Is it a coup?

“This is a coup, plain and simple,” Arizona Attorney General, Kris Mayes, 2/7/25

The clear indicator that Trump and Musk want to illegally consolidate power for themselves has been how they repeatedly break the law.

This won’t come as a surprise to you a little over a month into the administration, but compared to other Presidents, and even to Trump’s first term, the willingness to ignore the courts and violate laws is rampant and alarming. Illegal firings of workers, from the lowest rungs of the federal ladder to inspectors general, are largely unprecedented.

Now fired workers, unions, and advocates are all suing the Trump-Musk administration, and DOGE, but it’s unclear just how court rulings will be enforced. As CNBC writes, Judge Amir Ali has now ordered the Trump administration to release foreign aid funds three times. The President and his people are not complying. And this is just the tip of the coup’s iceberg.

Elon Musk lies at the heart of the even more nefarious, and in some ways subtle, coup attempt. Of course on the surface Musk and his antics, not to mention his attempts to fire tens of thousands of federal workers, or more, is not subtle at all. It’s brazen and infuriating and sparking more backlash than anything else coming out of DC at the moment. But under the surface the DOGE minions have been hard at work infiltrating as many federal departments as possible, attempting to get into data systems and enable themselves to edit code and more.

This last part might be the most dangerous element of the coup. Trillions of dollars flow in and out of the U.S. Treasury Department, which is why 19 states sued to stop Musk and his minions from accessing the reams of data and the code that Treasury holds. The block isn’t permanent, and doesn’t grant the state AGs everything they sought, but it’s a step.

Unfortunately it’s hard to know the power of this injunction, more than anything because it’s unclear how court orders will be enforced when the Trump administration refuses to comply. The limits to Musk’s coup specifically might ultimately come more from his overreach than anything else. Right now, Elon Musk is pushing to overcome resistance from within the Trump administration.

When the billionaire sent an email demanding that every one of the millions of federal workers tell him what they’re up to, multiple department heads pushed back. They told federal workers to not comply, and these were Trump nominees to lead various federal divisions. In other words, the latest resistance to Musk and DOGE is coming from inside the house.

Musk isn’t simply accepting this, of course. He’s publicly condemning those who resisted and calling for federal employees to face a second order to explain their work. At the same time, DOGE has escalated its assault on the federal government and federal workers, preparing a new round of mass firings, potentially costing tens of thousands of more federal jobs. DOGE is also trying to cancel additional grants and other forms of federal spending, according to interviews with more than three dozen government officials who spoke with the Washington Post.

This fight back against Musk within the Trump administration is paired with voter protesting at town halls, some GOP Senators speaking out against Trump, and popularity numbers for both the world’s richest man and the President declining. Nothing is over, of course, Musk is still deeply enmeshed in the White House and has his tentacles reaching into nearly every federal department. But the coup, or both coups from both men really, have hit significant roadblocks.

None of this means we stop fighting and resisting. In fact, it means the opposite. Fascists who seemed invulnerable, marching through every office in DC and tramping thousands upon thousands of federal workers, have been shown to have significant vulnerabilities. Their own party is much less united behind them than it was just a month ago. That means there are weaknesses, and divisions to be exploited.

Where Democratic leadership remains unwilling to fight, we have to be ruthless. People have hounded GOP town halls, heckling politicians from conservative districts, asking why they’re not standing up to Musk and why essentially services have been hit. And these folks didn’t just show up spontaneously. They organized. They chose to respond to this moment by taking action and refusing to let the Republicans off the hook, no matter how powerful they might appear at this moment.

In truth, the Trump coalition is weak. There is resistance within the government from the biggest unions of federal workers. There are diverging beliefs about how to govern within the party. There is the fact that several of their biggest moves, especially firing workers and cutting Medicaid and Social Security and SNAP, are deeply unpopular across a wide swath of the United States. The coup is not over, but it’s stumbling and getting tangled and trying to go in multiple directions at once. Now is the time to fight back harder than ever, and trip the fascists up in their tracks.