What would you call an attempt by the richest man in the world, an unelected unapologetic bigot and conspiracy theorist, to access an IRS system that includes “detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country”? Would the word “unusual” enter into it?
Definitionally, I suppose this is true. It is, in fact, unusual for a brand new government entity created under obviously and ghoulishly false pretenses to seek access to everyone’s tax records, including their personal identification numbers, as well as allowing them to “enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices, collection documents and other records.” It is unusual in the sense that it has, obviously, never happened before, because the Trump/Musk/DOGE ongoing administrative coup has never happened before, in any sense at all. There are probably some better words out there one could use to describe such a request, then.
In the first month of this administration, the inadequacy of legacy media’s fallback language constraints have been made clear over and over. Trump “tests his power” with one move, Musk and DOGE “raise alarms” with another. Also over the weekend, the New York Times used that same word to describe an absurdist bit of attempted extortion, calling a demand for half of all of Ukraine’s mineral resources as well as oil and gas in return for American support an “unusual deal.”
There are limits, of course, to the language widely read publications might use to describe what is going on. But many of those limits are largely self-imposed, and built upon a century or more of American history and news that is frankly unrelated to the pillaging of the federal government and every American taxpayer that is currently ongoing. Words like “unusual” suggest a connection to past events, the possibility that these things could have happened before, even if the specifics might have been a bit different. But they didn’t. There is no analog to Trump’s moves to fire huge sections of the federal workforce, or to a person like Musk even sniffing the kind of access and power he now enjoys.
There is a scene in “All the President’s Men” where Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee tells Woodward and Bernstein to cut the words “her tit” from a direct quote before printing. Why? “This is a family newspaper.” It was a reasonable question even then as to who exactly such edits were protecting; now it seems almost self-evident that dancing around the egregious nature of what those in charge are doing protects only them and their efforts to consolidate power. Calling things what they are — a coup, extortion, fascism, blatantly and corruptly illegal — obviously won’t stop them from happening, but it’s a baseline staging platform that all media should be able to climb up to.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
