Coup du jour

February 11, 2025

How we got to the brink, in a blink…

I realized after clicking “send” on Sunday’s tome—Let them eat bullets…—that I’d neglected to show the math supporting Ed Luce’s vehement statement, broadcast nationally a week ago: “This is a coup that’s happening. It is happening here. It is happening now.”

I figured most of you, having taken a civics class or two, would accept the premise of the so-called balance of powers, namely—

a) there is a constitutional tripod, devised by the founders, that is vital to the stability of American democracy, and—

b) that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Russell Vought and the crew that gave us “Project 2025” are wasting no time taking a veritable chainsaw to two of the three legs.

We are a deeply divided nation, to be sure. So it can seem that every dispute is rooted in partisan politics—lots of theater, lots of rhetoric, but not so profound as to cause lasting damage. So maybe Luce’s Paul Revere-like warning (ironically coming from a British journalist) could be tossed aside as just that—rhetoric.

I disagree. On two levels.

The law

The first is rooted in American constitutional law as it has evolved since at least 1803 when Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the court majority in Marbury v. Madison, established the judiciary branch’s powers of judicial review. The decision empowered the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, to evaluate whether Congressional laws and Executive branch actions comport with the U.S. Constitution. It is why President Richard Nixon—as he was ultimately forced to choose between resignation and certain impeachment—obeyed the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1974 decision in U.S. v. Nixon to turn over hours of audiotape sought by a special prosecutor—the so-called “Nixon tapes” that proved Nixon’s complicity in trying cover up a burglary at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters by a team of Nixon loyalists. More recently, it is also why the Biden administration and Justice Department were bound by Supreme Court’s majority ruling in Trump v. U.S (2024) that the president has “presumptive” immunity from prosecution for “official acts.”

The question that Trump rushed to the fore, literally within hours of being sworn in for his second term as president, is whether the president has the power to cripple or dissolve agencies created by Congress, and/or deny them the funding (authorized by Congress) to fulfill their missions. Article II of the Constitution says that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and this includes laws Congress passes to create and fund agencies located in the executive branch.

As the sun rises this morning the question of whether the new president is openly defying the Constitution and the laws requiring his faithful execution is front and center. It has been taken up by several federal judges in response to lawsuits filed by various parties, including thousands of FBI agents apparently being targeted for participating in investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021 uprising at the Capitol and thousands of USAID employees abruptly dismissed after Trump and Elon Musk made numerous debunked allegations of widespread fraud and malfeasance by agency officials.

The breadth of this conflict widens almost by the hour. For example, here’s the Seattle Times story looking specifically at how Trump’s planned cuts to National Institutes of Health funding would be calamitous to the University of Washington and other state institutions who rely upon federal funding for health research.

The Trumpian context, in broad daylight

Ed Luce was and is by no means alone in alerting Americans to the bracing diagnosis that a coup is underway, even if troops aren’t (yet) in the streets. For example, two widely respected scholars on autocracy and tyranny—American historians Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiatt have both spoken out in recent days agreeing with Luce that an American coup is underway. Snyder (the author of the widely circulated book “On Tyranny) set out his conclusion in a Substack post, and Ben-Ghiatt has explained her conclusion in recent interviews.

But—closer to the point—the actions and words of Donald Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, are by no means camouflaged. They’ve openly expressed intent to use their powers in ways judges and legal experts find unlawful in order to punish their rivals and reshape the U.S. government into an autocracy.

Starting with Vance, he drew immediate fire from critics when he took to Elon Musk’s “X” social media platform to respond the initial actions of federal judges to enjoin the new administration’s moves against USAID and other affected agencies.

"Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power," he wrote, then adding: "If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal.”

He was more direct in a 2021 interview, in which he said that if he could give Donald Trump advice for a second presidency it would be to fire "every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” To which he added: "When the courts stop you, stand before the country like [early US president] Andrew Jackson did and say: 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Trump’s fiery speeches about using the presidency for “retribution” against his political opponents even alarmed some of his traditional allies, including Fox News commentator (one who regularly introduced Trump at campaign rallies) Sean Hannity. The words on paper say enough, but the video (below) shows Hannity at a town hall event trying to lead Trump into at least softening his autocratic rhetoric.

And it works not all. Trump actually winds up poking fun at Hannity for gently trying to lead him onto safer ground.

I’ll add one gobsmacking slice of hypocrisy to this, which lives in plain sight. Attended to the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him is Trump’s fable that he’s been unjustly targeted for investigation and prosecution by Joe Biden and a corrupt justice department; that this was all about politics. And, yet, his choice for FBI director, Kash Patel, is infamous for publishing what strikes many as an enemies list of political opponents who should be dealt with in some fashion under a Trump presidency. (Patel, for the record, vehemently denies it is a political enemies list.) Patel auditioned for the job, and Trump will likely succeed in having the Republican majority in the Senate approve him.

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I could go on. But I’ll stop here, at least for now. There’s a razor’s edge between the footnotes and the lunacy of piling on evidence that a plurality of boat-parading Trump supporters simply ignore with a smile, a middle finger, and turning up the volume on Kid Rock. Trying to reason with a cult may be noble at some level. Yet, it’s also quixotic: and it shouldn’t scramble our brains and weaken our hearts. Because we’ll need those in the weeks and months to come.

That said I welcome your comments.

—tjc