Elon Musk, the American Trotsky

I never imagined that I would see a real revolution, at least not in the West. Sure, when I was a student, I fantasized, along with a number of my Edinburgh University lecturers, about a socialist revolution in the UK. Expropriate the expropriators! Ban the bosses! Nationalize everything and abolish money. But, of course, nothing so dramatic ever happens in mature liberal democracies. Except that it just has.

Okay, the Trump takeover of the US government is hardly a communist revolution, and Elon Musk is not immediately obvious as a reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, but what is happening right now is revolutionary — just not quite in the way my student self would have wished. 

The seizure of the administrative arm of the US state, the freezing of departmental budgets, the firing of senior staff, the crash audits, the court actions against dissenting state leaderships and the threatened impeachment of dissenting federal judges… all this is unprecedented in US history. Yet this “dictatorship on day one” was exactly what was promised by Donald Trump himself, before he was elected — though few believed him. The media and political classes have been one step behind ever since.

Musk’s effective seizure of the $6.8 trillion federal spending budget is clearly a coup, albeit not a military one. Nothing so analogue as guns and bombs is necessary if you are the world’s richest man and command the expertise of Silicon Valley. Anyway, he can always say that 77 million Americans voted for this brutal shake down. Musk’s vehicle for seizing the commanding heights of the US state, DoGE, has a divertingly jokey name, which again led many to fail to take it seriously — until it was too late. 

DoGE is, in reality, the United States Digital Service, USDS, a federal body established by Barack Obama in 2014 to modernize government IT systems. Donald Trump took it over by Executive Order and renamed it the United States DoGE Service, keeping the acronym. Because of its origins, it has the power to scrutinize all federal agencies’ IT systems.

This is how Musk was able to mount his lightning audits of government agencies — though he has been facing furious pushback from state lawyers challenging his right to use any of the intelligence gathered through access to digital databases. This was as audacious a move as any perpetrated by communist coup in history. A vanguard of AI-enabled nerds, backed by lawyers and overseen by the most successful and experienced businessman in the world. 

Bolsheviks, Maoists, Castroites knowing nothing of business and finance, apart from Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, usually ended up crashing the economy and handing what was left of it to their cronies or apparatchiks. Communists were really skillful at only one thing: totalitarian dictatorship and creating police states. Trump is not a fascist or a totalitarian. He is a unique phenomenon in Western politics: a libertarian-nationalist demagogue. The president is a kind of capitalist Joseph Stalin crossed with Argentina’s Javier Milei. 

And come to think of it, perhaps, Elon Musk could be seen as a techno-libertarian version of Leon Trotsky. The founder of the Red Army was always too intelligent for the Bolsheviks and was eventually murdered by Stalin. He’ll have to be careful not to end up the same way if he appears to eclipse his boss. But Musk’s ownership of the biggest social media news site on the planet, X, gives him a propaganda machine the Bolsheviks could never have dreamed of. He has used it ruthlessly since he took it over from Twitter in 2022. It’s almost as if he thought this great Trump revolution was going to happen two years before it did. Perhaps he did.

He has shamelessly used X to promote his “love” for Trump and troll his enemies. He has also exploited X’s facility for spreading falsehoods and rumors. He surely knows that, for example, that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts (or Pocahontas as Trump calls her) is worth not $80 million, fraudulently acquired, but less than $8 million. Yet he has pilloried her and other senators relentlessly, nevertheless. Similarly, the $9 million that he revealed had been given to the news agency Reuters for “large-scale social deception” was not an exercise in domestic brainwashing but a program of the defense research agency DARPA to combat Chinese and Russian weaponization of social media. As a leading defense contractor himself, not least through SpaceX, Musk knows this perfectly well. But he knows how it plays on X. 

DoGE’s exposure of egregious bureaucratic inefficiencies, many of which were already public knowledge — such as the pension records of state employees stored on paper in a limestone mine, or the $56 million to house illegal immigrants in posh New York hotels — told MAGA supporters exactly what they wanted to hear. It convinced them that Trump was finally “draining the swamp” and dismantling the “deep state.”

The real scandal is that hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars are indeed wasted every year by the US government, and that this has been known about for decades. Only last year the Government Audit Office under Joe Biden reported that “$233 billion to $522 billion” was being lost to fraud annually. Trump and Musk were determined to do something about this. They needed to popularize, weaponize, the stats and feed it into the X machine.

So, Musk first dispatched his teen and twenty-something revolutionary guards to upturn the weakest and least loved bureaucracy (by most lower-class Americans): the United States Agency for International Development. He knew that some of the most ludicrous examples of “woke” waste would be found there. And he wasn’t wrong. Millions were spent on programs that middle America was bound to see as an inappropriate use of their tax dollars: $6 million for sex changes in Guatemala, $15 million to teach journalists in Sri Lanka about non-binary language, $20 million to set up a Sesame Street show in Iraq, $2.5 million for diversity and inclusion in Serbia. The list goes on and on.

The Washington press corps kept trying to debunk and deny these expenditures, some of which were only part-financed by USAID the rest coming from other agencies. But the more they demanded “hard evidence” of waste and fraud, the more the Barbie-like White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was able to reel off lists of them.

This was propaganda for the digital age. The more Democrat politicians objected to DoGE’s unlawful “invasion of privacy” the more Musk was able to attack them as defenders of corruption and waste — and set the pitchfork-waving populists on X against them. It isn’t pretty, but it is highly effective.

It is not clear how long DoGE will be able to go on effectively breaking the rules, if not breaking the law. But in a sense, it doesn’t matter. The federal bureaucracy has been indelibly tainted by his accusations of widespread fraud (which are as yet unproven), gross inefficiency (which has been established beyond reasonable doubt), and a predilection for promoting progressive ideology (which it doesn’t even deny).

Something very odd happened to America during what has been called the “Great Awokening” of the 2010s. Call it a “woke mind virus” or just a quasi-religious intellectual craze, but the state, media and academia became preoccupied with race-obsessed DEI initiatives, “white privilege” ideology and 2SLGBTQIA+ ideas that many white, middle-class Americans find repugnant.

The techno-libertarian revolution we are witnessing is a reaction against all that. And there will be four more years of it. Every revolution brings chaos. At one point this week Musk said, jokingly, that he was “turning the government off and on again” like a computer to make it work properly. Government isn’t a laptop and it’s not clear what will finally emerge from Donald Trump’s hard reboot of America. But politics will never be the same again.