White Nationalist Forces Consolidate Power Alongside Musk’s Junta

Last week, I wrote a dispatch from Washington aimed at showing how the rise and return of Donald Trump would be covered by the media if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where US correspondents are more likely to call a spade a spade and more likely to make sweeping historical assertions.

Your response to that column was incredible, both from Americans who feel like they’re being gaslit by the tepid headlines and couched language most mainstream US news outlets are still using to describe grave assaults on our Constitution and legal system and also from readers overseas (including foreign correspondents who are writing about the collapse of our constitutional order) who agreed in dismay that my satirical portrayal was precisely how they were viewing the events in Washington from afar.

I thought — for now at least — I’d offer this as a weekly Saturday column, one that helps both to round up the firehose of news and events on multiple fronts that we’re living through each day as well provide some larger, clear-eyed context about the effects of these events. Without further ado, I give you William Boot’s latest dispatch from our troubled country:

NEWS ANALYSIS: White Nationalist Forces Consolidate Power Alongside Musk’s Junta
By William Boot

Two weeks into a fast-moving coup by a South African tech oligarch, the United States — which was already deep into planning for its 250^th birthday next year — hangs suspended this weekend in a liminal state somewhere between the constitutional republic it has been for 249 years and an authoritarian regime akin to Europe’s infamous fallen democracy, Hungary. 

Following the alarming purges of the security services last week and the successful capture of the national treasury and other federal agencies by technical junta forces loyal to centibillionaire Elon Musk, the country’s constitutional system seemed to awaken from slumber this week.

Although by Monday Musk reigned unquestioned as head of the government, he appears content to allow the country’s elected president, Donald Trump, to remain the ceremonial head of state, and overall the political situation seemed to stabilize as the week progressed. Amid widening protests by opposition leaders and the public, damning media reports, and a flurry of court orders that blocked or slowed some of the most controversial power grabs, the country even appeared — at least temporarily — to pull back from the abyss.

Nevertheless, tensions remained high on the streets of the federal district known as Washington and uncertainty filled governmental offices.

The capital’s limbo status was reflected in a bizarre power sharing arrangement—some agencies were directly controlled by Musk, while others remained led by ideologically aligned ministers appointed by the figurehead Trump. Many of those officials who support Musk’s white nationalist agenda went out of their way to pay homage to the oligarch. The transportation minister bragged publicly about inviting a Musk takeover of his ministry’s work on aviation safety, and the capital’s federal prosecutor posted a letter to social media putting his supposedly independent force at Musk’s disposal.

The small handful of correspondents whose news organizations have not been cowed into compliance by regime threats spent much of the week in the embattled capital trying to even identify the mysterious Musk-backed figures taking control of government systems. Many of the junta gang members, who would only identify themselves by first-names and were known locally as DOGE, adopted a standard uniform of t-shirts under blazers and appeared to be youths, some even in their teens — one went online by the moniker BigBalls.

Many of these child foot soldiers were apparently mercenaries pulled from the sprawling business empire run by Musk, himself a notoriously immature and boyish oligarch raised amid wealth and privilege in apartheid-era South Africa who has steadily built deep ties to far-right political movements around the globe in recent years.

Regime spokespeople refused to clarify for much of the week whether the DOGE operators deployed across Washington were officially employed by the government or just acting at the personal order of Musk.

Throughout the week, reports and rumors of surprise DOGE appearances at one government office or another spread like wildfire on social media and over text-messaging chains filled with nervous government employees. Members of the parliament’s opposition party tried to investigate some of the agencies under siege, but were blocked from even entering buildings occupied by DOGE forces; at the education ministry, for instance, they faced down an anonymous brown-shirted enforcer who refused to identify himself. 

At Parliament, members of the loyalist faction spent day after day pretending to not notice that Musk’s junta was undermining laws and blocking critical federal funding that they had settled on and approved themselves just months ago. One loyalist senator went so far as to say that “nobody should bellyache” about the unconstitutional and extra-legal moves by Musk.

Beyond the DOGE forces directly controlled by Musk’s junta, Christian white nationalists aligned with Musk solidified their control on other government institutions throughout the week, seeking to restore the primacy of the white male ruling class that has held power since the country’s founding and undermine the recent progress toward equality and professional advancements made by women and the country’s long oppressed racial and ethnic minorities.

After twenty members of the Democratic opposition party held an all-night protest, loyalist Republicans who control the Senate body approved a self-described Christian nationalist to head the country’s budget office. That official wrote in 2021 that he “recognizes America as a Christian nation, where our rights and duties are understood to come from God and where our primary responsibilities as citizens are for building and preserving the strength, prosperity and health of our own country.” 

In her first communications as the country’s top law enforcement officer — a post known as attorney general — Pam Bondi acted quickly to criminalize both private sector and educational programs that aimed to help hire, educate, or support minority workers. On Thursday, the government also issued a new presidential order officially favoring Christians, a policy that almost certainly violates the country’s longstanding constitutional freedom of religion and separation of church and state.

The military — now overseen by a TV host-turned-defense-minister who has tribal tattoo markings that celebrate the Christian Crusades and are commonly associated with white nationalist groups — canceled programs that support minority or women personnel, saying that he believed helping non-white men succeed and thrive was “incompatible” with military values. The defense minister’s sweeping decrees even “paused” trainings aimed at combating sexual assault and harassment, led museum officials to cover up pictures honoring women who had served the nation’s intelligence services, and the Air Force to stop teaching history about Black men who served heroically in World War II.

The country’s oldest military academy — a school known as West Point that has served for centuries as a treasured training ground for the nation’s soldiers and business elite alike — disbanded longstanding student groups for Black, Hispanic, Japanese, Korean, and indigenous students, as well as a society for women engineers, but notably preserved student groups made up of religious denominations popular with the country’s white majority.

It was clear the assault on women and minorities in the military came from the top down: In his first hours as president, Trump had fired the national coast guard commandant, the first woman ever to lead a branch of the military, and on Tuesday he capriciously ordered her to give up her government housing with just three hours notice.

The combination of actions by various federal leaders, including Bondi — whose justice ministry leadership has quickly undone decades of traditional independence and is instead primarily made up of Trump’s personal lawyers who successfully stymied last year the then-former president’s prosecution on 94 felony criminal charges stemming from four criminal cases — seems focused on turning the clock back to one of the country’s darkest historical chapters, known as Jim Crow, when it strictly enforced racial segregation laws, particularly in economically depressed southern regions that had until the middle of the 19^th century legalized the enslavement of Black people.

In fact, naked racism and support for white supremacy seemed one of the defining attributes of staffers across the new government. At least three of the DOGE mercenaries, when identified, were quickly traced to racist or extremist postings online; one of them, who had advocated for eugenics and called to “normalize” hating Indians, resigned, only to be quickly reinstated by Musk with support from the vice president. (“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” a social media account linked to the staff posted last July.) Similarly, a man appointed to be the nation’s top public diplomat had been previously fired from a government role for attending a gathering of white nationalists and had called the nation’s Black population “feral” and advocated sterilizing Black men by incentivizing them with fancy sneakers.

As if to underscore the new ties between apartheid-era South Africa, the regime — which spent much of first two weeks brutally cracking down on non-white refugees — moved in recent days to explicitly welcome new white Afrikaner refugees.

It is perhaps not surprising, in retrospect, that the United States government might be overthrown by such a radical, youthful, tech-enabled junta.

Throughout the governmental upheaval, there have been consistent warning signs of the country’s creaking gerontocracy and an aging, increasingly out-of-touch generation unwilling to cede power peacefully — after all, three of the country’s last five presidents have all been born in 1946 and the just-departed president, who was forced to drop out of his reelection bid after appearing unable to answer questions during a televised debate last June, was even older.

Attorney General Bondi’s confirmation hearing was overseen by a 91-year-old senator who could barely string together coherent sentences and the body’s longtime Republican leader, now 82 and who repeatedly froze in public appearances last year, fell down twice in the Capitol building on Wednesday and was spotted thereafter using a wheelchair.

Most of all, though, that gerontocracy seemed on full display in the presidential mansion. There, the seemingly senile elected president, mid-level oligarch Donald Trump — reduced apparently without public complaint by Musk’s coup to a ceremonial figurehead — continued his practice of issuing bizarre and impractical daily announcements aimed primarily at attracting media headlines, each almost less sensical than the last. There was little evidence he was aware of the broader actions taking place across his government and no sense he was in control of the capital. 

Over last weekend, the president — a failed real estate developer who remade his public image in the early 2000s as a hardened business executive through a popular reality TV show and who makes a habit of announcing that he’s solved crises that he invented himself — initiated a bizarre and ill-planned trade war with the country’s two main trading partners, only to rescind the threatened tariffs on Monday and Tuesday after the leaders of both countries placated him by announcing things they’d already been doing.

Later on Tuesday, he announced — with no official plan or even reasonable hope of execution — that the US would take over Gaza and develop it into golf courses; he devoted Thursday to an intensely personally attack on what amounts to just ten transgender college athletes nationwide, out of some 500,000 student athletes, the latest in a long series of actions aimed at inciting a moral panic over a tiny minority of an already heavily persecuted population; to cap off the week Friday evening, in a move more likely historically to emanate from Turkmenistan than the United States, he declared himself the chairman of the capital’s main arts institution, known as the Kennedy Center.

Then, for the third time in as many weekends of his presidency, he headed south to his personal beach compound located in Florida, a southern province known as a political stronghold and led by a loyalist governor. Presumably, this weekend — like the others so far — he’ll go golfing and then on Sunday, he is scheduled to attend the nation’s biggest secular holiday festival, an American football game called the “Super Bowl.”