Who Will Stop Elon Musk's Coup?

[Passages]

The world’s richest man now has the power to override congressional spending decisions and access to private information about every US taxpayer.

Jeet Heer

Elon Musk, often described as Donald Trump’s shadow president, has quickly morphed into something much more dangerous: Trump’s co-autocrat. Hitherto, Trump’s biggest threat to American democracy came when he incited the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The event was typically Trump in that it was lurid, violent, theatrical, and televised. January 6, like Trump’s first term, demonstrated that he had the ability to menace democratic norms and spur on mayhem—but not to really control the ultimate operation of government.

For his second term, Trump has tried to make amends for that failure by recruiting true believers who share his passion for subduing the government, including running roughshod over the system of checks and balance. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who specializes in taking over large companies and remaking them in his image, has been Trump’s most important ally in this agenda, acting as considerably more than an aide. In truth, Musk is emerging as a government within the government, using the time-honored revolutionary tactic of developing dual power in order to seize control.

On Sunday, the Financial Times reported that

Musk vowed to unilaterally cancel hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of government grants after apparently gaining access to review the US Treasury’s vast payments system, a move that prompted the sudden resignation of one of the department’s most senior officials.

The world’s richest man, who bankrolled Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and was tasked by the president with running the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, boasted on his social media site X that he was “rapidly shutting down…illegal payments” after a list of grants to Lutheran organisations was posted online.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/elon-musk-spending-data-coup/

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

[J_William_Ryan]

2. "Elon Musk, often described as Donald Trump's shadow president..."

Unelected, unappointed, unconfirmed – this is fascism at its most basic, facilitated by Trump.