Wake Up! Musk and the DOGE are leading a shadow corporate coup within Trump 2.0.

It's not just Project 2025: Musk and DOGE plan to gut and run our federal government as an executive branch-controlled corporation, with Trump as CEO and tech titans as a shadow board. It's dystopic.

TIME Magazine’s Feb. 7 cover of Elon Musk behind the Resolute Desk of the White House — rightly suggesting that he — and now DOGE and Co. — are managing a shadow coup.

Day 21 of the coup.

Dear Resisters,

I am sharing the excerpt below from a post I made yesterday to my personal journal Substack, A is for Autocracy, which provides more details on an unfolding shadow coup-within-a-coup I want to draw you attention to today. The information feels too urgent to not share it here, though this newsletter is focused on resistance to Trump 2.0. But to resist effectively, one must understand the enemy and battle.

We are facing something totally novel, radical, and quite dystopian. It goes beyond Project 2025, though that conservative anti-democratic blueprint details the policy objectives of Trump 2.0, including a total dismantling of federal government’s structure and departments, and the mass firing and replacing of the federal workforce. It also reflects the values and principles of many of Project 2025’s architects and contributors, who identify as fiscal libertarians and radical Christian nationalists advancing a dream of a future Christian America.

But as I note below, there is a parallel, or shadow, Corporate Coup unfolding within the Trump 2.0 takeover. Theirs is the anti-democratic political vision of executive unitary theory, also central to Project 2025, that calls for consolidating power in the executive branch, not merely in the president’s hands. It aims to curb and then eliminate our US system of checks and balances, sidelining the traditional role and oversight of Congress and the Courts as separate but equal branches in a pluralistic democracy.

The current coup is being managed by Russell Vought, in an unleashed Office of Management and Budget — with his hands on the government’s money — and by Elon Musk, overseeing the DOGE team. The latter represent an unelected group of private individuals, advised by Silicon Valley tech titans and allies of Musk. It’s a hostile corporate takeover model, and we must see it clearly to prevent its success. Musk’s makeover of X is closer to their economic model for the coup, one that relies on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies to amass data and produce great wealth for an elite. In short, it’s a private hostile takeover of a public institution.

The shadow coup was envisioned by far-right thinkers in recent years (see below), who openly talked about a radical libertarian takeover of America and their shared cyber wish-dream-fantasy of an alternative system to democracy. It’s a vision of what we are witnessing daily — a muscular economic insider administrative coup, waged by Executive Orders written by Vought and others and signed by Trump.

Having installed their AI system to run America, the tech bros will then be hired as subcontractors to manage these systems, too, profiting handsomely. They are unleashing not only AI but crypto. That’s the idea behind Trump’s new sovereign wealth fund, envisioned as a national investment portfolio, with bitcoin maybe replacing the US dollar. Many of these early steps have been taken..

These radical libertarians see democracy as a failed system. They want to totally take it apart and for it to fail, so American’s will suffer and feel it doesn’t work. They seek to replace it with their corporate model, which relies heavily on new technologies and digital assets. In their vision, the rights of citizens are effectively curtailed. Whoever disagrees, well… too bad. The American public will be treated like former Twitter employees who resisted Musk’s gutting of the social media platform to rebirth X, dispensing of any guardrails on hate speech, while weaponizing disinformation using new AI technologies. Their concerns will be dismissed. They’ll be fired overnight, like the “losers' in a shark tank episode of Trump’s past reality show, The Apprentice.

The architects of the cyber shadow coup are also completely serious about their vision and goals. They plan to completely disregard our current laws and fight those who oppose them in court, knowing they have bought the Supreme Court, courtesy of the long efforts by Catholic activist Leonard Leo and other billionaires who funded Project 2025 and are also aligned with this shadow coup. Their takeover of the Treasury payment system last week was key to this coup, allowing Vought and Musk to move to impound (freeze) employee payments, Congressionally-approved grants, and federal programs. All of this unfolded over the past two weeks. They’ve been slowed by lawsuits, but they are determined.

Our resistance must thus be tailored to fighting the goals and methods of a corporate, AI-driven coup, led by Christian libertarian broligarchs. It’s beyond the Orban model, even. Below you’ll also find some resources and links below for deeper reading. Looking ahead, I’ll tailor future posts about the corporate takeover to examine resistance to pluto-oligarchs.

Knowledge=power. Please, please, please, spread the word about the shadow coup. I feel a renewed sense of urgency to share what I have learned and hope you will too. — Anne-christine

“American Monopoly”

The shadow coups:

There is a much darker anti-democratic vision for the future that the Musk-Thiel-Andreeson-Horwitz circle has been putting forth, along with JD Vance, and right-wing tech disruptors including Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin. The last two are radical right tech libertarians who call for destroying our democracy — all democracies — which they view as declining, to be replaced with self-governing corporate mini states they call “network states.” These are conceived as gated mini-cities called “state sectors” financed by crypto, and run like free trade zones in Taiwan, and guarded by AI-surveillance systems.

The crypto will help them buy physical land that will operate under the sovereignty of the US — but under different economic rules. Looking to Trump 2.0, they envisage managing the US as a corporation, with Trump as the CEO and the bros as a board of directors — supplanting a traditional advisory Cabinet.

If this all sounds very conspiracy driven, it’s a real vision, report journalists who’ve been tracking the tech bros. They include Gil Duran, whose newsletter, The Nerd Reich, covers Silicon Valley and tech authoritarianism as a specialty beat. Duran is a former opinion writer at The Sacramento Bee who was comms director for Kamala Harris when she was California attorney general. I newly follow Joanna Richard, of the popular Substack The Silly Serious. They both acknowledge learning from others who have been tracking the increasingly dark, radical libertarian views of tech industry professionals newly united behind Trump 2.0. They include Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, joint owners of the A16Z firm, and prominent billionaires David Sacks and Brian Armstrong.

They warn that the DOGE clan’s latest moves at the Treasury are starting steps to destroy our current system and set up the alternative corporate model, and closely following Project 2025’s policy goals. That’s why Trump launched a US “Sovereign Wealth Fund” to create wealth for the government, reportedly open to digital assets, namely bitcoin. The big plan, Richard states, is to transfer our US taxpayer Treasury account into that sovereign account, generating wealth for Trump’s government.

That sovereign future cities plan is also why Trump and Vance are so obsessed with acquiring Panama and Greenland — to be set up model deregulated economic zones like “mini” states — precursors to network states, the long dream. Who knows, maybe the same wild vision is fueling Trump’s disturbing Gaza resort proposal. The driving vision is corporate autocracy.

There’s an awful lot to unpack in these future shock visions, so I’ll point you to a Richard’s latest You Tube video on this topic, which has links to Duran’s articles about the various bros and their roles. The Uber-right future cities sound like true dystopias, created by and for rich white people, mostly, and where the poor will certainly not be welcome.

Image: Mike Luckovich for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution

Who will own what and who will control what and who will profit and who will lose?

On that last point, I am already clear: the 99% will lose. The American people and global public who are not techno-plutocrats will lose. We have arguably already lost an unknown portion of our democracy in three short weeks that only represents the start of a much bigger power and money grab. We’re experiencing the launch of an economic coup, with its eyes on the future and digital economies. That’s also why we see Trump and Melania launch their own bitcoins, along with the DOGE bitcoin. It’s a mad scramble for profit.

How do we resist a corporate coup?

Looking to resistance, we — progressives — now need to bring in economic progressive experts and analysts, including tech, banking, and cryptocurrency experts to help unpack the unfolding economic coup in real time. We need to wake up the US private sector and corporate leaders and small business owners across the country to the hostile mega-corporate takeover model. Just this morning, I read about how Musk has accessed to data that includes payment information used by X competitors that can give him an edge to profit. It’s beyond outrageous: it’s a Musk f-you to everyone standing in his — and DOGE’s — way. He can now claim to be concerned about efficiency and waste, as he copies data and plunders the system, for the sake of future profits. And he’s acting on behalf of his allies, too.

We will urgently need our legal eagles and the courts and our still-stunned Congress to wake up to this threat, if they haven’t fully grasped the bigger undemocratic vision. The lawyers are litigating, and groups with the Democracy 2025 hub are leading the pack. They are all in, or will be. But we need Congress and legislators and unions to focus on this economic coup and vision of America as a free trade corporation.

Luckily, New York Attorney General Letitia James has led 19 Attorneys General over the weekend to successfully secure a temporary pause on the DOGE hacking of our Treasury and other departments. US District Judge Paul Englemayor, based in Manhattan, issued an emergency request in response to the AG lawsuit to stop DOGE. The judge has ordered Musk and the DOGE team to immediately destroy all information and copies they installed or took from the Treasure computer system. Will they comply? Don’t be naive. No: they have already shown a total disregard for the authority of anyone but themselves.

The case will be heard in a few days by US District Judge Jeanette Vargas, a Biden appointee like Englemayor. Expect a vigorous legal battle by Trump 2.0 lawyers — and lots of TV and MAGAland shouting on Fox by JD Vance and others, who support the vision of a corporate coup.

What about us — the media and community nonprofits and organizers and activists?

We need to inform our communities, number one. We must quickly educate the American public about what is at stake, and explain this complex threat, beyond the weaponization of Project 2025’s. That includes getting messages to the large body of Trump supporters and Christian evangelical supporters who are starting to reel, also stunned about the calls to destroy Medicare and Medicaid and even go after Social Security. Do they know the coup at hand will leave them poorer, not wealthy? Let’s inform them, too.

We should tell Judge Vargas today that democratic America is totally opposed to a hostile takeover by a private group of pluto-oligarchs.

And we need to continue to organize public resistance, in the streets, in front of the Treasury and maybe on Wall Street. Yesterday Rise and Resist in New York organized a protest at a Tesla showroom. We need street protest in every corner of our country.

An Argentine protester at the massive anti-Millei rally in Buenos Aires on February 1. Millions protested “Argentina’s Trump” and his autocratic “Make Argentina Great Again” regime.

Let’s not forget the world. Musk and co. operate globally. We’re already seeing Musk’s alliances with the AfD neo-Nazi populist party in Germany, and Trump’s open embrace of right-wing oligarchs like his mentor Viktor Orban, and Putin, and Modi in India. The tech coup brokers here have busily promoted their visions of destroying democracy and national economies and governments elsewhere, too. It’s being taken up by other groups and far-right political leaders abroad. So the broader global project of democracy is at stake, too. That means the media and citizen-activists and international civil society groups around the world need to recognize this threat and quickly mobilize, too.

It’s a brave new world — meaning, it’s time to be even braver and united in our resistance.

And a final reminder: a small group of private oligarchs have captured our government. They are weaponizing AI and new technologies to take control and destroy our country and advance a different model of society — run by and for elite groups. But we remain the great majority committed to America’s original vision of a pluralistic democracy. We need our progressive leaders and movement builders in all sectors to be bolder, louder, and move very fast now to unite a grassroots, multisectoral American resistance to this coup within a coup. — AC