When you think of the glory and greatness of the United States of America, what image comes to mind? Neil Armstrong stepping out calmly and resolutely onto the moon? Or, perhaps, an anonymous, battle-weary American G.I. handing out Hershey bars to hungry children as the grand armies of the republic rolled through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, on the road to vanquish a tyrant?
The First Buddy, Elon Musk, is having none of that.
If it were up to Mr. Musk — and apparently, in the disgraceful year 2025, it is up to Mr. Musk, an unelected billionaire raised in Pretoria not Peoria, to determine what kind of country we are — America would no longer be a nation of open hands and open hearts. Under the trolligarchy, the United States would be a nation where space exploration is done not as an expansion of human potential, for the scientific enrichment of all mankind, but as an exploitive extension of private business; where candy bars (or emergency food aid or H.I.V. medications) are given free to no one.
According to all reliable sources, Mr. Musk is out of control and running the show in Washington, D.C.
While Donald Trump, famous for his abbreviated working days, disappears into his private quarters and watches television, Mr. Musk burns the midnight oil, with the pages of the Constitution the fuel to his bonfires of democracy.
As The New York Times reported on Monday, Mr. Musk “is working with a frantic, around-the-clock energy familiar to the employees at his various companies, flanked by a cadre of young engineers, drawn in part from Silicon Valley. He has moved beds into the headquarters of the federal personnel office a few blocks from the White House, according to a person familiar with the situation, so he and his staff, working late into the night, could sleep there, reprising a tactic he has deployed at Twitter and Tesla.”
Mr. Musk has been elected to no office and approved by no members of Congress, and his security clearance remains shrouded in intentional obfuscation, but nonetheless, he is operating beyond scrutiny to dismantle the American way of government.
Remember, this is a man who last month ebulliently trolled the world with an emphatic and repeated one-armed gesture that either was in fact an intentional Nazi salute or that was an intentional, trollishly toying reference to a Nazi salute — a supposedly finer point that we greet with an emphatic “Same diff!”
This is the man who is palsy-walsy with Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right, radical Alternative for Germany party.
All rational, common-sense Americans, especially those with relatives who fought or died to end Nazism, should find Mr. Musk and his ilk repellant beyond words.
But here we find ourselves in this dark February of 2025. Since the inauguration, Mr. Musk and his unvetted team of private employees (ages 19 to 24, according to Wired magazine) have: wrested control of the Office of Personnel Management, in essence the federal government’s human resources department; forced their way into the servers of the Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, gaining access not just to the payment system of the federal government but also the private financial information of all Americans, including Social Security numbers, and fired more or less everyone from the entire U.S. Agency for International Development, blasting to smithereens an agency that delivers not just critical food and medical aid to the suffering people of the world but that is a critical arm of American geopolitical influence.
All of this is not just un-Christian, it is profoundly un-American. Where even to begin? According to Stephen Griffin, a professor of constitutional law at Tulane University, who spoke to C-SPAN, it is illegal to dismiss civil servants without legal proof of wrongdoing. And, of course, the executive branch does not hold the purse strings of the federal government; Congress does.
Reportedly, those decent and independent-minded Republican members who remain in Congress are nearly as profoundly shaken these last few weeks as their Democratic colleagues. Andrew Natsios, who ran U.S.A.I.D. under President George W. Bush and is a lifelong conservative Republican, told Politico that Mr. Musk’s actions there are “criminal,” “illegal,” and “outrageous.” We assert again that the actions and beliefs of Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump are not “Republican” as the word has always been understood. They are this new thing, a new kind of radical, destructive, dangerous, and anti-democratic American nationalism.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s actual cabinet appears to sit back, stunned. “Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” The Times reported. “One Trump official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.”
“It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions,” said the historian Douglas Brinkley.
This isn’t about money. It is about control.
Make no mistake. Mr. Musk and his team of youthful engineers are not doing what they’re doing simply to cut costs to American taxpayers. If the Republican-led Congress wants to cut budgets at any federal agency, or to make sure money is spent wisely, by all means, let them! That is Congress’s purview.
What the trolligarch in chief is attempting to do is to put in place economic controls over not just civil servants, to ensure obedience up and down the employment chain, but over all Americans — through hiring and firing power; through access to federal benefits, whether it’s Social Security or veterans’ benefits, and through on/off, yes/no control over the flow of any and all federal money for any and all programs that may or may not be considered Trumpian enough to be supported (be it “Sesame Street” on public television, Head Start programs for toddlers, or, say, a bipartisan effort to rebuild a crumbling airport runway in a blue state).
There is only one question to be asked as this unfolds: Will the Supreme Court reaffirm the role of Congress as a check on the power of the executive branch, as the founding fathers so wisely intended? Or will it not?
Americans, phone your representatives.