Contra Trump
底兒朝天
This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It’s a bomb at the heart of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably drift our way.
Writing in The New York Times, the political commentator Noah Millman essayed the view that Donald Trump’s second presidency is nothing less than the fourth major challenge to America’s constitutional order since the War of Independence itself — the other three occurred during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, around the Civil War in the mid nineteenth century and in the aftermath of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
‘Americans are prone to venerate our Constitution’, writes Millman, ‘mythologizing the founding generation as uniquely wise, and our subsequent constitutional history as a process of evolution toward an ever more perfect union.’ In reality, he says, that history reveals ‘a kind of punctuated equilibrium marked by mass extinction of prior forms and precedents. Each of these moments has reshaped the way our Constitution works in fundamental ways, providing a new framework for normal politics for a new era.’ Today,
The scope of President Trump’s challenge to the existing constitutional order — largely through a blitzkrieg of executive orders, many of them in blatant disregard of established precedent and legislation — suggests we may be in the process of another such discontinuous and disruptive moment.
The question is whether it will transform our constitutional order fruitfully yet again, or accelerate a final degeneration into Caesarism.
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Previously, in China Heritage we have noted some of the discomforting parallels between the histories of modern China and America. We have pursued our parallax bilateralism in the spirit of what I think of as ‘Larrikin Sinology’ — the wary study of a serious subject undertaken in an irreverent mood.
We first gazed through our Sino-American lens with the publication of A Monkey King’s Journey to the East on 1 January 2017 on the eve of Trump’s inauguration as president. During that first term, we commented on the ways that both Offical America and Official China twist modern history to serve their needs — see Mangling May Fourth 2020 in Washington and Mangling May Fourth 2020 in Beijing — and observed that:
Those of us who are inextricably involved with both of those nations while living, for the most part, on the periphery of these cheek-by-jowl empires, have long witnessed a decades-long ‘apache dance’.
In the wake of Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020, we launched Spectres & Souls — Vignettes, moments and meditations on China and America, 1861-2021. This was a yearlong discussion in which we suggested that many of the spectres and shades, as well as the enlivening souls and lofty inspirations, that asserted themselves both in China and the United States in 2021 could fruitfully be considered in the context of the 160-year period starting in 1861. In November that year, the successful Xinyou Coup 辛酉政變 at the court of the Manchu-Qing dynasty that had ruled China for two centuries ushered in a short-lived period of rapid reform, one that, in many respects continues to this day, even as it falters. While, in February 1861 on the other side of the Pacific Ocean seven slave-owning states broke with the Union that had been established under the Constitution of 1787, resulting in a four-year civil war. The successful conclusion of that war saved the Union, but the failure of the subsequent era of Reconstruction had profound ramifications for the state of that union, and the United States of America generally.
Our series Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium was launched in November 2024, following Donald Trump’s second electoral victory. Given the haunting parallels between Trump’s USA and Xi Jinping’s Chinese Republic we believe that it is time for a new academic and journalistic analytical approach to the Sino-American conundrum. We’ll call it ‘Whataboutism Studies’.
Responding to Noah Millman’s thesis about the four junctures in America’s constitutional history, we would note the impact of four coups in post-1949 Chinese affairs. They are:
- 1966 — when Mao Zedong overturned the party-state on the pretext of saving the nation from Soviet-style revisionism;
- 1976 — the Huairentang Coup when key leaders of the Maoist government were arrested and the pre-1966 old guard were restored to power to lead a decade of economic (and tentative political) reform;
- 1989 — when Deng Xiaoping and his fellow post-Mao gerontocrats overthrew the head of the Party and toyed with a three-year-long counter-reform; and,
- 2012 — when Xi Jinping, who would soon become head of the party-state-army, carried out a rolling bureaucratic coup against the state, installed himself as a Chairman of Everything and engineered a position of terminal tenure.
In short, this is a story of Revolution, Reform, Reaction and Restoration. For more on the ‘Four Rs’, see Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium.
***
Below, we return to the work of Carole Calladwalldr, a journalist who has previously featured in Contra Trump — see Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now. She prefaced her essay ‘It is a Coup’, published on 10 February 2025, with the following note:
The political changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade, I’ve been trying to investigate and expose these forces. Since 2016 that’s included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica and the revelation of a profound threat exploit at the heart of our democracies. But what’s happening now in the US is a paradigm shift: this is Broligarchy, a concept I coined last summer when I warned that what we were seeing was the proposed merger of Silicon Valley with state power. That has now happened. Writing about this from the UK, it’s clear we have a choice: we help lead the fight back against it. Or it comes for us next.
For more on America’s auto-golpe in Contra Trump, see:
- 6 January 2021 to 6 January 2024 — America’s Slow-rolling Autogolpe
- T2 – A Feature, Not a Bug
- Trump’s Inauguration — Can we call if fascism yet?
***
底兒朝天 dǐ’r cháo tiān, the Chinese rubric of this chapter, means ‘to turn something upside-down, to capsize’.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
11 February 2025
***
Further Reading:
- Carole Cadwalladr, Artificial Ignorance, 2 February 2025
- Timothy Snyder, Of Course It’s a Coup, 6 February 2025
- Erik Salvaggio, Anatomy of an AI Coup, TechPolicy.Press, 9 February 2025
- Gil Duran, Memo: ‘Capture of U.S. Critical Infrastructure by Neoreactionaries’, 10 February 2025
- Rick Wilson, You Are Not Allowed To Be Shocked — Welcome to the Valley of Finding Out, MAGA, 10 February 2025, and on YouTube
IT IS A COUP
Carole Cadwalladr
10 February 2025
This is what should be on every front page in 150 point banner headlines. All I have is this Substack but I lay it beneath your feet and pray to a higher power that I’m wrong.
![](https://chinaheritage.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/IMG_0836.jpeg)
Let me say this more clearly: what is happening right now, in America, in real time, is a coup.
This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.
Musk didn’t need a tank, guns, soldiers. He had a small crack cyber unit that he sent into the Treasury department last weekend. He now has unknown quantities of the entire US nation’s most sensitive data and potential backdoors into the system going forward. Treasury officials denied that he had access but it then turned out that he did. If it ended there, it would be catastrophic. But that unit — whose personnel include a 19-year-old called “Big Balls” — is now raiding and scorching the federal government, department by department, scraping its digital assets, stealing its data, taking control of the code and blowing up its administrative apparatus as it goes.
This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks like. It didn’t take armed men, just Musk’s taskforce of boy-men who may be dweebs and nerds but all the better to plunder the country’s digital resources. This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States’ most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its citizens.
In 2019, I appeared in a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. That’s a good place to start to understand what is going on now, but it wasn’t the great hack. It was among the first wave of major tech exploits of global elections. It was an exemplar of what was possible: the theft and weaponization of 87 million people’s personal data. But this now is the Great Hack. This week is when the operating system of the US was wrenched open and is now controlled by a private citizen under the protection of the President.
If you think I’ve completely lost it, please be advised that I’m far from alone in saying this. The small pools of light in the darkness of this week has been stumbling across individual commentators saying this for the last week. Just because these words are not on the front page in banner headlines of any newspaper doesn’t mean this isn’t not happening. It is.
In fact, there has been relentless, assiduous, detailed reporting in all outlets across America. There are journalists who aren’t eating or sleeping and doing amazing work tracking what’s happening. There is fact after fact after fact about Musk’s illegal pillaging of the federal government. But news organisation leaders are either falling for the distraction story — the most obviously insane one this week being rebuilding Gaza as a luxury resort, a story that dominated headlines and political oxygen for days. Or…what? Being unable to actually believe that this is what an authoritarian takeover looks like? Being unsure of whether you put the headline about the illegal coup d’etat next to a spring season fashion report? Above or below the round-up of best rice cookers? The fact is the front pages look like it’s business as normal when it’s anything but.
This was Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Tuesday. She’s a historian of fascism and authoritarianism at New York University and she said this even before some of this week’s most extreme events had taken place. (A transcript of the rest of her words here.)
“It’s very unusual. In my study of authoritarian states, it’s only really after a coup that you see such a speed, such obsessive haste to purge bureaucracy so quickly. Or when somebody is defending themselves, like Erdogan after the coup attempt against him, massive purge immediately. So that’s unusual.
“I don’t have another reference point for a private individual coming in, infiltrating, trying to turn government to the benefit of his businesses and locking out federal employees. It is a coup. I’m a historian of coups, and I would also use that word. So we’re in a real emergency situation for our democracy.”
A day later, this was Tim Snyder, a Yale professor and another great historian of authoritarianism, here: “Of course it’s a coup.”
History was made this week and while reporters are doing incredible work, to understand it our guides are historians, those who’ve lived in authoritarian states and Silicon Valley watchers. They are saying it. What I’ve learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon Valley’s system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away with it. And then lie about it afterwards. That’s the model here.
Everything that I’ve ever warned about is happening now. This is it. It’s just happening faster than anyone could have imagined.
It’s not that what’s happening is simply unlawful. This is what David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School told the Washington Post.
“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”
And he’s right. The system can’t and isn’t. Legal challenges are being made and even upheld but there’s no guarantee or even sign that Musk is going to honour them. That’s one of the most chilling points my friend, Mark Bergman, made to me over the weekend.
Last week, I included a voice note from my friend, tech investor turned tech campaigner, Roger McNamee, so you could hear direct from an expert about the latest developments in AI. This week I’ve asked Mark to do the honours.
He’s a lawyer, Washington political insider, and since last summer, he’s been participating in ‘War Game’ exercises with Defense Department officials, three-star generals, former Cabinet Secretaries and governors. In five exercises involving 175 people, they situation-tested possible scenarios of a Trump win. But they didn’t see this. It’s even worse than they feared.
[Audio file not copied here]
“Those challenges have been in respect of shutting down agencies, firing federal employees and engaging in the most egregious hack of government. It all at the hand hands of DOGE, Musk and his band of tech engineers. DC right now is shell-shocked. It is a government town, USA, ID, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, no federal agency will be spared the revenge and retribution tours in full swing, and huge numbers have been put on administrative leave, reassigned or fired, and the private sector is as much at risk, particularly NGOs and civil society organizations. The more high-profile violate the law, which is why the courts have been quick to enjoin actions.
“So yes, we’ve experienced a coup, not the old fashioned kind, no tanks or mobs, but an undemocratic and hostile takeover of government. It is cruel, it is petty. It can be brutal. It is at once chaotic and surgical. We said the institutions held in 2020 but behind institutions or people, and the extent to which all manner of power structures have preemptively obeyed is hugely worrying. There are legions ready to carry out the Trump agenda. The question is, will the rule of law hold?”
Last Tuesday, Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That’s the government body with the slogan ‘We are the nation’s first line of defense’. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful ‘buyout’ – what we call redundancy in the UK — or what 200 former employees — spies — have said is blatant attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports that new appointees are being presented with “loyalty tests”.
Musk’s troops — because that’s what they are, mercenaries — are acting in criminal, unlawful, unconstitutional ways. Organisations are acting quickly, taking lawsuits, and for now the courts are holding. But the key essential question is whether their rulings can be enforced with a political weaponized Department of Justice and FBI. What Mark Bergman told me (and is in the extended note below) is that they’ve known since the summer that there would be almost no way of pushing back against Trump. This politicisation of all branches of law enforcement creates a vacuum at the heart of the state. As he says in that note, the ramifications of this are little understood outside the people inside Washington who study this for a living.
And at least some of what DOGE is doing can never be undone. Musk, a private citizen, now has vast clouds of citizens’ data, their personal information and it seems likely, classified material. When data is out there, it’s out there. That genie can never be put back into the bottle.
It’s what it’s possible to do with that data, that the real nightmare begins. What machine learning algorithms and highly personalised targeting can do. It’s a digital coup. An information coup. And we have to understand what that means. Our fleshy bodies still inhabit earthly spaces but we are all, also, digital beings too. We live in a hybrid reality. And for more than a decade we have been targets of hybrid warfare, waged by hostile nation states whose methodology has been aped and used against us by political parties in a series of disrupted elections marked by illegal behaviour and a lack of any enforcement. But this now takes it to the next level.
It facilitates a concentration of wealth and power — because data is power — of a kind the world has never seen before.
Facebook’s actual corporate motto until 2014 taken from words Mark Zuckerberg spoke was “Move fast and break things”. That phrase has passed into commonplace: we know it, we quote it, we also fail to understand what that means. It means: act illegally and get away with it.
And that is the history of Silicon Valley. Its development and cancerous growth is marked by series of larcenous acts each more grotesque than the last. And Musk’s career is an exemplar of that, a career that has involved rampant criminality, gross invasions of privacy, stock market manipulation. And lies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently suing Musk for failing to disclose his ownership stock before he bought Twitter. The biggest mistake right now is to believe anything he says.
Every time, these companies have broken the law, they have simply gotten away with it. I know I’m repeating this, but it’s central to understanding both the mindset and what’s happening on the ground. And no-one exemplifies that more than Musk. The worst that has happened to him is a fine. A slap on the wrist. An insignificant line on a balance sheet. The “cost of doing business”.
On Friday, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, who’s been an essential voice this week, told the readers of his Substack to act now and call their representatives.
“Friends, we are in a national emergency. This is a coup d’etat. Elon Musk was never authorized by Congress to do anything that he’s doing, he was never even confirmed by Congress, his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was never authorized by Congress. Your representatives, your senators and Congressmen have never given him authority to do what he is doing, to take over government departments, to take over entire government agencies, to take over government payments system itself to determine for himself what is an appropriate payment. To arrogate to himself the authority to have your social security number, your private information? Please. Listen, call Congress now.”
It’s a coup
I found myself completely poleaxed on Wednesday. I read this piece on the New York Times website first thing in the morning, a thorough and alarming analysis of headlined “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab”. It quoted Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University, “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.” It was displayed prominently on the front page of the New York Times but it was also just one piece among many, a small weak signal amid the overpowering noise.
There’s another word for an “Executive Power Grab”, it’s a coup. And newspapers need to actually write that in big black letters on their front pages and tell their tired, busy, overwhelmed, distracted, scared readers what is happening. That none of this is “business as usual.”
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Over on the Guardian’s UK website on Wednesday, there was not a single mention on the front page of what was happening. Trump’s Gaza spectacular diversion strategy drowned out its quotient of American news. We just weren’t seeing what’s happening in the seat of government of our closest ally. As a private citizen mounted a takeover of the cornerstone superpower of the international rules-based order, our crucial NATO ally, our biggest single trading partner, the UK government didn’t even apparently notice.
The downstream potential international consequences of what is happening in America are profound and terrifying. That our government and much of the media is asleep at the wheel is a reason to be more not less terrified. Musk has made his intentions towards our democracy and national security quite clear. What he hasn’t yet had is the backing of the US state. That is shortly going to change. One of the first major stand-offs will be UK and EU tech regulation. I hope I’m wrong but it seems pretty obvious that’s what Musk’s Starmer-aimed tweets are all about. There seems no world in which the EU and the UK aren’t headed for the mother of all trade wars.
And that’s before we even consider the national security ramifications. The prime minister should be convening Cobra now. The Five Eyes — the intelligence sharing network of the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada — is already likely breached. Trump is going to do individual deals with all major trading partners that’s going to involve preposterous but real threats, including likely dangling the US’s membership of NATO over our heads all while Russia watches, waits and knows that we’ve done almost nothing to prepare. Plans to increase our defence spending have been made but not yet implemented. Our intelligence agencies do understand the precipice we’re on but there’s no indication the government is paying any attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as we know it is collapsing in real time.
It’s a coup
We all know that the the first thing that happens when a dictator seizes power is that he (it’s always a he) takes control of the radio station. Musk did that months ago. It wasn’t that Elon Musk buying Twitter pre-ordained what is now happening but it made it possible. And it was the moment, minutes after Trump was shot and he went full-in on his campaign that signalled the first shot fired in his digital takeover.
It’s both a mass propaganda machine and also the equivalent of an information drone with a deadly payload. It’s a weapon that’s already been turned on journalists and news organisations this week. There’s much more to come.
On Friday, Musk started following Wikileaks on Twitter. Hours later, twisted, weaponized leaks from USAID began.
This is going to get so much worse. Musk and MAGA will see this as the opening of the Stasi archive. It’s not. It’s rocketfuel for a witchhunt. It’s hybrid warfare against the enemies of the state. It’s going to be ugly and cruel and its targets are going to need help and support. Hands across the water to my friends at OCCRP, the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism organisation that uncovers transnational crime, that’s been in Musk’s sights this weekend, one of hundreds of media organisations around the world whose funding has been slashed overnight.
It’s a coup
By now you may feel scared and helpless. It’s how I felt this week. I had the same sick feeling I had watching UK political coverage before the pandemic. The government was just going to ignore the wave of deaths rippling from China to Italy and pretend it wasn’t happening? Really? That’s the plan?
This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It’s a bomb at the heart of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably drift our way.
My internal alarm bell, a sense of urgency and anxiety goes even further back. To early 2017, when I uncovered information about Cambridge Analytica’s illegal hack of data from Facebook while the company’s VP, Steve Bannon, was then on the National Security Council. That concept of highly personalised data in the control of a ruthless and political operator was what tripped my emergency wires. That is a reality now.
The point is that the shock and awe is meant to make us feel helpless. So I’m telling a bit of my own personal story here. Because part of what temporarily paralyzed me last week was that this is all happening while my own small corner of the mainstream media is collapsing in on itself too. The event that I’ve spent the last eight years warning about has come to pass and in a month, 100+ of my colleagues at the Guardian will be out of the door and my employment will be terminated. I will no longer have the platform of the news organisation where I’ve done my entire body of work to date and was able to communicate to a global audience.
But then, it’s all connected. We are living through an information crisis. It’s what underpins everything. In some ways, this happening now is not surprising at all. Moreover, many of the people who I see as essential voices during this crisis (including those above) are doing that effectively and independently from Substack as I will try to continue to do.
And, the key thing that the last eight years has given me is information. The lawsuit I fought for four years as a result of doing this work very almost floored me. But it didn’t. And I’ve learned essential skills during those years. It was part of what powered me to fight for the rights of Guardian journalists during our strike this December.
The next fightback against Musk and the Broligarchy has to draw from the long, long fight for workers rights which in turn influenced the fight for civil rights that must now power us on as we face the great unknown. What comes next has to be a fight for our data rights, our human rights.
This was former Guardian journalist Gary Younge on our picket line and I’ve thought about these words a lot.
‘You have to fight even if you won’t necessarily win. Power is almost never given up freely.’
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Source:
- Carole Cadwalldr, It’s a Coup, The Power, 10 February 2025, with minor corrections
***
Contra Trump
America’s Empire of Tedium
Contents
- MAGADU — Kubla Khan, Xanadu & the 2024 American presidential election
- Waiting for the Barbarians in a Garbage Time of History
- Unless we ourselves are The Barbarians …
- What seeds can I plant in this muck?
- If you elect a cretin once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect him twice, you’re the cretin.
- The Great Red Wall — A Remarkable Coalition of the Disgruntled
- A Political Monster Straight Out of Grendel
- Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now.
- Trump Redux — Who Goes Nazi Now?
- An Elegiac Eulogy from Unf*cking The Republic
- The American Green Zone in Our Consciousness
- Those 107 Days
- ‘I Think I’m Gonna Hate It Here’ — Randy Rainbow introduces the clown-car cabinet of MAGADU
- 6 January 2021 to 6 January 2024 — America’s Slow-rolling Autogolpe
- T2 – A Feature, Not a Bug
- Trump’s Inauguration — Can we call if fascism yet?
- ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid’ — A.A. Gill on The Golden Door
- America’s Real Cold War
- The Backlash Blues in Black History Month
***
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