On Feb. 2, private actors reportedly employed by Elon Musk took over U.S. Treasury computer systems that control the nation’s payments for government benefits. That action followed a Trump-ordered takeover of the USAID independent federal agency responsible for distributing foreign aid to people in needy countries around the world.
Elon Musk is not a federal employee. He has not been nominated by Donald Trump, nor confirmed by the U.S. Senate, to hold any power over the U.S. Treasury. Instead, Trump, acting like an emperor rather than the holder of an office defined by the U.S. Constitution, apparently outsourced to Musk the task of making a hostile takeover of Treasury Department computers.
Wendell Griffen
Now Musk, the richest person in the world and someone who never has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, has unfettered private access to the financial data of millions of Americans and every U.S. business. He can withhold that access and its information, from Trump, the Treasury Secretary, Congress, the federal courts and anyone else, if he chooses. Don’t expect him to wield that power according to democratic principles. Musk is a fascist white supremacist and gangster capitalist. That crowd never follows democratic rules.
Until 2020, Trump’s delegation to Musk to take over and remake any part of the federal government would have been an impeachable offense. But under Mitch McConnell, the U.S. Senate refused to convict Trump — twice — during his previous presidential term. Don’t expect House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump Christian nationalist sycophant, to entertain impeachment proceedings against Trump for this conduct or anything else.
And because John Roberts led the Supreme Court’s right-wing super majority on July 1, 2024, to declare Trump absolutely immune from criminal liability for any crime committed in his official capacity as president, it’s a safe bet Trump will not be successfully sued by Congress or charged by the Justice Department — led by an attorney general who is Trump’s former lawyer, Pamela Bondi — for letting Musk, a private person, seize access to Treasury Department computers that control $6 trillion appropriated to pay what the nation owes people for pension and other benefits.
“It’s a safe bet Trump will not be successfully sued by Congress or charged by the Justice Department.”
Trump’s Justice Department, led by Bondi, will not prosecute Musk but will defend him from any litigation.
Trump’s Defense Department, led by Pete Hegseth, will not defend the nation from whatever nefarious actions Musk takes with third-party nations (think China, Russia, Israel, India, Hungary) against U.S. individuals and businesses.
Trump’s State Department, under Marco Rubio, will cooperate with Musk.
Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are Trump’s nominees for the positions as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, director of National Intelligence and secretary of Health and Human Services, respectively. Expect the Senate to confirm each of them despite their obvious incompetence and character flaws. Then expect Patel, Gabbard and RFK Jr. to do whatever Musk wants.
Trump now controls the world’s most lethal military. He wants to fire military leaders who are more loyal to the Constitution than to his greed, ambition and other sociopathic tendencies. He is trying to force nonpolitical civil servants, whose job security is protected from political interference and retaliation by federal law, to leave their jobs and/or remove them from their positions and place them on paid administrative leave until they quit.
Two weeks ago, Trump pardoned 1,600 people who were convicted of crimes against the United States in the January 6 insurrection. Think of those people as proven vigilantes, part of a larger number of people ready, willing and able to use violent force to advance Trump’s fascist agenda and attack anyone who stands in his way.
Donald Trump’s vice president is JD Vance. Vance’s political career was sponsored by Peter Thiel, the billionaire who founded PayPal. Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget is Russell Vought, a principal contributor to the Project 2025 political paper funded by the right-wing billionaires who underwrite the Heritage Foundation.
Donald Trump, JD Vance and Mike Johnson hold the three highest elected offices in U.S. government. Expect Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the gangster capitalist cabal that produced the Project 2025 playbook to race the United States government backward to the Gilded Age of Jim Crow apartheid, robber baron economics and national disgrace.
“Expect Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, Albert Mohler, John McArthur and Michael Flynn to declare a great moral and spiritual revival is under way.”
Meanwhile, expect Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, Albert Mohler, John McArthur and Michael Flynn to declare a great moral and spiritual revival is underway in the United States. That will be a lie told to disguise the harsh reality that their coup has taken over the U. S. government.
When that happens, please don’t call it a bloodless coup. Police officers were attacked, beaten, bloodied, crippled for life and killed in the January 6 insurrection. The current coup is Trump’s way of completing the insurrection.
On Nov. 5, 2024, voters in the United States elected a convicted felon, sociopathic idiot and morally bankrupt white supremacist and misogynist and his hand-picked billionaire groomed sycophant to run the government. In less than a month, that man has given the government to Elon Musk, the man who paid $250 million to put him in power.
So, I am not exaggerating by declaring Donald Trump’s alliance with Elon Musk the most dangerous threat to our lives, liberty and posterity since the Civil War. Trump and Musk are the greatest threat since Adolf Hitler and Germany’s Third Reich to democracy, liberty, justice, peace and truth in the world.
Remember, Germans elected Hitler in 1933, less than a century ago. Hitler then made Germany the most despised nation in the world by attacking immigrants, Jews, gay people and nonwhite people.
Remember that Hitler’s military invaded Africa along with Poland and Russia. Now Trump has attacked our nearest neighbors and trading partners, Canada and Mexico, with harsh tariffs that violate trade agreements his previous administration made with those nations. Heather Cox Richardson’s latest report quotes Trump’s post to his Truth Social platform about wanting Canada to become the 51st U.S. state. He made that assertion and imposed the draconian tariffs as firefighters from Canada and Mexico risk their lives fighting forest fires in California.
Trump’s coup has two clear goals. The immediate objective is to secure his status as dictator heading a fascist regime of white supremacist gangster capitalists, their white supremacist political sycophants and white nationalist religious fundamentalists, then using them to control the economy, impose martial and political vigilante theocratic rule over civil society, and literally whitewash the racist, sexist, gangster capitalist, militarist and anti-democratic history of the United States that has been challenged since the Civil Rights Movement led to enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Their second objective is to ensure the votes of feminist women and liberationist indigenous and people of color never again can determine who can lead the executive branch of government to remedy systemic race, gender and class-based inequities that have dominated U.S. politics and policies since the colonies rebelled against the British empire in 1776.
As of Feb. 2, both goals have been advanced without public opposition. Now the question is whether massive opposition to Trump’s MAGA agenda will happen soon enough and be strong enough to withstand what is likely to be violent repression to check the Trump-Musk project from turning the United States into the most lethal fascist nation in history.
Wendell Griffen is a retired circuit court judge and pastor of New Millennium Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark.
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