Green Shoots of Opposition to Coup
An "emergency town hall" in SB convenes Saturday, amid growing signs of national pushback to Trump's extra-legal assault on U.S. Constitution and rule of law
(Editor’s note update: Due to an arthritic thumb-induced typo, this morning’s Newsmakers newsletter contained an incorrect address for the Unitarian Society. It is 1535 Santa Barbara St. (not 535 Santa Barbara Street). Apologies to all for confusion and thanks to eagle-eyed reader Barbara Peters for catching the mistake).
Until now, Democrats, legacy news media and social justice advocates have been supine against a ferocious attack on the rule of law, civil rights and the Constitution undertaken by the vigilante government of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
This week however, political pushback arose, amid grassroots protests across the nation, as some Democrats in Congress finally bestirred themselves to act like an opposition party, despite their lack of institutional power in Washington.
In Santa Barbara, a loose-knit coalition of activists, including Indivisible SB, Democratic Women, the Immigrant Legal Defense Fund, Commit to Democracy, and “805 Immigrants Response Network,” will convene an “Emergency Town Hall”:
Saturday (Feb. 8), 1-3 p.m. at the Unitarian Society, 1535 Santa Barbara St.
The purpose of the meeting — expected to include frontline reports from Washington by Rep. Salud Carbajal and by state Senator Monique Limon and Assembly member Gregg Hart from Sacramento - is to “Stop the Coup” through actions that individuals and groups “can take now to save our Democracy,” according to organizers.
The town hall is open to the public, and also will be livestreamed via Zoom. The link is here and more details are available on Indivisible SB’s website.
“Unelected billionaires and unvetted right-wing activists should not have access to sensitive government data. Period,” Carbajal said this week, in response to Musk imposing a political reign of terror at multiple federal agencies while seizing access to the most sensitive private data of American citizens.
This from a South African right-winger who has not been elected to anything and consorts with foreign dictators, but is at once the federal government’s largest contractor, world’s richest person and Trump’s most lavish campaign contributor, all while controlling his own social media platform of 650 million monthly users.
“The brazen takeover of USAID this week will likely only be the beginning,” Carbajal added of Musk’s recent actions. “We know from the Project 2025 blueprint that the Department of Education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other vital programs will be in their crosshairs.”
Pushback begins. Saturday’s town hall in Saturday comes at a time as opposition to Trump’s action is perking up, after three months of lethargy following the election, and two weeks of essentially stunned silence in the face of his “move fast and break things” offensive to seize and consolidate power in the White House, ruling by fiat and executive order in violation of Constitutional strictures and checks and balances.
This week:
In more than a dozen states, thousands of demonstrators gathered on Wednesday for social media-organized rallies that protested Trump’s harsh policies on immigration, diversity and the rights of transgender people. “This was organized by people, for people, for the protection of all people,” the leader of a protest in Michigan told the New York Times. “There will be more actions. There will be more organizing. There will be more things for regular everyday Americans to plug into. This is just the beginning.”
In Washington, Democrats in the Senate used parliamentary maneuvering to slow - but not stop - the Republican majority’s rubber stamp of Trump appointees who are dangerous or thoroughly unqualified, or both, to Cabinet and other top Administration perches, while House Democrats took to the streets to raise their voices against his subjugation of Congress’s power of the purse, by dismantling federal agencies and trying to freeze congressionally-approved government spending. Even the normally head-down, go-along-to-get-along Carbajal has been triggered in recent days to speak out more consistently and forcefully.
In newsrooms around the country, some reporters and editors finally let go of traditional he-said, she-said formats that serve to normalize the extra-illegality of what Trump is doing, in favor of sharpened and precise language that describes more accurately the scope and stakes of what is happening - even as CBS became the latest in a series of legacy media organizations to bend the knee to him, in violation of the values, ethics and practices of accountability journalism.
From Phillip Bump of the Washington Post:
Trump has worked deliberately and effectively to transform the presidency from being one-third of a governmental triumvirate into something more like what his ideological allies Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban enjoy. He has been aided by remarkable capitulation from the purportedly equal branches.
As he and his team — most notably Elon Musk — run roughshod over legal and ethical boundaries, it’s been hard not to notice how unprepared the system is for an internal threat. One would in fact be justified in assuming that Trump’s failures to comply with the law might trigger no repercussions whatsoever, just as they didn’t during his first term in office and largely didn’t during his interregnum.
As Timothy Snyder, a Yale University history professor who has studied and written widely on authoritarian movements, while warning of the dangers of Trumpism, put it in a Substack post headlined, “Of Course It’s a Coup”:
That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed….
The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.
Each hour this goes unrecognized makes the success of the coup more likely.
Image: Anti-Trumpism rally in Washington on Feb. 5 (USA Today photo).