Actually, It's a 'Self-Coup'
Also known as an "autogolpe," we are watching the destruction of the federal government from within.
Yesterday I wrote about how what is happening in the United States right now is a kind of coup. It seems a bit counterintuitive since we aren’t seeing armed revolutionaries in the streets, nor are we seeing a head of state toppled by rebels.
A friend in Europe responded to my post by sending me a link to a German newspaper article suggesting that what is happening can be characterized as an “administrative coup,” and that sounds about right.
Today, the inimitable Paul Krugman takes it a step further, and posits that “what’s happening in America right now is an attempted autogolpe.”
As Krugman goes on to say:
Latin American readers are surely familiar with the term. An autogolpe is literally a “self-coup” — when a legitimately elected leader uses his position to seize total control, eliminating legal and constitutional restraints on his power. Are Musk and Trump trying to pull off an autogolpe here? Of course they are. And they are doing so with, as far as I can tell, the full support of every Republican in the House and the Senate.
You should look at everything they do through that lens. Yes, we can ask whether a policy move makes sense in terms of its announced goals. But you should also always ask, “How does doing this serve the autogolpe?”
So let’s forget the obvious distractions like Greenland and Panama and even tariffs. Forget, too, the purported reasons for gutting federal agencies (to save taxpayers money? Pshaw!) And let’s stop calling the removal of federal civil service employees “firings.” They are purges, plain and simple.
We’re only in Week 3 of the Trump Takeover. I for one am going to take a deep breath now, see some opera tonight, spend time with friends this weekend, and enjoy the next week with some dear family coming to visit from afar. I hope you can also indulge in some self-care, away from the headlines.
And then, we all need to re-engage, and each find our own way to fight back against the destruction of democracy.
As legal analyst Joyce Vance always says at the end of her posts: we’re in this together.
The Germans would know. It’s straight out of the Hitler playbook