With Coup in Shambles, Musk Signals Retreat — Leaving Wreckage In Wake

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

First, let me point you to one of my favorite historical tidbits: The last surviving grandson of President John Tyler died on Sunday — yes, until this week, there was a grandson alive of a president who served from 1841-1845. When we talk about the United States as a young, still-new country, it’s worth remembering that all of our history as a country has unfolded in about three human lifetimes.

Now on to today’s column — I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country. As you may remember, in February as Elon Musk first seized power in Washington, I started writing occasional satirical columns in the model of how the events in the U.S. would be covered by a swashbuckling foreign correspondent in a Third World banana republic, a proud tradition by Slate and other writers in the past. Now, as Musk leaves his work as a “Special Government Employee,” our correspondent William Boot has another dispatch from the embattled capital:

With Coup in Shambles, Musk Signals Retreat, Leaving Wreckage In Wake

By William Boot

WASHINGTON — Four months after he seized control of the U.S. government in a lightning January coup, South African oligarch Elon Musk has announced he is retreating from the capital as his bizarre power-sharing arrangement with the nation’s mercurial elected president has grown strained and unraveled in recent weeks.

The move comes as Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has also faced increasing financial pressure and growing unpopularity as his actions leading government have turned him from a national hero into a pariah — owners of his once-popular brand of cars now face mockery in the streets and sales of his brand, the source of most of his wealth and power, have tanked.

His winter blitzkrieg on this once-proud democracy’s Constitution, laws, and traditions leaves behind a trail of institutional wreckage and bureaucratic damage that will take the country decades to undo — if it’s ever able to rebuild successfully — as well as a rising national and international death toll that is still coming into focus.

Musk and a junta of elite technical mercenaries pulled from his sprawling business empire swept into the capital in late January after the inauguration of convicted felon Donald Trump, seizing control of the US Treasury and other key ministries, and promising that the oligarch would remake the federal workforce, save billions of dollars, and introduce a new era of efficient technology-enabled government.

For weeks, Trump operated effectively as a ceremonial head of state. An aging, out-of-touch, and thin-skinned real estate mogul who has been primarily focused on enriching himself and punishing political enemies since he retook office, Trump seemed content to let Musk run roughshod over the government while he entertained himself with bizarre press conferences from the executive mansion — known as the White House — and by holding Cabinet meetings filled with obsequious speeches by sycophant ministers.

Musk and Trump particularly found common cause in advancing their shared agenda of racial grievance and white nationalism — using a presidential podium during the inauguration, Musk delivered a Nazi salute to a cheering rally and in the first days of his power-sharing arrangement with Trump, and women and members of the country’s oppressed Black minority were cashiered from top military jobs and positions of influence across the government. Trump also focused the state’s resources on aiding whites seeking to follow Musk in fleeing South Africa, declaring them “refugees” even as he effectively blocked and unwound all of the nation’s other immigration avenues. In one particularly bizarre example, the two teamed up to ambush the visiting South African president with unfounded online conspiracies about a “white genocide” taking place in Musk’s homeland.

After his initial flurry of activity and power seizure in January and February, Musk showed little sustained attention or interest in details of governing, and recent reporting by the country’s leading newspaper, known as the New York Times, paints a picture of a 53-year-old drug-addled man-child who upended the country’s constitutional order out of a combination of online radicalization and boredom. “Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it,” the Times wrote.

Today, while Musk’s once-grand promises of personally remaking the federal government and finding enormous cost savings in the national budget lie in shambles — the latest in the once-revered businessman’s long string of failed promises — the mercenaries he installed inside key ministries during his reign, known as DOGE, appear set to continue to execute his agenda of dismantling the administrative functions that underpinned and secured American daily life for two generations.

Tens of thousands of nonpartisan civil servants were fired or quit amid Musk’s governmental rampages; entire agencies, boards, and institutes were illegally shuttered by DOGE mercenaries, aided a quiescent parliament that refused to resist Musk. Court battles will continue to play out for months and even years to come, but the damage to the government is already done. Amid his retreat this week, Musk tweeted, “The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”

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There has never been a figure in American politics like the erratic and volatile billionaire, whose wealth dwarfs even the railroad and oil barons who once ruled this country in the 1800s when it was an agrarian nation on the outer edge of the developed world.

Attempting to spin the embarrassing failure of his government takeover, Musk spent much of the week giving highly scripted interviews to a cowed and torpid capital press corps, explaining to quisling reporters how the Emperor-With-No-Clothes was actually victorious and returning to his business empire in triumph rather than shame.

To cap off the week and seeming to recognize that the collapse of their unconventional power-sharing arrangement discredited both of them, Trump and Musk — noticeably sporting a black eye and clad in a DOGE black hat and t-shirt that has come to be customary for his mercenary junta — held a joint press conference in the president’s oval-shaped office Friday where they railed against enemies and promised that Musk was not, in fact, leaving the capital. “Elon's really not leaving,” President Trump said. “He’s gonna be back and forth. [DOGE’s] his baby — he’s going to be doing a lot of things.”

Indeed, outside security experts worry specifically that Musk’s ignominious departure may not mean he’s truly gone. They have warned it remains unclear what ongoing access to government IT systems Musk or his junta may possess, even as he purports to be returning to focus on his work in the private sector. Relatedly, it also remains unclear what’s happened to the vast amounts of government data Musk seized during his takeover — some of which appears to have exfiltrated, and which critics fear might now be in the possession of Musk-controlled businesses that do business with the government itself. According to one parliamentary aide, there are “multiple verifiable reports showing that DOGE has exfiltrated sensitive government data across agencies for unknown purposes.”

The line between Musk’s business interests and government control has been blurred throughout his power grab; this spring, the country’s foreign ministry has been pressuring African countries to do business with Musk’s internet service, known as Starlink, and Musk appeared to focus particular attention on dismantling and destroying the regulatory bodies that had been investigating wrongdoing at the six high-profile companies that make up his business empire — many of which include the brand X, like the social media site X, his major government-subsidized defense contractor, SpaceX, and his new artificial intelligence startup xAI. But as his relationship with Trump has grown strained, he’s also struggled to exert influence on major administration decisions — when he recently accompanied Trump on a foreign tour through the Middle East, he tried unsuccessfully to box out another US tech oligarch from making investment deals.

Friday’s press conference featured his most-favored son, also known by the name X, one of a dozen or more he has fathered with multiple women, including executives at his companies. Rumors swirled in the capital this week, too, as the wife of the president’s top advisor announced that she would be leaving the White House to work with Musk exclusively — and her husband tweeted angrily about Musk.

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The damage Musk and his DOGE junta did to government ministries and international prestige will reverberate for years in national politics and geopolitical alliances and almost certainly mark a permanent decline in this country’s global power abroad and economic might at home. In a matter of weeks, the united front of Musk and Trump destroyed institutions, offices, and tools of influence that over the last 80 years had allowed America to dominate world events — and it’s not clear that the country will now ever be able to rebuild the influence and power it held up until Musk’s coup.

Surely, the most-lasting impact from Musk’s coup will be the complete (and illegal) dismantling of the United States’ long-revered foreign-aid network — community relationships and projects built over decades to help the developing world, avoid global conflict, improve health outcomes, and boost economic partnership were in Musk’s words “[fed] into the wood chipper” and shut down in just hours and days. The long-term human toll is nearly incalculable — even before considering the disastrous effect on the country’s international standing and strategic power projection. In just one specific example, according to one projection, “roughly 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, because Musk cut off their mothers’ medication.”

Another study has found the destruction of what was once known as the US Agency for International Development has already resulted in 300,000 deaths overseas — a number roughly equal to the dead of the country’s two atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. The final death toll will likely stretch into the millions.

Whether Musk — whose wealth has long allowed him to skate past consequences that would have normally entailed crippling fines or even prison — will ever face criminal consequences for his winter coup and illegal and unconstitutional actions depends heavily on whether the country’s opposition party, known as Democrats, is able to return to power in 2029 before the five-year federal statute of limitations on such sanctions would expire.

Thus far, the largely ineffectual opposition party has managed little organized resistance to either Musk or Trump; in recent weeks, moreover, it’s been overtaken by backward-looking blame-casting about its own doddering geriatric figurehead, the president who preceded Trump, and paralyzed by its Soviet-style gerontocracy. Three Democratic members of parliament have died in office since January — the latest of a total of six Democrats who have died in office in the last year, and 11 of the 14 parliament members who are over age 80 are all Democrats.

Those parliamentary vacancies earlier this month allowed the Republican-led lower chamber to advance legislation on a one-vote margin that would provide Musk and the country’s other ruling oligarchs a massive budget-blasting tax cut — moves that contributed earlier this month to the once-storied superpower losing its last perfect credit rating.

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