At the head of the Trump administration, tycoon Elon Musk leads a so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that is the battering ram of the MAGA movement to dismantle the counter-powers that bother them. Trump and Musk's aim is to turn their simultaneous majority in Congress and the Supreme Court into an absolute power that they can exercise without restraint or control. This week, the resentful president has expanded Musk's powers and free hand to do and undo as he pleases through – like almost everything Trump does – a government order. Trump signed it on Tuesday –how you can read Antònia Crespí Ferrer's chronicle in this newspaper– in the Oval Office, repeating his daily ritual of signing off on his signatures, which he then displays in front of the cameras, as if they were trophies, and he did so in the presence of Musk himself and his four-year-old son, who he carried on his shoulders, along with one of the inevitable and hideous caps he usually wears. Musk forced the purchase of Twitter, many mocked, thinking it was the whim or eccentricity of a wealthy billionaire: now everyone can see that it was a strategic maneuver.)
Elon Musk's DOGE is mainly engaged in carrying out a purge among federal workers (the "bureaucrats", as he calls them), accusing them of corruption, embezzlement and massive waste of public resources. Musk has not provided a single piece of evidence of all this, beyond a defamatory verbiage that he spreads mainly with his own statements and with intense propaganda activity on the X network, from where it then jumps in the form of "news" to the media aligned with the Republicans around the world. The global right has perfectly understood the move and closes ranks (political, media, business, financial) around the new order promised and represented by the magnates who have landed in the White House, with the caps, the children, the signatures and everything else that suits them. If Musk says that the public service is full of corrupt bureaucrats who must be expelled, it is reproduced as is and that's it.
The same goes for the judges and prosecutors who denounce the illegality of many of Musk's and his DOGE's actions: these judges and prosecutors, according to the Tesla car manufacturer and his good friend Donald, are also corrupt and sellouts, and must be purged. The summary of this is a deep discrediting of institutions, instigated from the top of the American political and institutional system. With this, Trump and Musk offer their followers around the world another guideline to follow, which was already characteristic of the fascisms of the last century: if democracy bothers you, defame it, degrade it and finally, when no one cares anymore, destroy it. Most people, they think, will not notice much of a difference. It would be terrifying to have to think that they might not be completely off the mark.
