Musk, Trump Establish New Era of Kleptocracy in America

American institutions, from the media to civil society to Congress and state capitals, continue to underreact to the unraveling of our democracy. If, say, this was all happening in the East African country of Ishmaelia, our media would not hesitate to call the events we’re living through a full-blown autocratic coup.

And yet, three weeks into an all-out assault on the foundations and stability of our federal government, most journalists continue to treat the daily headlines as “normal.” The front-page of the New York Times has yet to resort to any blaring large fonts, and too many journalists in too many outlets continue to both-sides coverage as usual. Most TV news remains tepid. Not even Donald Trump’s clear First Amendment assault on the Associated Press over its continuing use of “Gulf of Mexico” could rouse the rest of the White House press corps. The White House Correspondents Association’s statement in opposition couldn’t even be described as “sternly worded,” which would appear the lowest bar it should clear. 

As a counterpoint, for the last few Saturdays, I’ve offered an attempt to document how a more clear-eyed correspondent might have covered these events overseas. (If you’ve missed the start of this series, here’s the initial installment, “Musk's Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government,” and last week’s follow-up, “White Nationalist Forces Consolidate Power Alongside Musk’s Junta.”) Without further ado, here is this week’s third news roundup from our intrepid foreign correspondent:

NEWS ANALYSIS: Musk, Trump Establish New Era of Kleptocracy in America

By William Boot 

After seizing the capital in a fast-moving late January coup and with universal control of government ministries now seemingly assured by a quiescent parliament, South African oligarch Elon Musk spent his third week in power dismantling the legal constraints that would stop him — already the world’s wealthiest man — from turning the US government into his personal piggy bank.

Day after passing day, it was clear that even if the United States and its $27 trillion envy-of-the-world economy was not exactly tipping post-coup into a full authoritarian state, then it had at least firmly slipped into banana republic territory.

Across one governmental office after another, Musk, elements of his technical junta, and loyalist ministers handpicked by the figurehead president Donald Trump made clear that they would fire or remove any official who attempted to enforce the rule of law — a two-century-long strong tradition here in this advanced western nation that has allowed it to become an economic powerhouse and cornerstone of global stability. In one of the most far-reaching moves to ensure unified control, Trump ordered that representatives of Musk’s irregular technical force — unofficial mercenaries pulled from Musk’s private business empire, known as DOGE, who are now operating in the capital with seemingly official backing — be installed across the government as political commissars, adopting an organizational structure that mimics the height of Stalin’s Soviet Russia.

In some of her first moves at the nation’s top law enforcement officer, attorney general Pam Bondi moved to effectively decriminalize large swaths of crimes most commonly carried out by the country’s financial and power elites. Amid spreading signs that the US government would be remade as a kleptocracy at home, she disbanded a special justice ministry task force aimed at investigating foreign kleptocrats, announced prosecutors would no longer seek to punish elites who accepted secret payments from foreign governments nor US companies that paid bribes to do business overseas. (Ironically, that anti-bribery law in the United States has long been wildly popular with US companies because its strong enforcement actually made it easier to do business overseas in corrupt environments.)

Trump himself moved to fully pardon one former provincial governor who had been previously imprisoned for soliciting bribes in exchange for gubernatorial appointments — a move that clearly will serve as an endorsement of such behavior going forward — and dropped pending criminal charges against two of his own personal staff who had abetted his efforts to thwart federal prosecution after he’d been previously removed from office in 2021. He also removed longstanding supports for government officials that he chose to fire, legally or not.

Perhaps most worrisome, he extended a weeks-long purge of prosecutors and law enforcement who had investigated white nationalist terrorist groups and militias loyal to him personally, further seeming to clear the way for those groups to take up violence in his name.

More broadly, the regime shuttered, disbanded, or disabled one watchdog agency after another. It fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, replacing the independent leader with a friendly loyalist, and also attempted to remove the head of the Office of Special Counsel, a government office that supports whistleblowers. (That move was blocked, for now, by a court.)

In a nod to the nation’s powerful class of oligarchs, the regime also indicated that in the coming days it would fire and neuter thousands of tax investigators who had been added in recent years in an attempt to improve compliance by the country’s wealthy, who largely ignore the country’s social contract to pay their share of tax receipts.

Musk personally announced his intention to “delete” the nation’s consumer protection bureau, which has stood in recent years as a roadblock for his own ambitions to force the nation’s citizens to use his website as a national payment system. By week’s end, the bureau’s work was frozen and large swaths of its staff removed illegally.

Reversing decades of traditional independence between prosecutors and the presidency, Trump declared that he intended to personally intervene in criminal cases, and apparently wasted little time doing so: Much of the week’s headlines in the capital focused on the regime’s ill-fated attempts to coerce the opposition mayor of the country’s largest city into cooperating with the regime’s politically driven crackdown on illegal immigrants. That mayor, Eric Adams, had been previously indicted for allegedly accepting bribes from foreign governments, but in an all-but-explicit public quid pro quo, the new regime offered to drop the charges if he would ease the ability of the federal government’s paramilitary units, known as ICE, to target city residents for deportation.

Three waves of prosecutors quit en masse rather than implement the deal — offering fiery resignation letters that accused Trump’s minions of corruption and betrayal of national tradition — harkening back to a notorious 1973 event remembered as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” when then-President Richard Nixon tried to shut down an investigation of his own corruption, a scandal that led to his resignation under pressure the following year.

So far, though, there are few signs of any similar backlash that would slow or stop Trump and Musk’s unwinding of the rule of law.

Together, the moves hung a giant sign that the US, which until now had been known for operating one of the cleanest and least corrupt business environments in the world — a series of structures, enforcement mechanisms, regulatory schemes, and legal practices that had made it the global headquarters for the world’s largest and most successful businesses — was now open to bribery and graft.

Most of the nation’s internal corruption watchdogs, known as inspectors general — who collectively had at least 32 active investigations underway into Musk’s sprawling business empire — were fired in the regime’s first days. The looming installation this coming week of a Trump loyalist atop its premier federal law enforcement agency, known as the FBI, which has the unique and sole ability to investigate corruption seemingly will remove one of the last impediments to installing a full kleptocracy for regime loyalists.

With those constraints neutered and his control of the nation’s treasury unchallenged, Musk — already the world’s richest man — seems set to transform the nation checking account into his own business development fund. The country’s foreign ministry indicated that it planned to buy $400 million of unnecessary and ill-suited vehicles to help prop up Musk’s troubled car company, which has been struggling in recent years due to its shoddy quality. The bombastic Musk, who has god-like ambitions of colonizing space and also runs a large rocket company that does billions of dollars of work with the government, announced that in the coming days his junta DOGE forces would also take control of the nation’s civilian space agency.

While nearly all of the regime’s moves in recent weeks have been subject to court challenges, there were spreading signs that the regime planned to ignore contravening orders from the judiciary — powering through what has long stood as the country’s ultimate check-and-balance on corrupt uses of executive power. Following Musk’s seizure of the national treasury on the weekend of January 26th in the opening stage of his coup, courts have tried to order him to continue funding legally mandated programs, but signs continued to grow that Musk was simply ignoring those rulings, and Musk — in an aggressive move seemingly unparalleled in modern finance — even raided a New York bank to steal $80 million already paid to that municipal government. Despite the shocking theft — a move that would appear to undermine some of the basic tenets of a functioning modern economy and set a precedent of a government reaching into any bank account nationwide whenever it so chooses — business leaders remained notably silent about the abuses of powers.

The bizarre executive power-sharing agreement — with Musk operating as an illegitimate head of government and the senile Trump content to serve out his ramblingly incoherent dotage as a ceremonial head of state — was highlighted it an eye-popping midweek press conference, where Musk, possibly high on narcotics and wearing a “Dark MAGA” hat that referenced the elected president’s neofacist supporters, held court at length in the oval-shaped presidential office while Trump sat near-silently at his desk, seemingly entranced by the more powerful oligarch’s child son’s antics.

During his own remarks, Musk — who had one of his businesses pay Trump $10 million personally this week, apparently as part of their power-sharing agreement — made a wide series of claims, nearly all of them false, including that the government was paying benefits to people who were 150 years old, a sign that Musk — who claims to be a brilliant once-in-a-lifetime engineer — does not even understand basic computer programming.

For his part, Trump continued to focus on his bizarre personal obsessions, most prominently his decree to rename the international body of water known as the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The regime’s propaganda minister sought through the week to punish the Associated Press for continuing to call the body by its long-established and internationally accepted name, a blatantly unconstitutional jihad that provoked no meaningful signs of solidarity or support from the increasingly cowed capital press corps, who have largely celebrated Trump and Musk’s aggression, touting it at one point this week as “masculine maximalism.”

Similarly, capital observers expressed fascination and puzzlement over parliament’s near-total silence in the face of Musk’s power plays and the increasingly irreversible damage being done to programs and ministries that had long held near-unanimous political and public support, from cancer research to funding for local schools and farmers.

Both factions of the parliament remained largely acquiescent. Republicans, also cowed into silence and acquiescence by years of Trump bluster and MAGA threats, have made clear they will serve as a rubber-stamp. Opposition Democrats skirmished briefly on the floor of the Senate, but they quickly capitulated—deciding, for the third weekend since Musk took over, that it was important to not work through the weekend. In fact, senior Democratic officials quickly left town entirely — making the bizarre choice that it was more important to show up at the glitzy international confab known as the Munich Security Conference to reassure allies that they intended to defend democracy someday, than it was to actually do so at home.