Trump and Musk's Power-Sharing Agreement Innovates the Authoritarian Playbook
The Novel Power-Partition Opens New Horizons of Corruption
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Here is a clip of my March 8 discussion with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart about our ongoing authoritarian crackdown.
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It’s Day 50 of the Donald Trump-Elon Musk administration, and Day 50 of the United States 2025 shock event. It’s a good time to step back and isolate the grand narratives of what is happening, because understanding the nature of this administration’s power is essential for effective resistance to it.
Here I focus on how the Trump-Musk administration is innovating the global authoritarian playbook, starting with the structure and use of executive authority. Trump has a novel power-sharing arrangement with an unelected private citizen who is essentially executing a hostile takeover of the U.S. government to capture data, neutralize investigations into his private companies, and use our country as a laboratory for a new form of authoritarian techno-governance that requires the wrecking of democracy.
The Trump administration’s actions since Jan. 20 echo traditional authoritarian assaults on democratic institutions. There is the expansion of the executive branch, which politicizes and domesticates the judiciary, the civil service, and other institutions. There is also a multi-pronged attempt to curb and discredit the financial and political authority of Congress by making massive use of executive orders as instruments of governance.
Trump has made no secret of his desire to govern in the manner of Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin. He came into office with immunity for “official acts,” courtesy of a heavily politicized Supreme Court, despite having incited a violent insurrection to try and stay in office illegally. A powerful far-right media apparatus, helmed by Fox, normalizes his lies, as does a domesticated GOP party. All of this means he has started his second term with the kind of institutional power that many autocrats work for years to achieve.
This makes the power-partition between Trump and Musk more unexpected. Trump, like all strongmen, proposes himself as a world-historical and unique figure (“I alone can fix it”), and it is odd to see Trump sit placidly as Musk speaks for him and steals the headlines, to the point that a Feb. 2025 TIME magazine cover depicted Musk, and not Trump, behind the iconic presidential desk.
Their arrangement differs from foreign situations in which oligarchs assist autocrats while remaining outside the government, for example by buying up media properties and turning them into pro-government vehicles, as has been done in India, Hungary, and Russia.
Here it is as though the oligarch’s own operatives, most of them former employees of his private companies, have physically occupied the spaces of government, locking out elected representatives, while the oligarch uses presidential spaces to travel and meet with foreign heads of state and also speaks for the president in the Oval Office and at Cabinet meetings, including to the press.
Trump evidently wants to keep his co-president happy. Musk recently criticized Secretary of State Marco Rubio for not making enough cuts from entities Rubio oversees, as though Rubio had failed to meet some Soviet Five-Year Plan quota. Rubio was unhappy but ended up having to thank Musk for making cuts, doubling his humiliation.
It’s easy to see what Musk gets out of this situation: for one thing, he has been stopping any investigations into his businesses. As I wrote in my Feb 2 essay entitled “A New Kind of Coup,” Musk already had vast riches and a social media empire. “What he lacked was the key to the castle, a way to get control of government from within. The $290 million he spent to help Trump and Republicans get elected helped to unlock the door. And so DOGE was created as a vehicle for his infiltration.”
And what about Trump? One of the strongman’s best-kept secrets is that he has little interest in day-to-day governance: what really motivates him is power, control and riches to be made. Trump’s true loves are golfing and promoting Trump-branded properties (he spent one-third of the first three years of his first term doing the latter, and is on track to surpass that, having golfed at his Florida courses for 13 of his first 48 days in office).
Trump was also fine with the Heritage Foundation becoming a kind of shadow government during the Joe Biden administration, and outsourcing second-term planning to Project 2025. Now Russ Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, implements those Project 2025 blueprints for authoritarian governance. Musk wields the chainsaw, Vought the pen, and Trump the golf club.
Yet there is also a far more sinister reason that Trump deems Musk and his chainsaw indispensable. Trump may have immunity, but he is a convicted felon who is always looking over his shoulder, fearful that someone else will come forth with evidence of his crimes. This is part of the authoritarian playbook: the more corrupt the strongman becomes, the more he becomes fixated on neutralizing all threats to his power, as fast as possible.
While Trump came into office legally, the Trump-Musk administration is taking not the gradualist path to change chosen by autocrats who arrive in power via elections, but a more extremist route, one reminiscent of the political climate after a coup.
This is where DOGE comes in. Remaking government quickly into a loyalist preserve, ending investigatory and oversight powers over governmental and corporate wrongdoing, and inducing paralysis in enemy government entities through a combination of impoverishment and depopulation (through mass firings), all at Space-X speed, required skills of a type that Vought and the bureaucrats of Project 2025 could not provide.
DOGE’s “efficiency” is focused on a lightning re-engineering of the state to give the very rich new freedoms from regulations on their corporate and individual behavior. “The fascists believed that you have to destroy to create, and this is what a second Trump administration would do,” I wrote in May 2024, predicting that Trump, if elected, would wreck “the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy.” This is where the Musk chainsaw comes in handy.
Shock events are about creating a space for experimentations with governance. The power-sharing arrangement of Trump and Musk innovates the authoritarian playbook, opening new horizons of corruption and the fantasy of being untouchable by the law.
Great insight. My question is, what do we as a collective group do to push back! The Supreme Court slapped him down last week. Very important decision for federal lawyers like myself. It is something we can use, the court’s actual opinion, to push back. He does not have carte Blanche with the Supreme Court. He thinks it’s another crony in NYC he’s going to pay off. He is in over his head and most of us know it. He tried a violent overthrow on Jan 6, and the schmucks let him back in. I see a greater America coming out of this current battle. He cannot erase 248 years of institutional knowledge. He cannot erase 248 years of gallantry by our men and women in the armed services. They live in lala land. We don’t. We stick to our guns and protect democracy. Our country battled true dictators in WWII. We pushed them back over 80 years ago in WWII. And, we will do it again. It’s tough to fight a real battle with 2 wimps who make shit up. They are not ready for us and never will be.
"how the Trump-Musk administration is innovating the global authoritarian playbook,....new form of authoritarian techno-governance that requires the wrecking of democracy."
I read an article about the crypto scams being waged among Donnie, Elum, and suspected with Putin and Russian Intelligence Services to remake the global money supply. It's beyond just making these billionaires more billions. It is about totally capturing and controlling the money supply to control all states. The scale of it makes George Soros shorting the British Pound look like a lemonade stand.