After seizing the [capitol] in a fast-moving late January coup and with universal control of government ministries now seemingly assured by a quiescent parliament, South African oligarch Elon Musk spent his third week in power dismantling the legal constraints that would stop him — already the world’s wealthiest man — from turning the US government into his personal piggy bank.
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Musk — already the world’s richest man — seems set to transform the nation checking account into his own business development fund. The country’s foreign ministry indicated that it planned to buy $400 million of unnecessary and ill-suited vehicles to help prop up Musk’s troubled car company, which has been struggling in recent years due to its shoddy quality. The bombastic Musk, who has god-like ambitions of colonizing space and also runs a large rocket company that does billions of dollars of work with the government, announced that in the coming days his junta DOGE forces would also take control of the nation’s civilian space agency.
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In some of her first moves at the nation’s top law enforcement officer, attorney general Pam Bondi moved to effectively decriminalize large swaths of crimes most commonly carried out by the country’s financial and power elites. Amid spreading signs that the US government would be remade as a kleptocracy at home, she disbanded a special justice ministry task force aimed at investigating foreign kleptocrats, announced prosecutors would no longer seek to punish elites who accepted secret payments from foreign governments nor US companies that paid bribes to do business overseas.
Trump himself moved to fully pardon one former provincial governor who had been previously imprisoned for soliciting bribes in exchange for gubernatorial appointments — a move that clearly will serve as an endorsement of such behavior going forward — and dropped pending criminal charges against two of his own personal staff who had abetted his efforts to thwart federal prosecution after he’d been previously removed from office in 2021. He also removed longstanding supports for government officials that he chose to fire, legally or not.
Perhaps most worrisome, he extended a weeks-long purge of prosecutors and law enforcement who had investigated white nationalist terrorist groups and militias loyal to him personally, further seeming to clear the way for those groups to take up violence in his name.
More broadly, the regime shuttered, disbanded, or disabled one watchdog agency after another.
[...]In a nod to the nation’s powerful class of oligarchs, the regime also indicated that in the coming days it would fire and neuter thousands of tax investigators who had been added in recent years in an attempt to improve compliance by the country’s wealthy, who largely ignore the country’s social contract to pay their share of tax receipts.
Musk personally announced his intention to “delete” the nation’s consumer protection bureau, which has stood in recent years as a roadblock for his own ambitions to force the nation’s citizens to use his website as a national payment system.
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Trump declared that he intended to personally intervene in criminal cases, and apparently wasted little time doing so: Much of the week’s headlines in the capital focused on the regime’s ill-fated attempts to coerce the opposition mayor of the country’s largest city into cooperating with the regime’s politically driven crackdown on illegal immigrants.
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Most of the nation’s internal corruption watchdogs, known as inspectors general — who collectively had at least 32 active investigations underway into Musk’s sprawling business empire — were fired in the regime’s first days.
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While nearly all of the regime’s moves in recent weeks have been subject to court challenges, there were spreading signs that the regime planned to ignore contravening orders from the judiciary — powering through what has long stood as the country’s ultimate check-and-balance on corrupt uses of executive power.
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The bizarre executive power-sharing agreement — with Musk operating as an illegitimate head of government and the senile Trump content to serve out his ramblingly incoherent dotage as a ceremonial head of state — was highlighted it an eye-popping midweek press conference, where Musk, possibly high on narcotics and wearing a “Dark MAGA” hat that referenced the elected president’s neofacist supporters, held court at length in the oval-shaped presidential office while Trump sat near-silently at his desk.
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Together, the moves hung a giant sign that the US, which until now had been known for operating one of the cleanest and least corrupt business environments in the world — a series of structures, enforcement mechanisms, regulatory schemes, and legal practices that had made it the global headquarters for the world’s largest and most successful businesses — was now open to bribery and graft.
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Republicans, also cowed into silence and acquiescence by years of Trump bluster and MAGA threats, have made clear they will serve as a rubber-stamp. Opposition Democrats skirmished briefly on the floor of the Senate, but they quickly capitulated—deciding, for the third weekend since Musk took over, that it was important to not work through the weekend. In fact, senior Democratic officials quickly left town entirely — making the bizarre choice that it was more important to show up at the glitzy international confab known as the Munich Security Conference to reassure allies that they intended to defend democracy
someday, than it was to actually do so at home.
Dooomsday Scenario
