

We are all supposed to pretend this is happening in the name of efficiency and cost-savings, and not as a way for Musk to pursue his shitty personal feuds.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day runs down the coup in progress and its main characters:

These are the demagogues, oligarchs, and literal teenage boys tearing apart our government right now. They are fueled by Silicon Valley’s dream of a monarchist network state and blood and soil white nationalism and they want to replace our money with the speculative cryptocurrencies they’re already holding, replace the country’s digital infrastructure with X, an online platform they invested in, and route all federal power to Trump, a president they’re actively bribing. They did not plan any of this in secret. They know this their moment and the coup is underway. They are serious. And every day they’re in power means more years, if not decades, of our lives that we will have to dedicate to trying to piece the country back together when they’re gone.

Also: The US Vs. China Vs. Everyone Else. The Grammys. And more