Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the wealthiest man in the world has been given carte blanche to allow his lackeys access to sensitive government systems, lock federal employees out of government buildings, and cease the flow of federal funds at his discretion. In less than a month, Elon Musk — whose corporate empire is based in Texas — has conducted a sort of coup-from-the-top, using his role as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to take over the technical operations of the federal government.
It should be made clear that Musk is not an elected official or even an appointed one that has been confirmed by the Senate. He is not required to make public financial disclosures and DOGE is not a true federal agency. Nevertheless, he has been given sweeping power to overhaul government operations, including directing his associates to access the Treasury Department’s sensitive federal payment and halt certain payments — something that has since been temporarily barred by a federal judge who Musk has since called to be impeached as a part of far-reaching attacks on the independent judiciary.
Ominous photos on Tuesday showed Musk standing behind Trump at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office defending his project, where he denied leading a “hostile takeover” of the U.S. government. Days earlier, a new TIME magazine cover depicted Musk sitting at the president’s desk — without Trump in the picture.
Legal experts have raised ethics questions regarding Musk and his potential conflicts of interest as a major government contractor, as well as questions of legality and constitutionality as it relates to DOGE undermining the separation of powers. (See: DOGE cutting spending that had already been appropriated by Congress, which controls the power of the purse according to the United States Constitution). Consider that prior to Musk’s interventions at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which have crippled the agency, the USAID inspector general was investigating the agency’s partnership with Musk’s company Starlink.
As an aside, it does seem that the vast majority of Americans — even the well-informed — had no idea what our federal agencies even did (preventing HIV, for example!) before Musk came in with a machete and started hacking off their limbs.
Federal judges have already issued injunctions to halt some of Trump’s proposed efforts, including a massive federal spending freeze, but whether those rulings will be followed is a separate question. Musk has already called for one federal judge to be impeached and has amplified posts that question judicial authority on his social media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter). Again, Musk is not an elected politician, though he is now a bureaucrat and an oligarch. He became an American citizen in 2002.
Meanwhile, Trump has enacted his policy of mass deportations, an effort that has reportedly resulted in racial profiling and the detainment of citizens who happen to be Latino, and has issued a flurry of executive orders targeting racial equity and transgender rights.
As others have pointed out, this deluge of newsmaking is purposeful. Steve Bannon — the Trump confidant who pleaded guilty on Tuesday to defrauding New Yorkers who donated to a “We Build the Wall” campaign — said it best in 2019 in an interview with PBS when he described a “muzzle velocity.” That is, a speed at creating news that effectively paralyzes both the press and Democrats.
“The opposition party is the media,” Bannon, who also served a prison sentence for contempt of Congress, said at the time. “And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
OK, so that’s worked. But to what end?
In the words of professor Rainer Mühlhoff, a German philosopher and mathematician at the University of Osnabrück, these developments indicate a qualitative leap in Trump’s political project that is best described as fascism.
“In many respects, this new fascism does not look exactly like its historical predecessors,” Mühlhoff recently wrote in Verfassungsblog, a journalistic and academic forum for debates on constitutional law and politics in Germany. “And yet it is fascism. Its hallmark will be that it will exploit the specific possibilities of data analysis and AI technology to eliminate the rule of law and replace it with a lean apparatus based on automation and preemption.”
According to Mühlhoff, a key characteristic of fascism is political activity “aimed at destroying the rule of law, administrative procedures, and the parliamentary and democratic order.” By taking over the key technological systems of the administrative state, Musk has acquired the power necessary to rend the existing state and simultaneously positioned himself and his allies in Big Tech as the potential operators and profiteers of this new apparatus. To that end, the chief information officers in charge of technology systems in at least three major government agencies have been replaced by Silicon Valley executives, including from Palantir and Musk’s SpaceX, per a WIRED report.
Some might quibble over whether fascism is the correct frame for understanding these political developments in the U.S. Just as sparkling wine doesn’t only come from the Champagne region of France, fascism isn’t the only sort of illiberalism at play in modern politics. Nevertheless, Mühlhoff is not alone in warning that Trump’s second term — and the role that Musk is playing — portends a looming fascism in the U.S.
In an interview with The Barbed Wire, Mark Bray, a historian of fascism and antifascism at Rutgers University, defined fascism by its characteristics: the use of mass popular politics, the glorification of violence toward traditional and hierarchical values, and an emphasis on class collaboration in the interest of the nation against so-called “elites” who are often explicitly or implicitly characterized as Jews that control the banking system, unspecified “globalists,” or Marxists — and sometimes all of the above.
“We’re not talking about elites as political scientists or as economists might identify them,” Bray told The Barbed Wire. “But elites as people who stand in for values that are considered to be oppressive in one form or another. So in that sense, an assistant professor of gender studies might be seen by a Trump supporter as more of an elite than some sort of right wing CEO, because the values that they allegedly espouse and how they see them as creating this kind of oppressive gender ideology.”
“I think certainly the fact that some people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk could come to represent every man against the elites feels very reminiscent to historically fascist and fascistic efforts to whip up a kind of populist sentiment against the elites they didn’t like in the interests of the elites they did,” Bray continued.
A similar perversion of the definition of “elites” was on display in a recent X post that Musk amplified, in which the “wrong enemy” is defined as people who are “rich” relative to “non-rich,” and the “right enemy” is defined as “people who use the government to control you” regardless of wealth. In another post, Musk accused USAID of being a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” despite USAID having long played a major role in anti-communist efforts abroad.
Some may view this lack of ideological consistency as puzzling. But within the framework of fascism, it makes perfect sense. “A feature of fascism is its incoherence and internal inconsistency,” Zach Biondi, professor of philosophy at University Of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote in 2018.
Historically, fascism has positioned itself as the enemy of both capitalism and communism, although when in power fascist regimes have often sided with business elites. In early 20th century Germany and Italy, fascist governments found themselves allied with big business to achieve their goals. Even American corporations did business with fascist dictators, such as IBM providing the punch-card system used in the German concentration camps, and some American businessmen were supportive of Hitler and the Nazi regime.
Consider Henry Ford, the American automobile industrialist who purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and used it to publish antisemitic theories and distributed the paper in his car dealerships. Today, we have our modern analog in Musk, whose purchase of X has turned the social media platform into a haven for far-right extremists and neo-Nazis. In addition to conducting a hostile takeover of our government systems, Musk has endorsed the far-right German AfD political party, which includes representatives with links to extremist groups and one who was found guilty in Germany of knowingly using a Nazi slogan.
The question of whether Trump himself is a fascist, or simply an illiberal politician with aspirations of autocracy, is less important than the question of what is being done under his watch — and whether that will push democracy over the edge. Consider Andrew Kloster, the man Trump has installed as the chief legal counsel at the government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Kloster is a self-described “raging misogynist” who was the subject of a temporary restraining order for domestic violence, according to the watchdog Project on Government Oversight. He also praised in a post on X the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who helped Hitler consolidate power. Under Kloster’s watch, the OPM has sought to purge government employees via a buyout that’s been paused by a federal judge, and noted by even some Republicans as a violation of federal law, per CBS.
“There was this kind of ethos in the Nazi Party of the different officials trying to outdo each other, to be more extreme, more violent, to do a better job of putting Nazi values into practice,” Bray told The Barbed Wire. “I don’t know to what extent President Trump told Elon Musk to go into the treasury. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t tell him, and if instead Trump has sort of emboldened his main people with a similar kind of authoritarian ethos that rejects a kind of servile chain of command and encourages taking initiative in the interest of the kind of values and goals that they feel like they all share. And that feels distinctly fascist to me.”
That’s not all that feels distinctly fascist.
One of Musk’s DOGE lackeys, Marko Elez, was linked by the The Wall Street Journal to an anonymous social media account that has made racist and pro-eugenics posts. Elez resigned after the revelation but has since been reinstated after Musk and Vice President JD Vance came to his defense on social media. Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, has since attacked the journalist who wrote the report, calling her disgusting and cruel person, saying she should be fired, and implicitly threatening her with criminal charges. (In one post, he identified her incorrectly.)
It’s unclear why Trump, Vance, Musk and his allies have fought so hard to maintain Elez’s access to sensitive government systems. Certainly there are plenty of skilled people who haven’t advocated for eugenics who could replace him — unless it was those sorts of beliefs that got him hired in the first place.
Even if there is reason to believe there is a strong fascistic undercurrent driving the second Trump administration, some experts think it’s unlikely that a one-party fascist dictatorship is on the immediate horizon. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argued in a recent article for Foreign Affairs magazine that the United States is sliding toward what they call competitive authoritarianism: “a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.” From this perspective, it is too soon to say fascism is around the corner. But if Levitsky and Way are correct in their assessment that competitive authoritarianism is a probable outcome of our current political situation, there is a real risk that it would merely be a transitional stage. After all, if the state can be wielded in authoritarian fashion to crush political opposition, who is to say that the creeping authoritarianism will remain competitive?