Some are calling what Trump and Musk are doing an "auto coup"
By Donna February 3, 2025 4:20 pm Category: International (5.0 from 1 vote)
Rules of the Post
Autocoups occur when a duly elected executive suspends the legislature and judiciary or withdraws civil liberties and otherwise violates the constitution—sometimes with the intent of protracting their rule. But the number of autocoups that have occurred in democracies again place us in the land of very few data points: Hitler in 1933, Uruguay in 1972, Peru in 1992 (and some argue, again in 2019), Turkey in 2015, Hungary this year, Bolivia before Morales was exiled to Mexico last year, and Maduro in Venezuela over the last few years. If we again stretch the definition of democracy we might include episodes in Pakistan, Panama, The Philippines, and Sri Lanka. The key to successful autocoups? An executive opportunistically declares a state of emergency and then uses extraordinary powers to arrogate more authority, the way Viktor Orban did in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Jeremy Konyndyk, USAID Staffer and president of Refugees International:
"So, I have not seen any reporting that suggests that Elon Musk has a valid security clearance, particularly to access the systems that it seems like they were trying to access, which were tapped into the highest-level national security networks that the U.S. government has.
USAID is a national security agency. You know, it conducts foreign policy work. And as such, in its, what are called SCIFs — those are the rooms where special compartmentalized information can be stored. It has a couple of SCIFs, as all the national security organizations do. And most staff at USAID rarely go in there and never need to consume that information. When I was working on COVID, I barely went in that room. But it exists. It’s there for some of the programs that need it.
And Elon, through that, if he has access to that, if his minions on this DOGE group of twentysomethings have access to that, that is some of the most sensitive national security information that the U.S. government possesses. None of them, as far as I have heard, have a valid clearance for that. And I think what you saw or reported of the two security staff is that they tried — as they are legally required to do, they tried to block people without a valid clearance from breaching classified information. And for that, they were pushed out of the agency. And reportedly, the Trump-appointed chief of staff, who had just arrived, also resigned over this. So, I mean, that should be a huge, huge, huge alarm bell.
You know, in terms of specific contract information, I’m not sure what rivals he might be looking for. I don’t get the sense he’s looking for a competitive edge here or something. I think he is just looking to destroy this agency, because if they can destroy this agency without any consultation with Congress, without any public disclosure of what they’re doing, without even an executive order giving them fig leaf from the president to do this, if a private citizen can just go in and destroy a federal agency, then we are in a dire, dire place as a government and as a country."
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