Fridays in Trumpland: 2.6.2025
Elon’s Mojo Dojo Casa House Coup, or By Any Means Necessary
This week, we got introduced to Elon Musk and what I have come to refer to as his Nazi Youth Brigade– the far-right-movement-aligned young men who, at his behest, are ravaging our government’s data stores with no concern for the illegality of what they’re doing, for the amorality of it, or for the future.
It’s a strange thing to watch a man so insecure as Elon Musk, so fragile and malignantly upset about having a trans daughter, so fragile and malignantly upset about his perceived mistreatment as a white South African, so irrationally irritated by rules and regulations actually applying to him and his companies, that he has essentially wormed his way into a shadow presidency as a means of carrying out vendettas.
As the writer and researcher Anna Gifty noted yesterday morning, it’s as if Elon is carrying out “Evil Fantasy Barbie House,” where, as one man, he is running roughshod over everyone and everything just to feel something.
Elon Musk has twelve children (that we know about). He is the richest man on earth. And yet, he feels so weak, so lost, so abandoned and so broken that he decided to make our government his own mojo dojo casa house, complete with a posse of boys that serve him and do his bidding ( (including one notably nicknamed, in classic mojo dojo casa house fashion, Big Balls), no matter how illegal that bidding might be.
It would be utterly pathetic, if it wasn’t so damn dangerous.
And when folks woke up this week to what was happening– when protests erupted outside the Treasury building and Congresspeople tried to gain access only to be denied and other Congresspeople barged into the office of the Speaker of the House to demand answers– what emerged from Elon’s mojo dojo casa house was, unsurprisingly, gaslighting and excuses.
The day after a ferocious mobilization in front of the Treasury building chanted “lock him up!” at the mention of Elon’s name, a letter from one of Trump’s Treasury officials arrived at Congress, claiming Elon Musk’s Nazi Youth Brigade was just working on “operational efficiency.”
Not to worry, they seemed to say– as if we all couldn’t see what was happening minute by minute, as if it wasn’t obvious that the Nazi Youth Brigade had invaded everything, stolen social security numbers and addresses and emails and taken control of trillions of federal payouts, as if the reporting, terrifying as it was, was nothing to see here, move along.
Nothing to see here, move along, as reports emerged of government officials trying to keep the Nazi Youth Brigade out of SCIFs, and being threatened with calls to US Marshalls.
Nothing to see here, move along, as we learned they had threatened David Lebryk, the Acting Secretary of the Treasury, with prosecution for telling Elon’s minions that what they were trying to do was illegal.
Nothing to see here, move along, as they raided USAID and shuttered the agency itself, and as thirty-plus lawsuits were filed against the federal government to try to stop the largest data breach in history and the freezing of funds and the demands that federal employees fire themselves for nothing.
Yes, we end this week with numerous temporary restraining orders. Yes, the courts and our elected officials and the people are fighting back.
But let’s make no mistake about it, shall we?
What we’re living through is a coup.
And notably, that coup is being carried out by someone who none of us elected, by someone who is stamped with the approval of a declining, weak, mentally incompetent president (who in his spare time is trying to colonize the Gaza Strip and commit crimes against humanity), by someone who is so afraid of being disliked that he may burn our entire government to the ground rather than go to therapy.
He is determined to play out his petty, pathetic pathology on the American people, by any means necessary.
It’s last gasp days for white supremacist patriarchy, and what a mascot they have chosen, eh?
Liars lie, but malignant narcissists lie more than most. And on that front, I have been thinking this week about how there’s only ever room for one malignant narcissist at the top.
Autocracies can’t run with two crazy strongmen.
Someone’s going to have to go.
And the reality here is that there’s only one man in this equation who has real power, and it’s not the man currently invading the Treasury.
Eventually, Elon will become too much of a weight around Trump’s ankles for him to stand.
The only question that remains is how long it takes for Trump to saw off the rope.
This week, I had a vivid and very intense dream– one of those ones where as you come out of it, you have to recenter yourself to time and space, and remember where you actually are.
It concerned someone I was in a relationship with in my twenties– an older man who lied and cheated and violently abused his way all around my life, and always had fantastical excuses to explain away his behavior.
Until this dream, I hadn’t thought about him for more than a single second in literally years.
And yet, in the dream, I found myself saying to him, “Did you honestly think I was that stupid? That I didn’t know all those times you f*cked around? That I fell for that ridiculous lie you told when I caught you cheating and the way you faked a fainting spell to stop talking about it? Did you really think I believed you? You thought you could play me like that? And then take your rage and shame out on me, like it was my fault?”
And as I shouted all of this at him in the dream, I was walking around his apartment, gathering up all my stuff, at long last– the books I left there when I walked out, the clothes and the mementos I just abandoned because I couldn’t be in his presence for another minute, all these markers of who I was and how I got there that I just left behind, for the sake of my own survival, because I realized that my survival mattered more than anything else.
I woke up thinking about what it takes to know you’re done— about the moment when you realize that you have no choice any longer, when you realize that they really do think you’re that stupid, when nothing to see here, move along, becomes your own wait a minute, stop— when you know, all at once, that you will do what you have to do to get out, by any means necessary.
Years later, a woman twenty years older than me told me that there is a moment like that in the life of every woman who has ever known an abuser– a moment where you suddenly see things clearly, and there is no going back.
Once your eyes are opened to the truth, you can’t unsee it.
This week, I walked past an old white board in my office, relegated to a box, on which I had post-it noted a reminder to myself at a very dark time, years ago.
It reads, in stark black sharpie: “BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.”
At the time I wrote it, things were dire in my own life. I was afraid for my survival, and the survival of my children, and whether we would ever be ok.
I knew when I wrote it that I was pulling it out of the depths of my academic study— out of the original use of it by Jean-Paul Sartre in his play Dirty Hands, out of the speech by anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon at the Positive Change Conference in Ghana in 1960, out of the lexicon of Malcolm X as it became a rallying cry for Black liberation.
I knew that I was calling on history to shore me up and remind me of something critical: that there was a better future yet to come that I could not predict, and a means of survival that I could not yet envision, but that by sheer force of will, I could bring to pass.
I wonder what it will take for America to fully open its eyes to the coup that’s underway, to the point that we can’t unsee it.
I wonder what it will take for this nation to choose to begin to believe in a better future yet unseen, and a means of survival not yet fully known, and move toward that.
Truth be told, I find myself longing for the moment when we see it all clearly– when the root of how we got here is undeniable and when we refuse, for one more minute, to live within a system that hates us all.
I long for the moment when we decide to leave behind all that no longer serves us and decide that our collective survival matters more than anything else.
I long for the moment that we know that we are done with all this rage and all this hate, and when our refusal to continue to allow it, and to claim instead liberation and peace and dignity for all, roots down and rides up on the words and the sheer force of will of all those who know that the time for freedom has arrived.
May it be so. May it be so. By any, peaceful, means necessary.
Elizabeth. Not only are you a brilliant attorney and activist and a talking off the ledge ist, but you are a terrific and deeply insightful writer.
In this article you managed to both expose the true nature of Elon and point the way out of this mess. We are more powerful than we know. And when we realize that and take action based on another vision of who we are…the world will reflect it.
Thank you!!!
I look forward to your weekly newsletter and this one hit home on so many levels. You are a wonderful and deeply thoughtful writer. I too have had my moments in life where everything can no longer be unseen and I step out the door leaving most of my belonging behind.
Before my meditation time this morning, I read an excerpt from “Peace is Every Step” by Thich Nhat Hanh. The chapter is “Hope as an Obstacle”. It said:
“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. …we can realize peace now in the present moment with our look, our smile, our words, our actions. Peace work is not a means. Each step we make should be peace.”
Thank you Elizabeth!