Waiting for the Coup

Good morning sports fans! It's a great day for us sports lovers, at least if you're a total sicko like me and your preferred sport is line-go-down. Because, thanks to Trump's tariffs, the markets are absolutely on fire. For just one example: Bloomberg is tracking a live statistic of "history's worst three-day market drops" and Trump's Liberation Day is hovering between 11th and 10th place all time.

But this rout has been thoroughly global. Not a single major global market closed less than 4% down. The Hang Seng closed down 13.22%, one tragic digit away from the ACAB number. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all hit "circuit breakers" on Monday, with Japan's TOPIX hitting one before markets even opened on Sunday night, a futures-market circuit breaker I made a joke about on Wednesday because I wasn't sure such a thing actually existed: again, I'm a fan, just in it for the love of the game.

As someone without investments, either financial or ideological, in the stock market, I like to watch the capitalists taking Ls. While they panic they have a rare tendency to be honest, and the rest of us rabble get to express our class hatred and enjoy a healthy dose of schadenfreude.

But I want to be clear, my libidinal enjoyment watching them scramble does not mean I'm confused about who pays for the actual collapse of the economy. We always pay. We pay for their good times and we REALLY pay for their bad times. The last fifty years of privatization and austerity has pushed more and more of consumer wealth into the market, via 401ks and 529 college savings, through municipal and state budgets, pension funds and infrastructure investment deals, meaning that real people are losing real money. But more crucially, the tariffs that are pummeling the markets are going to lead to bankruptcies, lay-offs, price rises, and spiraling economic chaos, and we, as ever, are the expenses that the capitalists shed first when they can't pay their bills. Elder Millennials have spent our entire adult lives "recovering" from one once-in-a-generation economic crisis after another.

But this one is also different. The COVID crisis was understood as an exogenous event, no matter that it was produced by capitalist market conditions, deepened by borders and IP policy, accelerated by labor and product circulation demands. And while the dot-com bubble and the great financial crisis were clearly attributable to bankers, traders and the tech gamblers who inflated then popped those bubbles, the government was able to ride in and restabilize the system. We may have chanted that "banks got bailed out we got sold out" against Obama, and many argued the bailouts just kicked the can down the road, but the liberals could at least make a case that they stabilized things and that, therefore, the global system works as advertised.

But this crisis has been firmly, obviously and extremely loudly caused by the global far right power grab and its favorite patriarch, Donald Trump.

Despite how loudly they protest this week, the capitalists and the media all got in line behind him, everyone talked on Trump being good for business, and Trump voters genuinely believed that the creeping recessionary trends building under Biden were going to be stomped out by the golden boot.

Instead, King Leer did exactly what he said he was going to do, and the capitalists are shocked, shocked that he would actually pursue the econocidal policies he talked about every single day on the campaign trail. They were sure he was just joking about all that, and that really, with their billions behind him and their presence at his side, he was actually going to pursue an enlightened policy of simply crushing labor and cutting taxes. Not masters of the universe, they proved themselves just another bunch of red-hatted rubes, duped for tens of millions of dollars where the voters who believed Trump would be better for their wallets lost only a vote.

What the current crisis can't help but reveal, with every passing moment, is that for all the talk of rules, laws, international order and wisdom of the market, those things are just that: Talk, niceties draped over a system which, in the final analysis, relies on nothing other than exploitation, power and violence. These captains of industry didn't have a plan, they didn't know something we didn't: the emperor hasn't worn clothes in a decade, but the most powerful people on earth just can't stop praising his couture. They went all in on MAGA, AI and Musk, and it's all falling apart too fast for them to gain any real political distance from the catastrophe.

But there is one way they could reclaim the narrative, and this weekend a lot of people on bluesky were talking about it. Jokes about the film Michael Clayton and the Business Plot abounded: in short, everyone is loudly wondering whether a coup could be coming, whether Trump might get offed.

I also did some of this joking, to be clear, so I want to be clear I include myself when I offer that imagining a coup coming in to protect the economy is structured around a positive fantasy about the system. Namely, that fantasy is that the system is more orderly, controlled, and rule-based than it actually is. "Surely the capitalists won't let this stand!" We can see the same kind of fantasizing that the system is more solid, transcendent or self-enforcing when people argue that capitalists want this current collapse somehow, pointing to the existence of short-sellers and people hedged and making money as evidence that, as a class, they are intentionally creating the crash through some kind of elaborate strategy.

These claims imagine that capital, its markets and society are made up of something more than just relations between people, that there is more than arbitrary contests of class power, politics and personality at play. This is the left wing version of belief in an innately intelligent market or an invisible hand at the wheel. And I'm sympathetic, as far as that goes: it is quite upsetting that our entire lives are spent working, paying bills and rent to and generally suffering for people this gullible, ignorant, chaotic and confused. It is comforting to believe they must actually be smarter somehow, that they have a plan.

To be absolutely clear, when I say that's a "positive fantasy" I don't mean that the people joking about it necessarily want a military coup, or believe that martial law would be preferable: I imagine only blue-anon types are genuinely excited by the prospect. But such a coup would be reassuring, in that it confirms a certain pre-conceived notion of how power and order actually operate. And furthermore, fantasy or not, I would definitely bet that there are at least a half dozen active plots with more or less realistic possibilities floating around the administration's near orbit in DC right now.

Indeed, I've been talking and writing about this exact scenario since the beginning of February as a worst-case outcome of the Trump administration's economic policies, and I think in the next few weeks we face the most extreme and acute danger from this threat. This is the moment that the capitalist class is genuinely, publicly turning against Trump as one, this is the moment they have the most rage and frustration and could most easily be drawn into such a plan.

Such a coup would likely involve Trump and Musk offed – if it's particularly slick job they will die via plausibly deniable accident, although nothing about these people screams slick – and perhaps see a President Vance installed, joined in an emergency "unity" government with a Democrat like Newsom or Fetterman as VP. And I think that coup would be extremely disastrous, the worst possible outcome at this exact moment, April 7, 2025.

The reason such a coup is a threat right now is not because Vance is "more dangerous" than Trump in some sort of objective, personality driven way. This is all speculation and guess work, but in the next few weeks the threat is especially intense because I think such a coup could see widespread popularity among liberals and capitalists, which might unify them in repression and demobilize the current protest movements.

Furthermore, the sheer public joy and relief that we would feel, the dancing in the street that will occur with news of Musk and/or Trump's demise, could be a serious agitant and provocation to the MAGAites who are currently extremely demoralized. Trump is in the process of ripping his base to shreds, threatening 401ks and social security, devastating small businesses (particularly car dealerships) and military job stability. Republican town halls are full of furious three-time Trump voters stunned by what Making America Great Again actually looks like.

Still, many of the more brutal material effects of his policies haven't yet been directly felt, and millions of those folks remain entranced in the fully fantastical media ecosystem built to keep their wallets open and their brains nice and smooth. Though Trump-till-death personality-cult types make up a not insubstantial percentage of his base, they are still a minority of his voters, and the people among them ready to actually fight a significant minority again. Every day that Trump and Musk have governed so far the cult loses people. As the damage begins to truly take hold, his base's deterioration will accelerate. Those people aren't going to stop being racists or anything, they're just gonna stop wanting to fight for this particular avatar of white mediocrity.

A cabal of capitalists offing the man before those effects are felt might make him a martyr, whipping up the right into frenzied conspiracies that, if only he had lived, his policies would have in fact proven prophetic and effective, that he was actually finally defeating the globalists and that's why they offed him.

A Silicon Valley coup in the next two weeks or so seem likely to demobilize us and inflame and organize the right, leading closer to a really dangerous and terrifying total fascism and/or right wing instigated civil war. But maybe it wouldn't! It could just as easily be the final blow to the MAGA movement and get everyone into the streets together against a military dictatorship, or just continue things moving along the current path of collapse, war and revolution. All of this is guess work, conjecture, best prediction I can make based on the current balance of forces.

But I do think that the greatest dangers we face at the moment are pacification of our popular forces or remobilization of the right's.

Never interrupt an enemy when he's making a mistake. Trump is currently squandering the best chance for a stable federal fascist power that has existed since the Civil War*, but he is hardly alone in wanting one. There are dozens of people all around him, among his cabinet and his funders, his administration offices and his campaign apparatuses, his corporations, family and other assorted lackeys, people just as eager to pursue that fascist world who are probably beginning to believe the Donald is a liability to those plans. That is not special to Trump, that is always the way with dictators, monarchs and CEOs. His movement is built on extreme hierarchy, authority and internal competition, which breeds resentment, humiliation, jealousy, greed and hatred.

Still, I'm much less scared now than I was on January 19th. Not because we aren't in the midst of a fascist coup, not because we aren't on the path to the camps: we are. Things are really fucking bad. But they were going to be really fucking bad as soon as Trump won the election.

The Democrats handed them fascism on a silver platter. Biden lifted our economy out of the most recent once-in-a-century financial crisis, the COVID crash, through eugenics, ableism and fascist necropolitics.

Biden's team saw the economic writing on the wall in 2021. He had meetings with union leaders to say that we were a few weeks away from total supply chain collapse: what would it take to get the workers back on the job? Back to Work, "back to normal" involved consciously sacrificing tens of millions of COVID dead and disabled to the great god Economy, and they spent the next three years gaslighting us about first one then two genocides. And Back to Normal was two counterrevolutionary birds with one stone, as it allowed employers to crush the rising wages and increasing worker power built through the Great Resignation, which was itself a social movement that arose from the George Floyd rebellion.

While the Palestine solidarity and encampment movements were large and inspiring, they also did not generalize far beyond activist and student circles. Civil society institutions, from universities and hospitals to banks and churches, were extremely happy to participate in COVID denialism, trans panic and Zionist extermination. In the electoral campaign, the Dems chose genocide over democracy again, continuing to support Netanyahu unconditionally which almost certainly cost them the election. And despite calling Trump a fascist – which the last three months have proven absolutely correct and true – Dems voted for his nominees, procedurally smoothed the way for his policies, and handed him power through extremely normalized transition procedures indicating that they, at the very least, didn't think fascism was actually a threat.

So you had a society acclimated to fascistic, eugenic public health policy – healthcare and COVID barely even came up in the campaign – a society where the entire political class supported a live-streamed genocide, where Democrat-led extremely violent attacks on groups of students sitting in tents mirrored Democrat-led extremely violent attacks on unhoused folks in their own tent encampments, where everyone was willing to sacrifice trans people as a scapegoat of political expediency, everyone was ready to admit that DEI had "gone a little too far", and the "opposition" insisted the fascist had legitimately won the election and so deserved our respect and support.

The business class publicly celebrated: the stock market skyrocketed, with reports of "giddy" business leaders who couldn't wait for the Trump admin's deregulation and tax cutting. They had won the class war once and for all, and all Trump had to do was not fuck it up.

Womp womp.

So yes, fascism is here. The global far right power grab is ascendant, triumphant. But their hero has, in a few short months, demonstrated the absolute poverty of their "solutions" to the current crises. Political capital amassed through decades of work and billions of dollars spent dashed on the rocks of three months of a single sundowning landlord's pet theories of economy and power.

The genocides continue and accelerate as empire rips apart social safety nets, scientific archives, international treaties, established law, all soft power and whatever miniscule moral claims they still held. While Netanyahu starves and bombs Gazans again to clear the strip for luxury developments, Rubio sends refugees to a "torture prison" in El Salvador, RFK halts cancer research and lays out the red carpet for pandemics to come, and Musk and the DOGE boys destroy centuries of accumulated knowledge and wisdom without even knowing what it is they're deleting, the liberal world order burns. And for what? For the egos and bank accounts of a few thousand of the worst people who have ever lived.

No system vulnerable to such disaster should have ever been built. This empire has been rotten from its very first moments more than five hundred years ago. Now the men who look to burn it down around them start by attacking what few laudatory accomplishments it has to offer, the knowledge produced despite and often against the extremely violent and extractive processes of capitalist medicine, culture, science and knowledge production. They want to burn the libraries because they want to destroy all evidence of their own ignorance, their own cruelty and malice.

And it is these men, not the library, that are the perfect outcome of the system. If the library was what the system was designed for, the library would be protected from their pathetic tantrums. But it goes up in flames all the same. The system is working just fine. Crises, wars, apocalypses, imperial collapse: these are crucial creative events in the history of global capitalism. As one cycle comes to its end, another blooms in its shadow. War destroys industries to be profitably rebuilt and wipes out populations of workers to be profitably restocked, colonialism eliminates knowledge to be profitably "rediscovered" and perpetuates disease to be profitably struggled against. The fact that capitalism occasionally consumes its own favored children is no more a sign that it is broken than when it rewards them with riches beyond imagination.

This crisis will be no different from any other unless we make it so. But we are uniquely positioned to do that. After fifteen years of escalating global struggle, we face an extremely unpopular team of billionaires who have so consistently made so many strategic errors that it seems almost purposeful. But they are, in fact, just that bad at this.

The next years are going to be desperately difficult. We will need to protect one another from evictions and deportations, we will need to empty the jails and transport each other state to state, will we need to figure out how to feed one another, to make our own medicines and build our own safety in the shell of a burning world. But it was always going to come down to that. Our enemies have made their big play: they swung the bat as hard as they could and landed a direct hit to their own junk. We can't let them recover and take another swing.

*I say "Federal" explicitly because states under Jim Crow, Reservations and the massive state-within-a-state that is the prison industrial complex represent already existing local fascisms that have been the structural basis of American liberalism.