Ezra Klein is Wrong: Trump and Musk are Enacting an Administrative Coup that Does Not Require our Approval to Succeed

He’s one of our shrewdest political observers, but his confidence in our ability to prevent Trump from capturing kingly powers is dangerously wrong.

It dropped in the New York Times - in print and video - on Day 13 of Trump 2.0 and went as viral as any political article of 2025. But Ezra Klein’s piece, “Don’t Believe Him,” was a conflation, a literary trick writers use to make an esoteric issue sound broadly applicable. When humanity’s most enduring democracy is being strangled to death is no time for conflation.

Klein’s message - to not believe or act as if Trump has the legitimate power to do the audacious things he does - is designed for those with civic power: members of Congress and judges. They can stall hearings, vote down bills, impose stays, and hand down injunctions. Telling us, the masses, not to believe Trump “can do” what he’s clearly doing, is dangerous. We urgently need the opposite advice, to act as if civic pushback might fail. Examining Klein’s thinking illuminates exactly this.

Klein asserts: Trump ignoring court orders “would be to attempt a kind of coup” that Trump/Musk do not “have the stomach for.” (And their “withdrawal of the OMB order suggests they do not.”)

Trump has already demonstrated he has the stomach for coups. In the lead-up to the Capitol riot, he went through a type of door-nudging drill of testing various methods to disrupt Biden’s election certification until one bred results: he suggested seizing voting machines; he urged Republican governors to submit alternate slates of electors; he sued states over their election processes, he strong-armed Governors to flip their state’s votes; he pressured his vice president to reject Biden’s electoral victory.

This is Trump’s nature. Whether with real estate, politics, or women, Trump will poke and prod to get what he wants, almost methodically, until he finds the soft tissue. Like a child trying to get to a cookie jar his mom has moved out of reach, he’ll climb the kitchen cabinets, pelt it with Legos, and finally climb in through a window.

Trump is enacting an administrative coup, one that works by moving chess pieces around on the inside, rather than swinging flagpoles and pepper spray from the outside. Ezra’s assumption that Trump is backing off is premature in the extreme. It assumes Trump's recent backpedaling from one route to power consolidation means he won’t try another, which history shows is anything but likely.

Trump rescinding his order to freeze federal spending was merely to defuse a level of pushback he is uncomfortable with, slamming the blinds shut to block too much sunlight on his naked self-indulgence. But he can eviscerate that pushback through administrative sabotage. This is exactly what Musk is doing for him.

Klein asserts: Trump having kingly powers “can only happen if we believe” he can.

Standing in the way of Trump’s kingly powers is not our attitude, but a handful of institutions designed to protect democratic principles. These include the media, Congress, government bureaucracy, and the courts. Trump and Musk are methodically sabotaging each one, emptying each of its ability to curb Trump’s rise to ultimate power.

Media

Twitter, now X, was where America’s educated elite learned about and shared perspectives on breaking political news. In 2021, the platform admitted to amplifying right-wing content over left-wing, an assertion a Penn study confirmed. Musk’s takeover in 2022 saw pro-Trump and pro-MAGA propaganda elevate to a level that spurred observers to label it “state media.” X is also influential in spreading content later shared on WhatsApp and Telegram and repackaged on Fox News.

A similar process is occurring on META platforms - Facebook and Instagram - whose CEO fired fact-checkers, donated to Trump’s inaugural fund, and took a prominent seat at Trump’s inauguration, near Washington Post CEO, Jeff Bezos. The LA Times, whose CEOs refused to endorse Kamala Harris, now features glowing stories of Trump allies.

US media, writ large, shoved its way right-ward and will continue so long as the CEOs who run almost all of Internet search and much of its cloud infrastructure publicly support Trump’s consolidation of power.

Congress

Klein asserts, “Trump is trying to govern like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president…A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks.”

This is wrong. A more powerful executive would get what he wants without wrangling with Congress at all. This is what Trump is working to do. Trump’s machinegun of executive orders bypasses Congress. He then strongarms the executive branch and threatens all others to make his proclamation a reality. This process makes Congress irrelevant. Article I of the Constitution is effectively null and void.

Congress’ signature capacity is the power of the purse, control over how government spends its revenues, including taxes. Trump has upended this configuration. In 2020, he couldn’t get money from Congress to fund a mobilization of troops to the Mexico border. But he found the soft tissue and wrangled almost $4 billion from the Pentagon budget to do it.

Without Congress, Trump has been able to withdraw the U.S. from the WHO, reclassify career federal employees as political appointees, grant security clearances to cronies without background checks, threaten two trade wars, and slap major tariffs on China, the biggest economy on earth. Trump has almost no need for Congress for money, as his right-hand man is the richest human on earth who now has access to sensitive government financial systems. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee correctly moved to subpoena Musk. Republicans blocked it.

The evisceration of the people’s representation in government means we now resemble most developing countries. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte launched a bloody campaign against “drug dealers” that killed thousands, including innocents. The Philippine Congress had numerous powers to check Duterte: legislation, reallocating funds, investigations, resolutions, and impeachment.

When Congress called officials to testify, Duterte forced them to consult him first. When there were House resolutions, they were watered down to avoid addressing human rights. When lawmakers spoke out, Duterte threatened to kill them. The Philippine “anarchy of families” meant many lawmakers owed their positions to Duterte and his clan. The result, a German research institute found, was that the Philippine House “does not effectively function when challenged by a determined President.

The U.S. has many more anti-executive stopgaps than the Philippines. But never has the U.S. seen a president show this level of irrepressible cunning and reckless abandon in tearing each of them down from the inside.

Government Bureaucracy

Most bureaucrats, of which I was one, fall under the executive branch, which the president leads. But bureaucrats have protections even a president can’t puncture. At least we did.

Elon Musk is trying to purge the federal workforce - including the CIA - of non-Trump-loyalists by offering buyouts. For those who don’t resign, he’s forced them to make difficult re-locations and threatened to lock them out of computer systems. None of this is legal. An administration cannot legally dismiss a federal employee without due process. But, for now, it can. Musk is daring anyone to stop him. The U.S. Congress, much like in the Philippines, is hamstrung to effectively push back. The only hope is the courts, a larger hurdle but one that Trump and Musk will eventually sidestep.

The Courts

For the courts to stop Trump/Musk’s federal lawbreaking, someone must sue them, win, and survive appeal. Then Trump/Musk must obey the ruling. Mandated fines will have less effect on Trump/Musk than anyone in history.

Trump’s nature, his entire essence, is working to prove that no one has any power over him. This is why he regularly appeared to fall asleep in court. If Trump was able to defang the Constitution’s most important article, why would he make an exception to obey a judicial ruling? He won’t. If he appears to obey, he will immediately attempt another method of getting what he wants, poking and prodding for our system’s soft tissue until he finds it.

The U.S. judicial system failed spectacularly to curb Trump after he raped E. Jean Carrol, committed election interference, stole classified documents, and launched a violent insurrection. With Musk in tow and the federal bureaucracy gutted, there is now almost no chance the courts will prove able to rein him in.

Klein asserts: “He (Trump) is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is doing that hoping perception then becomes reality. But that can only happen if we believe him.”

Trump will kick, slash, and claw his way to kingly powers whether we believe him or not. Klein’s note that “Trump’s political capital is thin” mistakes what type of political capital matters in this moment. Authoritarians do not need overwhelming support from their legislatures to consolidate power, just enough government muscle to prevent the opposition from getting in the way. Yes, some of Trump’s early moves appear ham-handed and incompetent. But Klein is wrong to assume this means Trump will never successfully beat back Congress and sidestep the courts to exert his will on the U.S. government.

Ezra Klein can decipher our political miasma like few can. His intellectual heft asserts itself in every essay and interview he produces. But the landscape on which he excels is changing so drastically, older experts are bound to flounder.

We are drifting toward territory only occupied by developing countries with whom we have little to no cultural connection. Anne Appelbaum just told The Bulwark podcast, “We’re now in the realm of illegality.” I spent one year in Cairo studying the Egyptian government where my readings left my jaw agape at how methodically Hosni Mubarak had gutted the oppositional husk from every institution, company, and organization. They were all crafted to serve the president, his family, and his military through an intricate web of incentives, bribes, and threats such that any internal pressure that emerged was squashed like a gnat.

Only two institutions stop leaders like these, the military and the people. This century, mass protests aided by military defections have brought down autocrats in Algeria, Bolivia, Egypt, Libya, South Africa, Sudan, Yemen, Zimbabwe, and most recently in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. These are foreign to American political instincts. We have never needed to dig for this tool.

But that is about to change. We need to greatly expand our resistance toolkit, and quickly, before Trump dismantles everything our 248-year experiment in multiracial democracy has built.