Trump, Musk Shred Constitutional Protections as Country Lurches Toward Mafia State

Welcome to the (mostly) weekly edition of my satirical dispatches from the embattled national capital of Washington, D.C., which I hope provides a useful frame and weekly news recap to recognize the big-picture reality of what’s happening in our country right now.

I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of wanna-be dictator Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. A month ago, watching Trump and Musk’s then-unfolding coup in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch and show how I think the US media should be covering this troubling and world-altering story. (If you’d like to read those earlier dispatches from previous weeks, start here: The first installment, second, or third.)

Without further ado, I give you our fictional correspondent William Boot’s all-too-real latest report:

Trump, Musk Shred Constitutional Protections as Country Lurches Toward Mafia State
By William Boot

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Nearly two months after a historically unprecedented coup by junta forces loyal to South African oligarch Elon Musk, the United States — a long-proud and envy-of-the-world democracy — stands increasingly unrecognizable, seeming to slip day-by-day away from its constitutional tradition and toward an oligarchic mafia state governed only by the personal whims of Musk and the country’s elected president, Donald Trump.

This week was marked by stunningly brazen, unquestionably illegal, and unconstitutional assaults on the nation’s historic traditions of due process and free speech — as well as at least one armed standoff inside the capital — as Musk’s forces expanded control of government agencies and Trump extended his extortionate crackdown on independent institutions accused of regime thoughtcrimes.

After a brief period where tensions seemed to be growing in the unprecedented power-sharing agreement between Musk and Trump, the two men seemed to more deeply cement their partnership this week, appearing together in public to boost their shared vision for a kleptocratic dictatorship focused on personal retribution, fealty, and white nationalism. By week’s end, the Musk-Trump partnership increasingly resembled less a functional constitutional democracy and more a mafia-style racketeering organization that blended private business profit with official government power.

Over the course of the week, Musk and Trump worked together to allow Musk’s extra-legal junta forces, known as DOGE, to take over more ministries and once-independent government agencies — this week targeting lesser-known agencies, including one that supported libraries and museums, as well as four others that supported minority businesses, mediated labor disputes, worked to end homelessness, and aided struggling local communities. Musk himself gained access to some of the nation’s most closely-held military secrets, apparently putting himself — who derives much of his wealth from government contracts, subsidies, and military deals— in a position to further direct some of the nation’s $800-billion in military spending for his personal benefit.

The extralegal efforts and expanding power and control of DOGE mercenaries led to numerous bizarre stories across the government, including an armed standoff at the country’s quasi-independent national center for peace and conflict resolution, known as the US Institute for Peace (USIP). That story is worth quoting at some length as it was covered by the capital’s main newspaper because it reads as its own satirical parody of a banana republic come to life:

Beyond DOGE’s actions, the week’s headlines were dominated by controversy over President Trump’s decision to send hundreds of people — their identities still mostly unknown — to an indefinite period of slave labor in a brutal El Salvador prison without any legal process or even criminal charges. The move — which was carried out contrary to a specific judicial order prohibiting it — heralded a new level of brazenness by Trump’s federal security services, which are operating increasingly lawlessly.

In courtrooms and news articles with the increasingly compliant news media, the Trump government argued that its dictatorial-interpretation of presidential power allowed the president to kidnap and disappear anyone he desired without judicial review before or afterward, a view more historically most closely associated with Pinochet’s Chile, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Argentina’s military regime. While the El Salvador slave labor dominated headlines, human rights organizations elsewhere in the country also announced lower-profile “disappearances” as well, including 48 people disappeared from the state of New Mexico.

The week’s other major controversy focused around Trump’s assault on independent institutions, free speech, and freedom of thought in the country’s long prized civil society and private sector. The country has long celebrated a tradition of allowing healthy political dissent — a right famously enshrined in the first amendment to the country’s 240-year-old constitution and long valued as the country’s foremost freedom — and traditionally both of the nation’s main political parties have respected the ability of nonprofit civil society institutions, universities, and businesses to express political opinions without official punishment.

However, in a case study that many fear will be expanded over the weeks ahead, President Trump successfully extorted one of the country’s leading universities, Columbia — a school all-but synonymous with the nation’s elite — by threatening its federal funding in order to force the university to cease its tradition of academic freedom and free exploration. The school quickly capitulated, engaging in an Orwell-esque exercise of self-punishment, as did one of the country’s top law firms who faced similar pressure from Trump and agreed to donate $40 million of the firm’s time to supporting the Trump administration in court and also cease its professional support to the country’s long-oppressed ethnic and racial minorities.

Many in the capital and across the country fear that the coming days will see the landmark surrenders as a blueprint for effectively silencing the country’s institutions of higher education and other law firms that have attempted in court to press against the excesses and authoritarian moves of the current Trump-Musk administration.

Trump and Musk also accelerated efforts to unwind the country’s long-standing tradition of individual free speech and the widely embraced freedom to criticize the government. Security services rounded up multiple students who had expressed views counter to the government and began efforts to remove them from the country, moves that would have been considered illegal and anathema just weeks ago.

Border security forces cracked down on prominent and respected international visitors, refusing to allow entry to visiting professionals who had expressed public or even private criticism of Trump. The French government expressed concern that one of its scientists was expelled from the US “by the American authorities because the researcher's phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration's research policy.” By week’s end, even traditional friendly allies were beginning to advise travelers to reconsider professional or nonessential travel to the United States, which has long welcomed international visitors and built much of its national economy on being a global hub of business, information exchange, and innovation.

Weeks after some of the nation’s normally independent prosecutors pledged fealty to Musk and promised to back his junta forces with their law enforcement resources, it is increasingly impossible to tell where Musk’s business empire ends and the official government begins.

Musk’s forces installed his own proprietary communications network across the White House complex, the nation’s commerce minister used an official interview to encourage people to buy stock in Musk’s troubled car company, and the country’s justice minister announced that federal security services were being dedicated to defending the car company and that people who vandalized Musk’s cars would be treated as “terrorists.” The president himself staged a bizarre advertisement on the grounds of the presidential mansion for Musk’s cars and later used social media to echo that car vandals would also be sent to the newly favored forced labor camps in El Salvador.

Controversy this week also centered around the new government’s continuing efforts to solidify white nationalism at all levels of the government; the military faced controversy as it removed historical records and photos showing the heroic wartime contributions of the nation’s ethnic and religious minorities. Elsewhere, the government rolled back a 60-year-old regulation that prohibited segregation of bathroom or drinking facilities, seeming to pave the way for a return to a notorious chapter of the country’s history known as “Jim Crow.”

Two months into the Trump-Musk regime, the parade of controversies, official abuses, and illegal actions remains so unrelenting and fast-moving that many scandals that would have been considered historic and career-ending just months ago never even receive high-profile attention here in the capital. Case-in-point: Trump expanded his own cult of personality Friday by naming the country’s newest fighter plane after himself — a move unprecedented in the country’s history, but one that the country’s top business newspaper didn’t even mention until the ninth paragraph of its write-up.