Ian Linden: Trump's takeover - Is it a coup?

Professor Ian Linden

"Of Course It's A Coup" is the headline of a recent blog by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History and Global Affairs at Harvard. He is always worth reading but this short piece on the Substack American online platform ( https://snyder.substack.com/p/of-course-its-a-coup ) is something of a blockbuster. Snyder's proposition is quite simple. Coups used to start by the military trying to take control of key places: Parliament, presidential palace, radio and TV Stations. But now they can begin in a very different way. And a coup is underway right now in Washington DC.

Snyder's attention-grabbing headline worked for me. Coups were one of several hazards of living in Nigeria in the 1970s. We had three in my time there. Most of the actual physical fighting tended to be around a key place like the local radio station. None were great triumphs of military strategy. One began after a polo match and a bout of all-night drinking in the club. Each coup created a tense period until it became clear that the leadership of all four of the Nigerian Army's regional Divisions were united in opposing the coup. A split in the Army meant possible civil war.

Snyder argues that in today's coups "power is more digital than physical". It's an important insight. And with tech giants behaving like powerful feudal lords, you can see the consequences.

But Snyder was pre-empted by the Catalan sociologist, Manuel Castells, at the turn of the millennium. Castells saw history as overlapping epochs categorized by the nature of power, how people experience the world, and how they make a living. Thus he identifies three overlapping phases of history: the agricultural, the industrial and the information economy. This last period was associated with a networked society with power arising from the control of information and data - overlapping, of course, with military power: the epoch in which we now live.

Snyder paints a picture of the un-elected 'special government employee', Elon Musk, and his white-shirted acolytes from Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) trying to get control of financial data from the US treasury and the other main departments of State. For radio station and other key sites in the Capital read the digital content of Federal Government Computers as coup targets. Whilst in foreign policy, Vice-President JD Vance tries to construct a white nationalist MAGA-style network in Europe, and US Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, thrusts the USA into an authoritarian alliance with Putin against China. We are well and truly into American authoritarian control of Castells' information economy and networked society.

That we are in the early stages of a slow-motion coup in the USA, the consequence of government by Trump, should wake up the Republican Party. That Trump has clear intent to disrupt and subvert democratic practice, return the world to a crude promotion of might-is-right, and reject social democrat Europe with its concern for the vulnerable, should wake up all people of good-will. Given the apparently unlimited power of AI and the future impact of the climate change this is both a moral and existential crisis.

But these are early days and there are some hopeful precedents. South Korea and Brazil have faced a similar threat to their democratic societies and reacted effectively to counter it. Provided the gravity of the threat in America is recognized - this is a more damaging avarice for power than state capture for financial enrichment that occurred under President Jacob Zuma in South Africa - America will do the same. Thanks to fearful and supine Republican leadership, their further betrayal of national responsibility as a legislature, amongst the institutions balancing the power of the Executive, Congress and the Law, only the Law has risen to the challenge.

A particularly egregious symptom of Republican collaboration with Trump's authoritarian aims has been the Senate confirmation, despite the Democrats best efforts to block it, of Russell Vought as Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OBR), approved by 53-47 (voting exactly on Party lines). The OBR is important. It passes the President's budget proposal to Congress, oversees the IT practices of Federal agencies, and generally oversees Federal spending. That means expenditure of $6.75 trillion a year will be passing through the hands of a right-wing ideologue.

Vought is one of the thinkers and writers of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, the blueprint for authoritarian Christian nationalism in the USA. He envisaged the sacking of merit-promoted civil servants and replacing them with MAGA political appointees (US Presidents are already allowed to make 4,000 political appointments to the civil service). Project 2025's proposals are aimed at breaking down restrictions on presidential power.

If Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives have been behaving like a rabbit in a car's headlights, then some of the country's judges, trades unions and affected citizens could be said to be setting up temporary traffic lights and red cones to, at least, slow the traffic. Some 50 lawsuits have already been filed to stop what is an unconstitutional power grab. A district judge has put a preliminary injunction prohibiting the access of Musk's white-shirts to information held on federal computers. Some 26 USAID employees are suing Musk and DOGE in the Baltimore Federal Court for dismantling USAID without formal Senate confirmation. There is a case pending on the constitutionality of removing the right to citizenship of the children of immigrants born in the USA. Lawsuits and temporary injunctions , though, cannot halt the damage as cases bounce up the appeal process to the Supreme Court. Some have simply been ignored.

The Republicans, the MAGA supporters, and the many others who voted Trump and his cronies into office have been forced-fed disinformation and lies. They may continue to see the application of the Rule of Law as politicization of the legal system by the Democrats. But that will be increasingly implausible. Americans still have a choice. Wave goodbye to the US constitution, the rule of law, nationally and internationally, or block this slow-motion coup.

"Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after", Jonathan Swift wrote some three hundred years ago. That has even more salience today. But even in the Internet age, in a country with a deep belief in democracy, surely people will register the true impact of this coup before it is too late and will act accordingly. Or not.

In both new or Nigerian-style coups, the risk of civil strife is ever present. In Timothy Snyder's warning to his fellow citizens: "Miss the Obvious, Lose your Republic".

LINK: www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/trumps-takeover-is-it-a-coup

Professor Ian Linden is Visiting Professor at St Mary's University, Strawberry Hill, London. A past director of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, he was awarded a CMG for his work for human rights in 2000. He has also been an adviser on Europe and Justice and Peace issues to the Department of International Affairs of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales. Ian chairs a new charity for After-school schooling in Beirut for Syrian refugees and Lebanese kids in danger of dropping out partnering with CARITAS Lebanon and work on board of Las Casas Institute in Oxford with Richard Finn OP. His latest book was Global Catholicism published by Hurst in 2009.