The Heist Is Here: Part I

A Coup, in which our Heroes are waylaid by billionaires and find themselves in a Strange New Land.

Part I - Smash & Grab

What would you call it if people forced their way into your house, took control of your computer and your bank accounts, then started rewriting the underlying code of your computer - and also of your bank - in ways that would allow them to block transactions or move your money around without your approval? All of this while also browsing or hoovering up all your personal information as fast as they could. You’d call it a crime, a whole bunch of crimes actually, and you’d call the police.

Something like this appears to have been happening down in Washington, D.C. all this past week.

A normal politician, when contemplating doing something potentially illegal or unpopular, would hide behind plausible deniability. They would move slowly and subtly. They would avoid drawing attention to themselves and they would pause or withdraw if they thought they were about to be challenged or subjected to public scrutiny. To state the extremely obvious, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are not normal politicians. They are also not cat burglars, sneak thieves or your garden variety shoplifters, which is unfortunate, because if they were then our present situation would be much less dangerous than it is. None of that is their style. Elon and Donald’s shared style leans towards things that are flashy, attention-getting and loud. A smash-and-grab is all of these things. A smash-and-grab is a type of robbery in which a swarm of looters burst into a store with no effort to avoid arousing suspicion or setting off alarms. They smash windows and display cases, then grab as much valuable stuff as they can and try to run off before anyone can stop them. At the moment, Elon and Donald appear to be leading a smash-and-grab, but rather than knocking over a local jewelry store or electronics shop their target appears to be the Treasury Department and numerous other agencies of the federal government of the United States.

It used to be the case that if someone wanted to rob you they needed to do it in person, either to your face or by waving a gun around down at the bank. Up until very recent times, if you were a faction wanting to seize control of the US government’s money and of the millions of payments coming and going from a sprawling and resistant bureaucracy, then you would have needed hundreds or thousands of soldiers to occupy Fort Knox, and thousands more to intercept all the mail and packages coming and going from the various non-compliant agencies. This kind of project was obviously impractical and impossible and no one ever attempted such a crazy thing. But nowadays, control over the government’s money is mostly all about ones and zeros, and it appears to be the case that a few properly motivated twenty-somethings with decent hacking skills and uninterrupted access to the root code may be able to do things that were previously impossible. They may, for instance, be able to cut off the flow of the government’s money to any particular agency or individual. If this is what’s happening (and there’s a lot of good reporting suggesting that it is) then it may be the case that our venerable, nearly 250-year-old system of checks and balances, separation of powers and Congress’s power of the purse has survived less than three weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, all of it effectively overthrown - or maybe so far only profoundly weakened - by Elon Musk’s van-load of absurdly racist, bad boy hackers. The fact that this accomplishment represents an illegal, unconstitutional attack on the foundation of our federal system and the rule of law is obviously more a feature than a bug.

In any system, controlling the scarce and necessary resource allows you to control the system as a whole. If you want to control agriculture in Southern California - or some other dry place - then being in charge of the distribution of water gives you that control. In a war zone or crisis situation, warlords, militias and hostile governments have not infrequently used food to control the local population. Similarly, if you want to exercise dictatorial control over the government of the United States then the ability to unilaterally turn off the flow of money to any agency or individual - an unaccountable decision for which there is no recourse or appeal - goes a long way towards giving you that control. It appears to be the case that Elon and Donald are now in the process of seizing this control, without bothering to ask anyone for permission or authorization, and without needing the compliance of anyone beyond the roomful of obedient MAGA button-pushers who appear to be inserting themselves as the gatekeepers of US government spending.

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In the summer of 1972, five men were arrested breaking into an office on the sixth floor of the Watergate complex in Washington, D. C. Between them, the five men had lock picks, door jimmies, surgical gloves, two film cameras, forty rolls of film, one walkie talkie, two bugging devices, a handful of sequentially numbered $100 bills, and “three pen-sized tear gas guns”. From this small and almost comical beginning, Watergate grew to become the defining political scandal of the past one hundred years. The break-in and the subsequent investigation ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, still the only US president ever forced to step down, and jail terms for many of his top lieutenants.

Despite it’s enduring significance, Watergate begins to look quaintly old fashioned when compared with the style and scope of Elon and Donald’s current operation.

People whose opinion I respect and who have access to the most current insider information seem to believe that the rule of law can be restored if only senior Democrats would give Elon and Donald a stern talking to. They’ve expressed the Very Reasonable Belief that the threat of not supporting the next budget or a rise in the debt ceiling would be sufficient to force an end to Elon’s lawless rampage and a return to the bad old days of uncivil-but-strictly-legal groin kicking, institutional vandalism and performative insanity that has been the GOP’s modus operandi for way too long now. I disagree. Elon’s behavior this past week makes me think those days are done.

Donald Trump was facing the likely prospect of jail time before he squeaked out his win back in November. Since staying in office is the only way for him to be sure of staying out of jail, and since reinstating the rule of law is literally what he is most afraid of, the odds of anyone successfully pressuring Donald Trump into making his way back to the straight and narrow have never seemed all that good. He’s too openly committed to the Dark Side. The fact that Elon Musk, on the other hand, has taken such public ownership of the ongoing and clearly illegal attacks against the US Treasury, USAID and an alphabet soup of other US agencies and departments is both unexpected and ominous.

It’s possible that Elon’s recent crime spree is just some manic episode that he’ll snap out of, or maybe he’ll get bored and wander off in search of some other pretty toy to break. But knowing the precedent of Watergate, it seems very unlikely that Elon would put himself in such serious jeopardy unless he planned on staying the course. Why risk jail attempting to break the will of millions of annoying bureaucrats when there’s so many other people who’d be so much more fun and way less perilous to antagonize and harass? Also - and this is fundamental - even Elon has to recognize that turning a bunch of barely supervised, power-mad wunderkinds loose on the code base of the United States government has the potential to turn into the biggest bureaucratic and computing disaster in the history of both bureaucracies and computers. Any crash, glitch or sudden incompatibilities going forward will be on him, and every one of these potentially very public fiascos will threaten Elon’s valuable and carefully cultivated brand as the Eccentric But Bankable Boy Genius. And should his wilding minions have left behind any trackers, keyloggers, backdoors or other malware - or should any of the data they likely took with them get leaked - then any exploitation or fallout from these vulnerabilities at the heart of the US government will also land squarely on Elon’s head. All of which is way too big a risk to take on a whim.

So, based on the developments of this past week, it seems clear that Elon Musk has thrown his lot in with Donald Trump for the long haul, and that they’re right now in the process of openly breaking all kinds of laws in a mad rush to pull down every obstacle to their power before anyone can organize to stop them. Break the law, go to jail. Break the rule of law, become king.

And so, just like that - first slowly, then all of a sudden - we are arrived.

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There is a bright line that separates the normal, squabbling back-and-forth of legal, constitutional government from an illegal and unconstitutional attempt to overthrow that government. I believe that line is now clearly behind us.

Welcome to the After Times.

Put simply, our current situation includes the following unfortunate realities. A grotesque, obnoxious, unelected, Nazi-saluting, South African billionaire has somehow elevated himself to the office of co-president of the United States of America, a completely imaginary position from which he is currently launching a series of brutal, reckless and potentially devastating attacks on the power of the federal government. Meanwhile, our actual president continues to captivate much of an easily distracted media with his endless clown show of threats against immigrants and trans kids and unhinged schemes to invade Greenland, or seize control of the Panama Canal, or to commit the war crime of ethnic cleansing in order to - wait for it - build luxury condos and casinos on top of what is now the smoking, blood-covered wreckage of Gaza. The president’s party is utterly craven, compromised and complicit. Any Congressional Republican with ethics or a spine has been driven with shrieks and hoots away from the fires and the feast. The Democrats in Congress are scrambling to organize an effective response but they have no control over any branch of government, nor will they until next year’s elections at the earliest.

No one is coming to save us. We will have to save ourselves.

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Find Part II and Part III on Substack, or at MUDandFeathers.org