Over the last week, the Nazi-salute-throwing contingent of the Trump regime has dramatically accelerated its attacks on democratic institutions. In a brazen disregard of existing laws and public welfare, Musk and his saboteurs have orchestrated a stunning bureaucratic coup, taking over the payment, personnel, and management systems of the federal bureaucracy. While these fascists decry the federal bureaucracy as “illegal,” with Musk framing his liquidation of USAID as removing “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” what it amounts to is an attack by the world’s richest men on its poorest people.
These incursions into our public resources, which undercut the remaining social protections afforded by the federal government, align directly with the initiatives of Project 2025 and white conservatives’ longstanding goal of (re)creating the Christian nationalist Jim Crow apartheid state. Despite the language of illegality deployed by Trump, his surrogates, and the man who bought a president to justify the destruction of our public institutions, the job of the federal bureaucracy, in fact, is to establish, maintain, and support our collective rights. Destroying it, as these fascist interlopers are now doing, is designed to negate the (frankly insufficient) existing protections previously supported by the federal government. These have ensured cleaner food, safer workplaces, and fairer treatment by bosses and cops. We ought to be making these protections stronger and using them to build more robust and vibrant communities. Instead, members of the predator class have captured and are in the process of destroying them.
Much of the discussion and reporting around this tactic of fascist acceleration revolves around whether or to what extent these actions are “illegal.” While I think the answer is fairly obvious—Musk’s bureaucratic coup is certainly against the law—I want to suggest that it is not, in fact, illegal. I realize at face value that this seems a contradictory and counterproductive claim, but what we can already see is that those in power have acquiesced and aided in the liquidation of the public bureaucratic infrastructure of our shared rights. What I’m suggesting here—which I mean as a critique—is that something cannot be illegal if those in power carry it out with impunity, regardless of whether or not it is against the law. In other words, the question of whether or not these acts of fascist acceleration are legal obstructs where we ought to focus—on elite capture of the legal and of the underlying language and mechanisms for adjudicating our ostensibly shared rights.