If you ever needed a perfect image of what this entire presidency under Elon Musk has been about, Senator Ed Markey gave it to us yesterday afternoon, as he was denied entry to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after trying to meet with Elon’s DOGE representatives. Markey has been hanging out at various federal agencies like the Treasury and now the EPA, trying to investigate Elon Musk’s coup that even North Carolina Republican Thom Tills says “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.”
Yes, in the strictest sense that Congress is a entity with immense power that represents the people and can’t just be told to fuck off by a foreign billionaire because he’s emboldened by barrels of ketamine and the most destructive midlife crisis mankind has ever seen. This is quite literally a coup, in that unelected jagoffs are assuming control of core government systems that they are not legally allowed to touch, influencing the basic functions of government. The tell of what this is really about is they haven’t even bothered to try any of these budget cuts in Congress. They control the purse strings, and many of what the Republicans want to do could be accomplished legally through acts of a Congress they control. But they’re all fucking lunatics and can barely deal with each other, so apparently it’s easier to just let an unelected billionaire anoint himself King and tell these braindead lemmings what to do.
As Timothy Burke noted, the titular photo snapped by Ed Markey’s staff is of a private security guard from a company called Triple Canopy, who is primarily known from their work in Iraq, and likely is now contracted to work for the federal government under self-appointed President Musk’s directive. This really drives home the eternal maxim that imperialism inevitably makes its way back home, as billionaire is guarding the EPA with a contractor used in U.S. occupations, while handing control of critical financial levers to kids out of college who apparently don’t know how to convert from Excel to PDF.
As Nathan Tankus has documented in his alarming reports from inside the Treasury, this is a grave crisis. Elon either has access or is trying to obtain access to control of $6 trillion in authorized payments, and as Dave Levitan has excellently reported for Splinter these past couple weeks, Musk is replicating this unhinged power grab in as many agencies as he can get his grubby hands on. An unelected billionaire has set up shop in the central nervous system of the United States government in defiance of all constitutional authority, hiring his own private security to protect the property of the people from the people, and no one knows how to stop him. Welcome to dystopia.
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