Trump/Musk is ignoring court orders, though they haven’t owned up to it publicly yet.
Once they do, the response – from the courts, from Democrats in Congress, from Republicans in Congress, from the general public – will be telling as to where things go from here.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Aside from JD Vance, the third-in-command, a distant third, suggesting in a tweet over the weekend that the executive branch doesn’t need to listen to the courts, we don’t have anything official from Trump/Musk, which is telling, for now.
ICYMI
You’d expect Trump/Musk to be shouting at the top of their lungs about not needing to follow the rules.
I can sense the why to the reluctance.
They’ve worked hard to get to this point.
It took Musk using his paper billions to buy Twitter, and turn it into a propaganda machine, and Musk and his billionaire oligarch wannabes billions more to buy up what’s left of the mainstream news media, to get the barest of bare pluralities in the 2024 election cycle.
That’s why you’re seeing them run the hurry-up offense; time is precious when you’re running a con on 330 million people, and 165 million of them are onto you.
They have slim majorities in Congress, they have – think they have – the courts.
Musk now has his 19-year-old hacker bros seizing control of the money.
The last step in this is just up and telling us that it’s over – the it here being, American democracy as we’ve come to know it.
It’s the, what happens after they do that, that we need to think through.
One way this goes
People are right to fear the public acknowledgement of a constitutional crisis, because we haven’t had one of these for a while, since, oh, right about the 1850s, give or take.
Years into that one, we started shooting at each other, in organized quasi-military fashion.
The stakes are just as big now, actually exponentially bigger, given our increased role in the world order.
We didn’t have thousands of nuclear bombs pointed at other people, and thousands more pointed back at us, last time we took aim at other Americans.
Now, if Trump/Musk is assuming that the other side is going to up and decide, well, they’re in control now, and even though they did it by breaking every rule in the book, the other side is going to hold itself to the book, and surrender, they’re crazy.
ICYMI
People will take to the streets in every city, big and small, in the country.
You’re already seeing that, in limited quantities.
It will expand, in a flash mob.
Work will come to a standstill. Traffic won’t move.
If you think the U.S. Capitol was under siege on Jan. 6, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
Now, a next step, a response from Trump/Musk, could be – and you should expect this – calling out the military to quash dissent.
That’s dangerous, but not for the reasons you assume.
One protestor gets shot, and how could that kind of thing not happen, if only by accident, given the tensions, it’s on like Donkey Kong.
Instead of quashing dissent, that shot heard ‘round the world increases the tensions tenfold, a hundredfold, to infinity and beyond.
We have people who want their country back – and they’re not all just on the left; there’s also the millions of people who voted for Trump because they believed what they were told by the media, that Project 2025 was TDS writ large, and have seen that the media lied to them.
It will be those folks vs. the MAGA warriors in the streets, and here’s where things threaten to spiral out of control.
ICYMI
Let’s shift our attention back to DC, where Trump has those slim majorities in the House and Senate – a 218-215 majority in the House, meaning two House Republicans switching sides on a vote swing the balance of power; a 53-47 majority in the Senate, meaning four Senate Republicans switching sides on a vote flip the balance of power there.
You don’t need the entirety of the Republican caucus in either chamber to see blood flowing like rivers in the streets of the good ol’ US of A to decide to revolt politically for things to begin to change.
You need two in the House, and/or four in the Senate.
One, or the other.
Both would be nice.
There are already people in both caucuses inclined to flip, just as we’ve seen judges appointed by Reagan, the Bushes and even Trump signaling that they’re not automatic.
Just a few of those folks follow their conscience, and we get movement in the right direction.
Another way this goes
OK, so, let’s assume that none of the conscience Republicans have the gumption to display it, what happens then?
Again, millions of people who maybe didn’t think things were perfect before, but still largely liked that enough to not want to trade it in for whatever Trump/Musk seems to have in store, aren’t about to stand down.
I think we peel off even some of the less rabid among the MAGAs to join us here.
Civil war isn’t what they voted for; they wanted an end to abortion, or they were told that immigrants were the source of all of our problems, not other Americans.
This is where things start to get ugly – and no, people protesting in every city, big and small, and the military shooting people wasn’t already ugly, compared to what’s next.
The danger zone is no longer just we, the people; the few, the powerful, find themselves increasingly at risk.
Trump/Musk is an obvious target, but they’re protected, by and large.
ICYMI
I mean, some rando kid from Pennsylvania supposedly outwitted the Secret Service last summer and fired off a hail of rifle shots at Trump.
I’m less sure by the day that this actually happened as we have been led to believe it happened, but anyway.
It’s fair to assume that Trump/Musk, the other oligarchs, are good.
How about other Republicans in Congress? They don’t travel around with security details, have armed guards at their apartments in DC.
ICYMI
Cabinet members are safe, but what about the next level down?
Millionaire and billionaire CEOs are already in the crosshairs, literally, if you remember the Luigi Mangione story from a few weeks back.
How many more Luigi Mangiones are out there isn’t known, but it’s not smart to assume that there are none.
Expect counterattacks from the MAGA warriors aimed at prominent Democrats and other figures on the left.
This, friends, is what we’d call civil war.
How bad can it get?
I don’t imagine that it gets this far, or anywhere close, but it’s worth thinking it through, to see how bad it can get.
The civil war of the 1860s was largely geographical, and the armies wore uniforms.
A 2020s civil war would pit neighbor against neighbor in the so-called purple states like my own Virginia, which leans D, but currently has an R governor, and can swing from election to election.
A wide swath of the territory between the coasts and in the southeast is solid R, but significantly, two of the three biggest money states, located on the coasts – California ($4.1 trillion GDP) and New York ($2.3 trillion GDP) – are solid D.
They’re not connected by land, but as independent entities, they wield a lot of power and influence, because they pay the bills for the flyover states.
It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that, worst-case, California and New York could pull their tax dollars from the U.S. treasury – we’re talking, between those two blue states alone, roughly 25 percent of annual federal tax revenues.
Call it secession, call it what you will, but good luck paying paying the military, Trump/Musk, without the blue states continuing to foot the bill for your sea of impoverished red states.
And that’s not even accounting for the destruction of the U.S. and world economy that would accompany a second American civil war.
The billionaire class would, indeed, learn pretty quickly that the status of being a billionaire is as fleeting as a nice summer breeze – that you’re only a billionaire if the paper money that it’s counted on still has value, that you can’t still keep selling Teslas and Starlink internet and Apple and Google phones and having Amazon drivers drop off packages at suburban houses if the U.S. isn’t in the state of relative peace and security that we’ve enjoyed for generations.
Faith in greed
Greed, no doubt, is motivating Trump/Musk and their billionaire oligarch wannabe enablers to try to make the big grab that seems to be in the works now.
They assume, I think incorrectly, that they have a pliant public that will roll over and play dead, in the face of their effort to rewrite the way we live.
They actually think 49.5 percent in a presidential election and too-close-to-call majorities in Congress represents a mandate, which is a gross misread on their part.
They think they’re safe, even after two reported assassination attempts on Trump last summer, neither by anybody remotely ingenious, and after the Luigi Mangione takedown of a healthcare CEO, and again, that Luigi Mangione kid isn’t a .007 type.
Reality is, they’re only as safe as their security details decide they are, only as powerful as a couple of Republicans in the House and Senate decide they are, as a couple of judges who read the law as it is written decide they are.
I assume the oligarchs, drunk with perceived power in the here and now, will continue to push buttons to try to get more of what they think they want.
Until they get actual pushback – not Chuck Schumer chanting off-key at a press conference, but millions taking to the streets, and bringing the economy to its knees.
ICYMI
People who know anybody who is filthy rich will tell you that the thing they fear most is people realizing that their extreme wealth is nothing more than a house of cards.
Let’s hope, for all of our sakes, that it doesn’t get to a point where that fear, that their wealth will no longer be recognized, is replaced by the fear of their heads no longer being attached to their bodies.
I don’t think it gets anywhere near that far.
Trump caved on his tariffs on Canada and Mexico after they each agreed to do things they were already doing just so he could declare victory and go to the Super Bowl, and all they had to do was take Kentucky bourbon off the shelves and threaten to cancel Taco Tuesday.
We are going to be willing to do some things – take to the streets, organize a general strike – to get them to see that everything I wrote here is something that could happen, and to start to realize that it wouldn’t end well for them, so that, in the end, it ends well for all of us.
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Chris Graham
