Let's Get Real— How Much Damage Can Musk And His Angry Young Incels Actually Do?

After All, Trump Is Watching, Right?

One of the founders of the Never Trump movement, William Kristol, named his “Why Elon Will Be Trump’s Undoing” essay in yesterday’s Bulwark Never Musk. He concedes that “the Trump blitzkrieg has been impressive. Many of our laws, norms, and procedures designed to provide guardrails against arbitrary, reckless, and lawless actions have proven ineffective.” But all is not lost. “[D]efensive lines can fall and the forces of freedom can still ultimately prevail. And vulnerabilities in the apparently formidable Trumpist movement have already begun to appear. Here’s one vulnerability: Elon Musk. No one voted for Musk... So what’s the vulnerability? How about the richest man in the world, the second-most powerful man in the Trump White House, who is reshaping America despite never having been elected or confirmed to any public office?… 53 percent of voters disapprove of Musk playing a prominent role in the Trump administration, while only 37 percent approve… So as Musk has become ever more prominent, there’s been a slight erosion of support for him, even as Trump’s numbers have improved a bit over that period.”

Kristol wrote that “Turning that slight erosion into a cascade of disapproval is the task. But it should be a pretty doable one. Already, there is evidence of it happening, as relayed by Rep. Jared Golden, perhaps the most [right-wing] Democrat in the House: ‘I’ve been getting a lot of calls over the past few days, and the interesting thing is none of them are about Donald Trump. They’re all about Elon Musk. My constituents, and a majority of this country, put Trump in the White House, not this unelected, weirdo billionaire.’”

Also yesterday, Timothy Snyder described what a coup looks like today: “A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments. That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed. In the third decade of the twenty first century, power is more digital than physical. The buildings and the human beings are there to protect the workings of the computers, and thus the workings of the government as a whole, in our case an (in principle) democratic government which is organized and bounded by a notion of individual rights. The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.”

The NY Times published a guest editorial, What Is ‘State Capture?’ A Warning For Americans, by Tyler McBrien, the managing editor of Lawfare. “The full picture of the government overhaul has yet to come into focus,” he wrote, “and the contours of Musk’s role and mission in that transformation remain sketchy. But the cumulative effect of these stories offers at best a complicated answer to what should be an uncomplicated question: Who exactly is running the federal government? It’s troubling enough not to be able to answer emphatically with ‘democratically elected leaders.’ Even more troubling is the possibility that the actual answer is Musk— the world’s richest man— and other unaccountable, unelected, unconfirmed allies cozy with the president.”

Political economists have a name for that: state capture. State capture occurs when wealthy private interests influence a government to such a degree that they can freely direct policy decisions and public funds for their own benefit or for the benefit of their ideological fellow travelers (or both).

Revelations of this especially pernicious, widespread form of corruption have occurred in other countries— a striking example occurred in the country of Musk’s birth, South Africa— and they offer cautionary tales for democratic governments everywhere.

The details vary by context, but the political scientist Elizabeth David-Barrett lays out three general mechanisms of state capture. They now sound familiar: shaping the rules of the game through law and policy; influencing administrative decisions by capturing the budget, appointments, government contracts and regulatory decisions; and disabling checks on power by dismantling accountability structures like the judiciary, law enforcement and prosecution, and audit institutions like the inspectors general and the media.

Some of these strategies could come straight from the Project 2025 playbook or Trump administration executive orders. This should disturb all Americans. According to David-Barrett, state capture creates broad, long-lasting systemic inequality and diminished public services. Changing the rules of the game to allow such collusion to flourish, she writes, “leaves those few holders of economic power in a strong position to influence future political elites, consolidating their dominance in a self-perpetuating dynamic.”

...Musk’s recent stand against USAID, the federal agency responsible for administering foreign and development assistance since 1961, could have come directly from the state capture playbook— only often more brazen in intent. “USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk posted over the weekend. “Time for it to die.” In that time, the agency’s website went offline, and its top two security officials were placed on administrative leave after refusing to allow members of Musk’s team access to secure USAID systems. Finally, on Monday, Musk said that he had consulted Trump and that “we’re shutting it down.” (On Monday, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced that he is the acting administrator of the agency.)

The example from South Africa was detailed in a 2016 report actually called “State of Capture” from the country’s public protector, Thulisile Madonsela.

It described how, over a number of years, billions of dollars of public funding went into the pockets of a few elites, instead of supporting struggling health services and education systems. Madonsela’s office had received a series of allegations that the Guptas, a wealthy Indian family with deep business ties in South Africa, had successfully pressured the president and other top officials into removing or appointing ministers of state-owned entities, “resulting in improper and possibly corrupt award of state contracts and benefits to the Gupta family’s businesses.”

…[D]escriptions of state capture must speak directly to its victims: the American people. “If we are guilty of underdescribing state capture in the media, it is perhaps a guilt that lies in our failure to draw a blunt connection between political jargon and real human beings,” the South African political analyst Eusebius McKaiser wrote in 2017. “We need simpler and more visceral depictions of the meaning of corruption and the opportunities it costs, including the grandest scale of corruption, which is all that state capture picks out.”

McKaiser demonstrated how it’s done. When a 5-year-old boy drowned in feces in a dilapidated pit toilet at his school while wealthy businessmen were accused of siphoning money away from building things like school toilets, McKaiser simply declared that the student “died because of state capture.”

Americans should know who is in charge of their national government. If they can’t answer that simple question, government officials and civil society must recognize warning signs of state capture and take back what is ours.

Jonathan Chait: “Sometimes a constitutional crisis sneaks up on you, shrouded in darkness, revealing itself gradually. Other times it announces itself dramatically. Elon Musk, to whom Donald Trump has delegated the task of neutering the congressional spending authority laid out in Article I of the Constitution, could hardly be more obvious about his intentions if he rode into Washington on a horse trailed by Roman legions… Musk cites a vague crisis that requires suspending normal operations and concentrating power in his own hands. According to various reports, he is holed up in the Eisenhower Building with a small team of young engineers who possess neither government experience nor the authority to question his impulsive judgments, on the hunt for Marxist plots lurking within long-standing federal programs. Musk cites a vague crisis that requires suspending normal operations and concentrating power in his own hands. According to various reports, he is holed up in the Eisenhower Building with a small team of young engineers who possess neither government experience nor the authority to question his impulsive judgments, on the hunt for Marxist plots lurking within long-standing federal programs.”

Musk cites a vague crisis that requires suspending normal operations and concentrating power in his own hands. According to various reports, he is holed up in the Eisenhower Building with a small team of young engineers who possess neither government experience nor the authority to question his impulsive judgments, on the hunt for Marxist plots lurking within long-standing federal programs. Musk cites a vague crisis that requires suspending normal operations and concentrating power in his own hands. According to various reports, he is holed up in the Eisenhower Building with a small team of young engineers who possess neither government experience nor the authority to question his impulsive judgments, on the hunt for Marxist plots lurking within long-standing federal programs. Musk cites a vague crisis that requires suspending normal operations and concentrating power in his own hands.

Making things even more disturbing is the chaotic legal gray area in which Musk is operating. Musk and his team are working in secret, without hearings or public debate… Democrats suspect that Musk is breaching numerous federal laws, but without any oversight, it is hard to tell precisely what he is doing. In any case, Musk might not have much reason to care about following the law. Trump has already made plain, by issuing mass pardons and commutations for the January 6 insurrectionists, that he will protect illegal conduct on his behalf.

…Musk seems to have intuited that he can destroy programs and bureaucratic cultures faster than the system can restore them. Firing officials en masse, throwing the people and clients that rely on those programs into confusion and financial risk, and striking fear into the whole federal apparatus can break down the institutions and destroy their institutional knowledge. Rebuilding is painfully slow; destruction is rapid. This may be the dynamic Musk has in mind when he insists that his work must happen “now or never.”

Not even the most committed small-government-conservative lawmaker would design a process like the one now occurring: a handful of political novices, many of them drinking deep from the fetid waters of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, tearing through the federal budget, making haphazard decisions about what to scrap. And indeed, no elected body has designed this process. Trump and Musk have arrogated the power to themselves. The true urgent cause is to return that power to the legislature before the damage becomes irreversible.