No, the answer to a coup is still not 'do well in the next election'

Over at The Other Place, Peter Olandt has an essay that posits that of all possible responses to the Trump/Musk orgy of illegal and authoritarian acts—a coup meant to overthrow the constitutional balance so that a single authoritarian figure has full power over government pursestrings and Congress' role is reduced to advisory at best—any Democratic focus on the 2028 election almost comically misses the moment.

Talking about political strategy in 2028 like it’s 2020 is like discussing the menu for the Titanic’s return trip as the iceberg slices the side of the ship flooding compartment after compartment. Trump’s putting the means by which agencies access money under his henchmen’s control is a direct coup. The power of congress is to control the purse strings and write the laws. Trump now controls the purse strings and laws are meaningless to him. Unless Republicans suddenly find a will to oppose him (and most of those were weeded out on the last go around) all of these lawsuits against his actions will either fail in court, via Supreme Court fiat if needed, or he will simply ignore the Supreme Court rulings when the random one goes against him.

That's about the state of things. Imagining that constitutional legitimacy can be restored by sailing through four years of abject, blinding corruption, active media complicity, and a distinct possibility of The Criminal launching one or several wars against NATO allies, then putting on a really ripping campaign show in the resulting wreckage, feels almost hopelessly naive. Trump's aides—not The Criminal himself, who appears to have almost no remaining awareness of what those aides are doing—are working to summarily destroy large chunks of critical national infrastructure and to cut off all avenues of dissent. There will be no campaign in 2028, at least not one of the sort we're familiar with. It will instead be a disinformation free-for-all, with the mechanisms of government and major media outlets doing the disinforming from their perches of authority and foreign actors acting with impunity to muddle the rest.

Trump has all but deputized the Jan. 6 coup supporters, firing all those who prosecuted them, launching inquiries into all government agents who so much as worked on the cases, Trump's aides are already redirecting government resources away from white collar crimes and foreign influence, aka all the crimes his own team has ever run afoul of, but the biggest crisis is that Trump's aides are all but openly encouraging far-right vigilantism against their enemies.

That makes political violence in the coming year virtually guaranteed, and a good chunk of it may come from our newly fascist government itself. The seditionists who back Trump are getting a carte blanche invitation to repeat their performances, while those who oppose their fascist violence are likely to be met with U.S. military deployments. That is the environment in which the 2028 "election" will play out—and we have already seen the lengths the Republican Party is willing to go to to ensure the voting either goes their way or is declared to be illegitimate.

Olandt is getting some pushback from commenters who don't think he's proposed a counterplan on his own, however, so let's talk about that. First, I want to bring in this column from Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall. TPM, along with tech-oriented sites like Wired, has been doing solid work reporting both what the Trump/Musk administration has been up to and what the often horrifying outcomes might look like, so I recommend the site.

Marshall proposes a very specific plan indeed.

I had been somewhat pessimistic about what I was seeing from Congressional Democrats on this front. But starting yesterday they began to change their tune and started saying explicitly that the budget and debt ceiling were a key lever for them in handling the situation. That’s real progress. But I think the terms need to be sharpened a lot. The standard should be no help on the budget or the debt ceiling until the law breaking stops. Period. End of story. No wilding gangs marauding through the federal government. End the criminal conduct. Period.

That’s it. No nuance.

Key to understanding the current crisis is an acknowledgment that this isn't a political fight anymore. It's a fight over whether our laws even still exist.

What [Trump's subordinates] are doing now, on the contrary, is not only brazenly illegal but an overt and undeniable violation of the federal constitution. When that stops then Democrats will consider helping on the budget and the debt ceiling. And they can negotiate on particulars. But nothing until the lawbreaking stops.

This is much better an answer than any proposal that Democrats "ignore the noise" or "pick their battles" or "abandon trans rights" or "focus on the price of eggs" or "try to undo all if it in some future administration, if one happens."

I'll also tell you flat-out that I think many Democratic lawmakers are already terrified of taking such bold action. Why? Because every time Republicans are pushed into a binary choice, they choose extremism. It was true of Sen. Mitch McConnell's tenure. It's been true since at least 2016, when a not-yet-senile Trump brazenly ignored countless ethical norms and regulations and the Republican House and Senate declared that Screw It, from now on all those kinds of corruption are legal. It's all right if the president runs his own D.C. hotel and convention site. It's all right if the president blocks military aid from reaching an at-war ally unless that foreign government announces an invented investigation of his next election opponent. It's all right if a president attempts a violent coup that jeopardizes the very lives of lawmakers.

Once you've backed a seditious conspiracy, like nearly every Republican still in Washington is now on record as doing, there's very little reason to think that any of them will give a damn about either budget negotiations or the debt ceiling.

If House Speaker Mike Johnson, a vocal coup backer, cult-leaning Christian nationalist, and eager crime enabler finds himself unable to find the votes to raise the debt ceiling or pass a new budget, will he and his fascism-backing allies seek compromise with Democrats to find a solution?

Or will Johnson encourage Trump to declare that the debt ceiling is invalid—an idea that has been floated for years now by political figures on both sides of the aisle—and wipe it away with a single supposed Executive Order?

If the House and Senate cannot pass a budget, does that mean we have no budget? Or do figures like Johnson, Thune, Graham, and so forth stand before a lectern and announce that since the impasse seems permanent, Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk, and whatever ketamine Musk currently has access to are the sole controllers of the national purse?

I'm not sure the waffling we've seen from the more institution and norm-obsessed Democratic lawmakers is an attempt to preserve legislative comity. I worry that those lawmakers believe that pressuring their coup-supporting, crime-indifferent Republican counterparts too strongly will simply result in their counterparts stripping any remaining pretense of sharing power at all.

And if you think I'm overselling those concerns, I don't know what to tell you. There's nothing about the Trump/Musk assault on government that suggests there is any lower bound. As I write this, we learn that Trump has erased—"disbanded"—the entire Department of Justice team responsible for tracking and seizing the assets of criminal Russian oligarchs.

There are no more rules. There's just a mob-tied real estate developer, his Putin-supporting billionaire white supremacist partner, and a Republican Party that's celebrating as Trump burns the country down.

Back, then, to the question posed by critics of Olandt's criticism: So what are ya gonna do about it?

The answer to that one is unsatisfying, but the plain truth of it is that very little can be done about it until the American public sees what's going on, understands what's going on, and gets pissed about what's going on. Widespread public outrage is a prerequisite for everything that might come next, and at the moment the national media is tamping down hard on any journalism that accurately reports just how much of Musk's actions, in particular, would appear to be full-bore felonies of the lifetime-in-prison variety.

We remain incredibly lucky in one particular aspect, however: Donald Trump remains an unfathomable idiot, a man who thinks water flows south because the maps all have "south" at the bottom. Trump has been taking countless steps to ensure the American economy crashes good and hard even as Musk's team sabotages government programs ranging from grants to rural health programs to Social Security to wheat and rice farmers. The Criminal's team seems hellbent on causing an actual depression, and widespread economic chaos is the one thing that will get normal Americans furious and into the streets.

If anyone on Trump's team had brainpower anything above "racist walnut," they'd recognize that keeping citizens fat and happy is absolutely vital to staving off mass rage. But they don't, and so Musk is wrecking countless things that your MAGA-leaning family and associates are about to get pretty damn mad about.

If we forget what judges can "do about it," and what Democratic elected officials can "do about it," and what billionaire-captured media can "do about it," and ignore for the moment that Trump may be one "I order you to invade Canada" away from learning what the U.S. military might "do about it," the question becomes what we can do it, in the most hyperlocal sense, and that's an easy question to answer.

1) It's very, very important to bring up what Musk is doing when talking to others in your life who might be persuaded—including Trump fans. All those things they claimed Trump wouldn't do: Do they feel lied to, now? Doesn't it feel like he scammed you, dad? Did you really vote for the local health clinics to close, or for a billionaire's team of teen hackers to download all your financial records so that they could put them in an "A.I."?

You don't need to be confrontational. All you need to do is point out every petty little way Republicans are sabotaging the things Americans once claimed to care about. And while Americans don't get riled by racism or injustice, they hate the idea that powerful people are scamming them. Musk is a poster child for everything wrong with America, and now he's got everyone's Social Security numbers and the power to zero out whatever payments he wants to.

2) Protests are still important. If talking to people one on one can begin sowing doubt in Trump-agnostic or Trump-supporting heads, showing public resistance is important for building up the permission structure for those Trump allies to jump ship. Street protests are like lawn signs: They don't do a damn thing by themselves, but their mere presence signals to apolitical people that their community peers have opinions about A Thing and if they, too, want to have that opinion about A Thing than they'll be joining a team of people who think that rather than being quietly alone.

3) Keep as up to date as you can muster while still maintaining your health. It's quite likely we're about to see economic chaos, and while I have no useful advice in dealing with that it's something worth planning for if you can. We are also, and I keep repeating this, almost certainly entering a period of Trump-sanctioned, Republican-abetted vigilante violence. If it happens, that's your cue to unleash maximum contempt for anyone and everyone who still is on Team Trump. If they still support Trumpism even as violence unfolds, cut them loose. Forever.

Call your representatives, especially if they are Republicans. You might think that expressing your opposition is useless and that your Republican seatwarmer won't give a damn. That might be true during normal times, but adding your voice to a growing chorus of other deeply angry people is the only means by which those Republicans might begin to wonder if Elon Musk's shenanigans or Donald Trump's tariffs might cost them their own political careers. The number of "safe" gerrymandered seats shrinks considerably when public anger is at its highest.

In a fantasy world, there would be some administration crime or constitutional abuse so grotesque that your swing-seat lawmaker might decide their only shot at political survival is to switch parties. That's unlikely to happen, given that the now-rote response from the MAGA base to those that thwart Trump is to unleash hundreds of death threats. It's even less unlikely now that Trump has, in his firing of Justice prosecutors, signaled that he thinks violence against his enemies is justified and even good. But the only way to chip away at Trump's coalition of racists, seditionists, and outright Republican crooks is to convince the hangers-on at the ragged edges that no, tying themselves to an outright traitor is the worse option, not the better one.

So that's the immediate goal, the one that can't wait. Give the Trump backers and the Trump-neutral people in your life the reasons and space to begin questioning this chaos. Be public in your opposition to Trump not for your own sake, but to legitimize that opposition; minor public opposition to fascism can be easily stamped out with violence, but major public opposition cannot easily be met with the same sorts of brutality. And call your Republican representatives every damn day, as much as your personal tolerance will allow, to let them know that if they can't stand up to Elon Musk then they ought to resign right now and not waste their time trying for reelection. Pick those scabs at every opportunity. Install doubt.

Everything else is situational, and depends on what happens next. It's possible Trump dies on the toilet tomorrow. It's possible Elon dies on the toilet tonight. It's possible some Republican we never expected says "You know what? I actually don't want my name on this stuff, I never signed up to be responsible for the collapse of the republic."

But the public action necessary right now remains the same. Make public opposition to Trump so commonplace that nobody can claim it's a minority opinion. Turn your Republican elected officials into nervous wrecks, as they frantically ponder what the lines are before their constituents turn their rage on them. Make sure everyone knows that Trump and Musk are trying to rob them blind, because "powerful people are trying to rob us blind" is the staple of populist power. Fox News dedicates their every moment to the premise—because it works.

That sets the stage for Congress and the courts to act. Without those prerequisites, nothing else will happen.