As Trump's aides purge government of prosecutors, Republicans stake their party future on treason and terror

It's very difficult to write any substantive analysis about what is now transparently a Musk-Trump coup. That's not because the Heritage-authored Project 2025's endorsed vision of illegal shock-and-awe attacks on government functions has succeeded in obfuscating what's going on; far from it. The attacks from Trump allies broadly fall into just three groups.

1) The Musk and Russell Vought-led effort to illegally seize control of government spending, rendering congressional appropriations—and, in fact, the entire legislative budgeting process—moot.

This is the most obviously criminal group of actions, as Musk's gathered collection of misfit toys have reportedly run roughshod over a great many federal laws governing who can access classified or secured data and for what purposes; whether the teen groypers currently installing unknown hardware and copying unknown data can expect prison time will depend entirely on whether The Criminal's top aides remember to put pre-written pardon papers in front of him while The Criminal still has the cognitive skills to sign his name.

2) The all-of-government movement towards open white nationalism and white supremacy.

The scope of these efforts seem all-encompassing, with not just "diversity" programs under attack but government websites being scrubbed of mentions of non-white-male history makers, portraits in government buildings being covered up or taken down, and scientific papers that so much as mention either race or gender being removed from public data collections.

At the moment The Criminal's newly appointed Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is a particular point person; he is overseeing the illegal dismantling of U.S. foreign aid programs and the transformation of State into a den of unapologetic white supremacists.

In hindsight the aggressiveness of these efforts, which include blatantly neo-Nazi and actual-Nazi propaganda claims, should have been guessed from the outset. The Criminal is a seditious conspirator, convicted felon, and a traitor to our nation; any American who is not an odious and criminal-leaning radical refuses to be associated with him. That means that there are no moderating voices in The Criminal's second administration. The payroll from top to bottom is a list of the Americans eager to support and conspire with the organizers of a coup against government.

3) An embrace of domestic terrorism as weapon against Republicanism's enemies, led by Trump and acting US Attorney Edward R. Martin Jr.

This was the last of the priorities to publicly emerge, and the one that finally puts a cap on the debate over whether Republicanism is a truly fascist movement. Fascist movements use extralegal violence and vigilanteism to achieve their goals, but up until now The Criminal and his allies had attempted to maintain some plausible separation between themselves and the violent groups that attacked Congress in an attempt to overthrow the government.

No more. Anti-opposition violence is now a party-endorsed movement feature. The Criminal issued a blanket pardon that pointedly freed even the most violent members of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection mob, as well as the convicted planners of that violence. It was Ed Martin who worked as point person in securing those rapid releases; Martin has long parroted the hoax claims used to justify the day's violence and has devoted himself not only to freeing those who attacked police officers on Jan. 6, but retaliations against the prosecutors who dared bring them to justice.

That push, from The Criminal and seditionist ally Martin, has now spurred a purge of government prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 related cases. The Trump administration has now demanded, from the Department of Justice, a full list of every federal investigator even tangentially involved in prosecuting the insurrectionists. That effort appears to be headed by another pro-sedition member of Trump's prior legal team, Emil Bove.

Rough estimates would put this number around 6000 agents out of an FBI workforce of 13,000 agents, or roughly half. And, again, the criteria for being placed on the list is to have merely so much as touched a Jan. 6 coup-related investigation.

The message is not hidden, but boldly stated. Those who attacked police and attempted to capture or kill members of the U.S. Congress were freed from prison without condition; those who prosecuted them have been fired; those who investigated them will soon join them.

It is a pro-terrorism agenda. Those who have committed brutal violence for the sake of the Republican leader have been placed above the law, immune to its consequences. Those who identify crimes done in service of the Republican leader will be fired—or imprisoned. Even as he focused on purging the federal workforce of law enforcement figures willing to prosecute Republican violence, Ed Martin found time to issue a new conspiracy-laced threat against those who might hinder Musk's quasi-legal espionage force.

Musk's actions are likely the most brazenly criminal, but it is the Martin-led effort to sabotage anti-violence and anti-terrorism investigations that will likely do the most devastation. Even if the 6000 FBI agents—half the workforce—are not fired but merely probed, the message has been sent: future investigations of pro-Trump violence will not be tolerated.

And with that, there is no visible future in which the United States does not descend into a period of fascist violence and counterviolence. The militia figures who orchestrated the first coup attempt have been set free, and their prosecutors fired. The Criminal has been bold in elevating the traitors as supposed patriots, propping up conspirator Stewart Rhodes behind him a VIP position during a recent speech. Federal investigators have now been functionally prohibited from investigating the activities of pro-Republican violent militias.

The reason it is so difficult to write any practical analysis of where the Republican Party has now led us is not because the future is murky, but because it is inevitable. Donald J. Trump, Ed Martin, Emil Bove, and the rest of Trump's pro-sedition aides have constructed a mechanism for producing mass political violence, both stochastic and orchestrated, while the Department of Justice stands down and allows it.

There is no good outcome here. This was the last piece of authoritarianism to be rolled into place, and they are now doing so before our eyes.

And it is the firing of the federal prosecutors who prosecuted the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrectionists that has turned the Republican Party, all of it, into traitors. Not seditionists; not crooked; not partisan. Traitors. Even if one could make a case of presidential prerogative, as Trump giddily kept his promise to free those who had committed violence on his behalf, there is no non-traitorous interpretation of his purge of prosecutors and investigators.

It is an act that poses an immediate and nationwide threat to the American people. It is a plain breach of his duty to protect; it is a transparent endorsement of violence.

The Republicans in the House and Senate are obliged to act, now that Trump's camp has sabotaged both the rule of law and the safety of the American people, and if they do not they are traitors. They are willing accomplices in whatever acts of domestic terror the far-right now unleashes on Trump's behalf, because that is what remaining silent means. There is no nuance here.

We are now almost certain to land on a future in which domestic terrorists attack Trump's enemies, or election offices are ransacked by mobs who believe the next to-be-issued hoaxes, while federal prosecutors are told to stand down and instead the military is called up to commit violence against any group in America who marches in opposition to such thuggery. And it will be the fault of the feckless, stupid, and entirely malevolent Republican lawmakers currently justifying, to themselves, their own party's destruction of the rule of law.

The reason I am so pessimistic about what happens in the near future, no matter what thievery does or does not get away with or what happens to the now countless sedition-backing incompetents walking into doorframes throughout government, is because the Republican Party's signal to Americans that the rule of law is now optional will, with certainty, convince a massive number of Americans that the rule of law is indeed optional.

And that gets very bad, very fast. And it is not only bad actors who will abandon the law; if the new government position is that every law is optional and all laws are subservient to their personal, momentary whims, then there are no laws to follow.

There are still off-ramps here. The most optimistic scenario relies on the inherent cowardice and self-serving nature of Republican lawmakers; Trump is first and foremost an idiot, and at this point is obviously so mentally impaired that he can hardly tell the difference between his imagination and reality, and if Trump craters the economy through tariffs, trade wars, or allowing an apparently drug-addled billionaire private citizen to shut down gigantic economic swaths for bragging rights, it is still possible that even the most cowardly of Republican officials might find reason to either toss him or, more likely, announce that they will be caucusing with Democrats to block his insanities.

But Trump has fully weaponized the Department of Justice so that violence on his behalf will go unpunished; if an attempted coup could be ignored, and that could be ignored, nobody involved can be presumed to have either morality nor even enough cowardice to engage in self-protection.

It is also possible Trump chokes on his own spit and dies, at which point we find that the spell is broken and no mass media efforts to prop JD Vance up as the next Dear Leader will work.

Or it is possible that Trump's economic devastation causes media companies and other corporate giants to recoil from fascist Republicanism for the precise reason they latched onto it: As their fortunes collapse, suddenly billionaire owners will instruct their hired editors and producers to switch sides good and hard—and, in the span of a single month of Even Greater Depression, the press suddenly decides that the administration's full sabotage of the Constitution and the American people is a Watergate moment after all.

So there are possibilities, but they are remote. What Donald Trump, Donald Trump's acolytes, and House and Senate Republicans are attempting to do is to disband federal law enforcement so that future acts of vigilantism on their behalf will be, in the whole, successful. It is a wager that what cannot be done legally can be done illegally, so long as the movement has what all fascist movements need in order to commit such crimes—an extrajudicial vigilante force empowered to retaliate against those who dare object to those crimes.

That is what we are seeing, and it is an act of treason against our nation. The enemy force consists of ideologues who rate their own power as more important than government itself. Some are billionaires, some are sycophants, some are white supremacists, and some are merely cowards. But Trump's sabotage of the only mechanisms by which his allies could be brought to justice, and his explicit sabotage of the mechanisms by which his most violent stormtroopers could be held to account, amounts to a traitorous act, and none of us should pretend otherwise.