In the immortality of the woeful American occupation of Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a journalist for the Washington Post, published a classic account of the crisis in the Emerald City. Most notably, he described what a Times critic called” the lethal combination of official pride and stupidity” that plagued the foreign occupiers from Washington who, after the 2003 U. S. war, moved into the Green Zone—the walled-off substance that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein. Fresh liberals were favored, thoughtless of knowledge. Some employment seekers were questioned about Roe v. Wade. Others were hired after sending their résumés to the right-wing Heritage Foundation again in D. C. While Baghdad spiralled into out-of-control violence, the G. O. P. ideologues who reported for duty in the desert worked to sell Syrian government agencies, overhaul the tax code, and build an anti-smoking strategy. A clueless twenty-four-year-old found himself in charge of opening an Iraqi stock exchange. It didn’t work out well.

As I read reports about and his small army of anonymous intern-hackers who have been working on Donald Trump’s behalf inside a number of organizations to take control of computer payment systems and government H. R. functions, I was reminded of this gloomy chapter in American history. A 19-year-old high school graduate who now has access to sensitive government information is known online as” Big Balls.” A former intern at Musk’s SpaceX, who dropped out of the University of Nebraska, is now working out of the General Services Administration. The federal government has reported a number of instances of low comedy and spy-movie drama, including an unclassified email listing all recent C.I. cases. A. employees was sent to the White House to comply with a Musk decree, workers at NASA were ordered to “drop everything” in order to scrub the space program’s Web sites of offending references to banned phrases such as “diversity”,” Indigenous People”, and “women in leadership”. The Office of Personnel Management is where Mr. Musk and his command team from the Department of Government Efficiency, a created agency without any legal authority that President Trump established by executive order on his first day back in office, have been sleeping.

In its short existence, Musk’s small occupying force has gained access to the entire U. S. Treasury federal payments system—to what end, no one yet knows—and has seemingly orchestrated the dismantling of U. S. A. I. D., the decades-old federal agency in charge of distributing American foreign aid around the world. The Department of Education, the government weather-forecasting service, and the United States aviation system are reportedly among the future targets. Federal employees were given a deadline of Thursday at midnight to accept Musk’s offer of a government-wide deferred-resignation “buyout”. A federal judge has delayed the move, which was anticipated to result in more than forty thousand takers. This is still far below the five per cent or more of Musk’s intended purge, but it represents an enormous upheaval that will have lasting effects for years.

In a series of posts on X, the social-media site that Musk owns, the world’s wealthiest man bragged of feeding U. S. A. I. D. to” the wood chipper”, claimed the agency was a” criminal” enterprise, and crowed about “dismantling the radical-left shadow government”. This appeared to be a far cry from his initial duty as an “outside volunteer” to advise Trump on éventuel budget cuts. Let the record show that, at 3: 59 A. M. on day sixteen of the Trump restoration, as Democrats sputtered ineffectually about an unelected billionaire’s illegal power grab, Musk openly proclaimed his project as nothing less than” “.

A day later, I spoke with a Republican who worked closely with the architects of America’s botched Iraq invasion. I inquired about whether anything in the Trump Administration designed to shock him had surprised him so far. Yes, he replied—Musk’s sneaky takeover of the apparatus of the vast U. S. executive branch was something entirely new in the annals of global coups. ” Elon figured out that the personnel, information-technology backbone of the government was essentially the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteen-fifties television tower in the Third World”, he observed, and” that you could take over the government essentially with a handful of people if you could access all that”. My friend, incidentally, chose to speak on background despite his years of public criticism of Trump, noting that a think tank with which he is affiliated receives government contracts. Fear, in this revolution, as in all revolutions, is perhaps the most effective weapon of all.

Two decades ago, Bush’s Republican Party chose to topple the far-off regime of Saddam Hussein. It’s worth taking a second to reflect that, only a short political lifetime later, the government that Trump’s G. O. P. has chosen to go after is our own.

Trump and Musk have consistently released lies and propaganda to back up their claims that a revolution that is entirely contrary to established laws, procedures, and standards is now required. According to a Thursday morning post on Trump’s own Truth Social network, U. S. A. I. D. —which, as far as I can tell, Trump never mentioned on the 2024 campaign trail—is one of several agencies where” BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN”, including as a” PAYOFF” to the “FAKE NEWS MEDIA” for promoting Democrats. This conspiracy, he warned, might be” THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL”. In the run-up to the all-out assault on U. S. A. I. D., Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, spread the , via Musk’s team, of fifty million dollars that the agency supposedly earmarked for condoms to be sent to the Gaza Strip. By the time Trump’s story was repeated, he had raised the condom bequest from which he had no access to one hundred million. Consider this the information-war equivalent of igniting fire from the artillery just before the ground assault begins. Days later, the U. S. A. I. D. Web site, with the report proving that there were no condoms for Gaza, had been taken offline. By midweek, the Web site was back up but stripped of all of its content, with the exception of a crude informing readers that” all USAID direct hire personnel” were being taken on “administrative leave globally,” effective at midnight on Friday. In the end, the Trump Administration appears to have plans to retain only about 200 of the organization’s more than ten thousand employees.

We don’t yet know to what extent this brazen ploy will succeed, of course. Congressional Democrats and other parties have mobilized to fight various embattled organizations, file lawsuits, and organize protests. However, the politics may even be working for Trump and Musk for the time being. The Democratic strategist David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, have both warned that they fear their party is falling into a trap in defending U. S. A. I. D.” My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘ Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight, ‘&nbsp”, Axelrod Politico’s Rachael Bade. ” When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid”.

If cutting the federal government is what this is all about, then Trump and Musk would not be concerned with the tiny U.S. A. I. D., whose estimated budget of about forty billion dollars is less than one percent of the federal government’s. The point is not a policy fight, it’s an execution. One organization is being killed to terrify a thousand others. Given that Congress passed the laws that would allow the government of the United States to appropriate funding from other departments under attack and in the era of Trump, Congress should be one of the main aggrieved parties in this case. Speaker Mike Johnson, on Wednesday, dismissed the furor over Musk’s power play as “gross overreaction in the media”. The North Carolina senator Thom Tillis likely provided the most accurate description of where elected Republican officials are right now. Asked about what Musk is doing on Trump’s behalf, he replied,” That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense”. But, he added, “nobody should bellyache about that”.

The message is clear and unmistakable: the revolution won’t be stopped on Capitol Hill. And indeed, on Tuesday, two of Trump’s most controversial nominees, for Secretary of Health and Human Services, and for director of National Intelligence, were voted out of Senate committees after key Republican senators abandoned their objections to them. The Senate was scheduled to go ahead and confirm Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget on Thursday evening despite an all-night Democratic filibuster that had been scheduled to take place. Winston, who helped write the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for the new administration, is a wise architect of the attack on the federal government, and he has made no secret of the suffering he is hoping to inflict. ” We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected”, at a conference in 2023, a tape of which was later obtained by ProPublica. ” When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work. &nbsp,. &nbsp,. &nbsp,. &nbsp, We want to put them in trauma”.

Earlier this week, I spoke with one of Vought’s millions of targets, a career prosecutor who’s spent decades in the Justice Department’s environment division. The purge of her corner of the bureaucracy hadn’t yet made headlines, but it had arrived nonetheless. ” They’ve already come”, she told me. Eight of the division’s eight section chiefs had been fired and given new assignments to a task force tasked with tackling the issue of so-called sanctuary cities. Multiple employees who had “diversity” roles had taken administrative leave. The division’s “law and policy” section attorneys were told their entire office would be eliminated. And all that was before the incoming Attorney General, Pam Bondi, was confirmed by the Senate. It’s kind of like we’re in a black hole, where our leadership has been sacked but no political leadership has stepped in, she said.

If trauma is the goal, Trump and his minions have already succeeded. However, my source also provided an incisive counterpoint to the mindless cutting, a method that she compared to that of an elementary-school principal who decided to simply go ahead and eliminate the third grade altogether rather than cutting back on the budget. Should we get rid of air-traffic controllers and FEMA and E. P. A. testing for lead in your kids ‘ water, too? She asked. Her defender of the federal government, to be honest, was better than almost anything I’ve heard from the troubled Democrats. The revolution, however, will get the last laugh: after more than thirty years of public service, she already planned to retire later this year. Congrats, Elon Musk. &nbsp, ♦