The U.S. is Now Far Too Musky

You know the word musty (having a stale, moldy, or damp smell) and also perhaps the term musky (having an odor of or resembling musk). But I am writing here about Musky (referring to Elon Musk). 

Timothy Snyder is a scholar worth knowing about and taking seriously.  He is an American historian and a professor of History at Yale University. During Trump’s first year as POTUS in 2017, Snyder (b. 1969) published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

Snyder’s book is a short one about how to prevent a democracy from becoming a tyranny (such as Italy did in the 1920s and Germany did in the 1930s) with a focus on modern United States politics and on what he calls "America's turn towards authoritarianism."*¹

On the first page of the Prologue, Snyder states that tyranny means “the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.”

Snyder now posts regularly on Substack, and “Of course it’s a coup” is the title of his February 5 post, which can be accessed here. In that post, he asserts,

The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.*²

Snyder goes on to say, “President Trump … will also perform at Musk’s pleasure. There is not much he can do without the use of the federal government’s computers.”

Some are saying, correctly it seems, that Trump is a PINO (President in name only), and now U.S. executive power is really in Musk’s hands. Time magazine’s recent provocative "cover" puts Elon Musk behind Trump’s desk. 

So, this is why I am saying that the U.S. is now too Musky. While perhaps no one else is using that last word, there are a multitude of Democrats and an appallingly few Republicans who agree with my assessment.

Elon Musk needs little introduction, but there is much about him that most of us don’t know. Briefly, he was born in South Africa (in 1971) and became a citizen of Canada in 1989 and of the U.S. in 2002. He has been married and divorced twice and has fathered 12 children with three women.*³

Until recently, Musk has been best known for founding (in 2002) and being the CEO of SpaceX, for being the CEO of Tesla, Inc. (since 2008), and for being the owner of Twitter (which he bought in 2022 and changed the name to X in 2023).

Also, as is widely known, Musk is considered the wealthiest man in the world with an estimated net worth of over 40 billion US dollars. And now he has become the most powerful person in the U.S. federal government other than (or even more than?) the President.

Musk’s political power comes from his being the head of DOGE (The Department of Government Efficiency). DOGE is not a Cabinet-level department; it is, rather, a temporary contracted government organization created by President Trump’s executive order on the day he was inaugurated.

According to Wikipedia, “DOGE's stated purpose is to reduce wasteful and fraudulent federal spending, and eliminate excessive regulations.” Further, it was “created to ‘modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.’" 

On February 11, the President hosted reporters in the Oval Office, but as Heather Cox Richardson reported, “Elon Musk held center stage,” for the event was Trump signing another executive order, this one essentially putting DOGE in charge of the U.S. government. 

Having someone other than the President in charge of the government and dismissing the place of Congress certainly sounds like it is a coup. In a lengthy, informative piece by eminent journalist Anne Applebaum (b. 1964) in the January 14 issue of The Atlantic (see here), Musk is leading a “regime change.”

If these assertions about the U.S. now experiencing a coup or an illegal regime change are true, which I’m afraid are accurate, surely it is also accurate to say that the U.S. is now too Musky! Aren’t we going to speak out forcefully against that?! 

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 *1 That book topped The New York Times bestseller list for paperback nonfiction in 2017 and remained on bestseller lists as late as 2021. On March 12, the Vital Conversations group in Kansas City's Northland will discuss tyranny, using Snyder's book as the basis for conversation. (Those of you who live in the area are invited to attend this gathering which meets in the Antioch branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library in Gladstone.)

*2 The day before Snyder made his post, Joyce Vance (whose husband is no kin to VP Vance) posted Is It Really a Coup? on her Substack blog (titled Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance). On February 12 her post was titled Call it what it is, reiterating that what Musk is doing through DOGE is, indeed, a coup.

*3 Actually, he married and divorced his second wife twice. In 2020, his “romantic partner” gave birth to a boy they named X Æ A-Xii. On February 11, “Lil X” (as his father calls him) was pictured with his father and the President in the Oval Office.