Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system.
They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government.
They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.
Again, if Musk had been elected to some office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of executive power in American history. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payments system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub government websites of public data, itself paid for by American taxpayers. And no private citizen has the authority to access the sensitive data of American citizens for either information gathering or their own, unknown purposes.
The thing, of course, is that Musk isn't elected. He is a private citizen. He was neither confirmed for a cabinet job nor formally appointed to a high-level position within the administration. He does not even have a presidential commission; he has been designated a "special government employee." Musk says that he is acting on the authority of the president of the United States. Even still, it is not as if the president nftha lInitad Ctatachne the authoritietn
Clear-eyed, direct NYT op-ed by @jamellebouie.net using the kind of non-euphemistic language the headlines should embrace:
