What happens when Trump (and Musk) ignore the courts? - SCOTUS is supplicant to Trump so if a case gets that far Trump is likely to prevail, or they will simply ignore the courts which will , in any case, be so tied up with the sheer volume of illegality that they cannot function (which is why one of the lines of attack is to fire as many government employees as possible).
I honestly think most people do not appreciate the scale of Musks’s insurrection.
One of two things I reckon;
Hopefully my OH and all the other sensible Americans living here in France will be fast-tracked for political asylum.
I can’t see there being a military coup. I could see civil war - and perhaps that is what Trump wants so he can declare martial law and not hold the mid terms - thinking especially of his recent outburst against Zelensky and the adage “accuse you enemy of that which you are guilty (or planning)”.
However the groups most likely to start a civil war in the US are generally right leaning and will be cheering Musk and Trump for “draining the swamp” even as the pair of them destroy American (and possibly Western) democracy for the next 100 years for their own benefit and profit.
Looks like the military coup has been avoided via the Friday night massacre at the Pentagon, no doubt to install loyalists and lackeys who would order shoot to kill .
Those of us that are here now (legally) shouldn’t need this and we wouldn’t be getting it from Le Pen.
Not least because Trump (well, his tame Defence secretary Hegseth) has just sacked the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force and will presumably be replacing them with loyal Trumpists.
Yes he’s nominated a retired Air Force Lieutenant-General to be the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs - apparently because Trump met him in Iraq and he “looked like something out of Central Casting”.
FFS.
Also this movie-star general is not senior enough to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs so will need a “presidential waiver” to take up the appointment. Which of course will be forthcoming, but it’s yet another case of Trump firing competent and appropriate people and putting loyalist monkeys in their place.
Hopefully he will also fire the White House doctors and replace them with some junior interns who will inject him with bleach.
He has always been very concerned with peoples’ appearances. Like that has anything to do with competency?
Not least their skin colour, despite seeming fairly casual about his own…
Agreed.
Two videos and an article that may be of interest. The 2nd and 3rd feature the same historian who explains the three strains of politics that have converged and are influencing what is unfolding in Washington … who they are and what they want, etc.
Historian Quinn Slobodian on Trump, Musk & the Movement to “Shatter” the State
The New York Time Review article by Quinn Slobodian - Speed Up the Breakdown: The future of the government depends on how far the DOGE dynamo spins.
I’ve opened those pages to your links Bee, and will watch them. But the problem IMO is that most people are too busy scraping a living and or minding their kiddies and or their elderly relatives to understand what’s going on.
I am a member of an American truck drivers’ forum and they have very strict rules about politics, restricting anything to do with it to a special section. As a result I have never in my year there heard even the word Trump mentioned.
But they do stray a little close to the line sometimes especially at the joking expense of the Canadian members.
A recent exchange went something like this:
to a native of Canuckistan (their name for it not mine) one said;
There’ll be none of that when you are state numbers 51 to 58
reply;
Is that after Washington, Oregon and California are the 11th, 12th and 13th Provinces?
Spardo;
Err I heard that Denmark wanted to buy California.
reply;
Yes, but they only want San Francisco Bay really, they are going to rename it the Greenland Warm Water Port.
If nothing else it shows a healthy disregard for their orange leader’s pronouncements I thought. 
I really, really hope so. Because despite the fact we are chatting on this happy go lucky forum, this is big, big shit. I spent twenty years as an executive of a major US tech firm, so I am not and have never been anti US, indeed the opposite. But this is a coup and very frightening.
Greed.
@John_Scully I’m not sleeping well right now
Another master stroke 
Welcome to dystopia.
The worse, the better…
Strangely, I’m beginning to wonder whether the current chaos may, in the long term, be “a good thing”. I’m all for Trump appointing crazy, egotistical, inappropriate people to senior positions at a federal level so that they begin to tear each other apart. I can’t help feeling that the individual states will manage their own affairs quite well and the more the federal government is out of things the better.
Also, am I wrong to be optimistic that the less the US meddles in the rest of the world the better? Let them be isolationist. Then maybe too the rest of the world will have to grow up and find its own solutions.
So if that feels uncomfortable for the Americans on here who are hating seeing what’s happening to their country (just as I hated seeing what Boris was doing in the UK), I’m sorry for you on an individual level. But I remain to be convinced this is all bad, and this too shall pass.