MAGA Feeding Frenzy Has Caused a Constitutional Crisis

The assault is coming from different angles: Project 2025. The feudal tech barons. The America First nativists. It’s not a single master plan – it’s comprehensive chaos

iStock / Credit: Douglas Rissing

We are in the midst of a full-on assault on constitutional government. “Crisis” may just be the most overused term in the public discourse. But this is it: A crisis – for democracy, for the constitutional order.

Things are moving so fast. Over the weekend, Elon Musk, without even the pretense of constitutional authority, seized control of the federal government’s nervous system, of its centralized information and financial network. He installed his own crew across the government in some kind of fake advisory capacity – most of them young men in their late teens or early twenties, a goon squad of Musk disciples.

These Musk goons are currently occupying several federal agencies and departments – quite literally so in the case of the Office of Personnel Management, basically the federal government’s HR department, and the Treasury, where they moved in with sofa beds and mattresses. They locked federal employees out of their computers. And they seem to be in charge of the Treasury department’s payment system, which controls the flow of about $6 trillion annually – including payments to government contractors, salaries for federal workers, Social Security and Medicaid, and on and on and on.

Acquiring access to these agencies’ computer systems constitutes an unprecedented and utterly illegal breach of data security. Highly sensitive data and the financial infrastructure of the federal government is now in the hands of Elon Musk. Core governmental functions are now depending on the whims of this unelected, unvetted billionaire who hasn’t been appointed for any actual government position, let alone confirmed by the Senate. Musk has already boasted on X-Twitter about how he will single-handedly stop payments he deems illegitimate and disrupt the flow of money.

While all this is unfolding, the Trumpists have also been attempting to purge the FBI by trying to fire or force to resign everyone even remotely involved in the January 6 investigations – potentially thousands of agents and higher officials. They are also threatening to abolish whole departments and agencies, created by Congress, with a scratch of the pen. And they are purging all data from government websites they believe is in violation of Trump’s orders to no longer acknowledge the existence of trans people or promote DEI efforts.

That was just the past five days.

Last week opened with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) attempting to freeze trillions of federal funding. The order was not only ignoring existing laws but also the very basis of the separation of powers by denying Congress the power of the purse. The very next day, the Office of Personnel Management, seemingly orchestrated by Musk, tried to coerce mass resignations from federal workers.

The previous week, their first week in power, the Trumpists used an utterly unprecedented flurry of executive orders to roll back civil rights protections and undo much of the civil rights order that has unfolded since the 1960s. They even targeted the foundations on which the civil rights order was built, attempting to rewrite the constitution itself via an executive order to end birthright citizenship.

And that wasn’t even close to a comprehensive recap of everything that has been happening since January 20.

Regime change

We are not witnessing a presidential transition enacting policy changes. The Trumpists are seeking to remake the political order itself by redefining the rules of how power is being wielded, of who gets to wield power and who gets to control it. Trump wills it: An assertion of absolute control.

The speed and aggressiveness of this assault on the constitutional order have had an almost disorienting effect. Attempts to make sense of this chaos have yielded very different interpretations. One school of thought holds that things are unfolding in an entirely predictable way as the regime is merely enacting Project 2025. Both Time Magazine and CNN have published big pieces since the inauguration making the case that most of Trump’s initiatives have been lifted directly from what the Heritage Foundation and its contributors came up with. In every single conversation I have had with journalists in the past week I have been asked: “This is Project 2025, is it not?”

Another interpretation claims that this is less about Heritage and the reactionary elites behind Project 2025 and mostly about Elon Musk. It’s the Musk Coup. Donald Trump, in this view, is merely a figurehead, occasionally signing orders he doesn’t understand and otherwise playing golf in Florida.

Both narratives promise certainty in a situation that feels pretty darn dangerous. If this is all Project 2025, we know the playbook. We can read their policy report, find out what to expect next, be ready for it. If Elon Musk is in charge, we can look to what he did when he took over Twitter – that’s his playbook, and so we know what to expect from him too.

But the most plausible interpretation, I believe, is that it isn’t just one thing. The assault is coming from several directions. There are the reactionary elites mostly aligned with Heritage and Project 2025; there are the America First nativists; there are the techbro feudal barons. There is also, let’s not forget, Donald Trump as a slightly idiosyncratic factor, driven entirely by a sense of grievance, a desire for revenge, and his personal obsessions (tariffs, for instance; and the urge to install a politics of domination both domestically as well as on the world stage). All of these different factions of the Trumpist Right have been let loose on the government. Invoking the will of the president, they have declared themselves masters of the world. It is genuinely unclear how much coordination there is between them. Their actions add up to an often chaotic, but nevertheless comprehensive assault on the constitutional order. Less the execution of a single master plan – and more a MAGA feeding frenzy.

Let’s look at what these different factions have been up to, where they align, where we can discern their distinctive fingerprints, and where we might expect friction.

Project 2025

The enormous assertion of executive power and the attempt to centralize power at the presidency is very much in line with what Project 2025 has promised. Presidential executive orders are the preferred instrument for Russell Vought, one of the emblematic figures and key architects behind Project 2025. Vought is Trump’s choice to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a position from which he will seek to bend the entire government machinery to Trump’s will, as he views Trump as a “gift of God.” Broadly speaking, Project 2025 seeks to dismantle certain parts of government and the administrative state – deprive government of any tool that might be used to install boundaries for moneyed interests, help create a fairer pluralistic society, or tackle some of the most urgent public policy crises. At the same time, they seek to mobilize and weaponize other parts. The overriding goal is to transform government into an autocratic revenge machine that can impose a reactionary vision against the will of the majority. In order to achieve that, the Heritage crew desires to purge from government anyone who is not all in on the Trumpist project and replace them with loyalists and ideological conformists.

Project 2025’s handwriting is all over the attempts to roll back fundamental civil rights protections by declaring federal anti-discrimination protections null and void as well as the anti-DEI crusade, which is really an attempt to outlaw federal initiatives to democratize American government and society.

Similarly, the attempt to institute a comprehensive federal funding freeze was quintessentially Project 2025. In the memo outlining the regime’s reasoning, the Office of Management and Budget declared: “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.” This idea is pervasive among the Project 2025 crowd: federal spending as “the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening,” as Heritage president Kevin Roberts put it in his Foreword to “Mandate for Leadership.”

More generally, the OMB memo also captures the grievance that is animating Project 2025: Look anywhere in the policy report, and what you’ll find is visceral disdain for any kind of pluralism and diversity channeled into a policy agenda aiming to extinguish it. “Mandate for Leadership” talks about “eliminating politicization” – only to then present the whole laundry list of rightwing culture war grievances. DEI! CRT! Trans people! It is a policy agenda aligning entirely with the canon of reactionary white Christian male moral panics. The people behind Project 2025 see themselves as noble defenders of “real America” against a totalitarian “woke,” “globalist” assault. They are consumed by the idea of restoring white male domination. This is their declaration of war on multiracial, gender-egalitarian pluralism.

America First nativists

Most closely aligned with Project 2025, but nevertheless coming from an ideologically and institutionally distinct faction is the crusade to ethnically cleanse the nation. The emblematic figure of the America First nativists inside the regime is probably Stephen Miller. It’s certainly true that his white nationalist desires and the plans outlined in Project 2025 complement each other. Project 2025 demands an extremely restrictionist approach to immigration. They want to institute a system that resembles the immigration regime of the 1920s through 60s, when the desirability of immigrants was determined by openly racist criteria. Project 2025 proposes an extreme version of deterrence by cruelty. Remember Trump’s family separation policy? The people behind Project 2025 believe that was a good start, only it didn’t go far enough, which is why they want to make it easier to detain children under horrible conditions. In general, they seek to dramatically curtail legal immigration, gut asylum, and potentially rescind the legal status of hundreds of thousands of people who are in the United States, but lack permanent status.

As inhumane and despicable as all of this is, there is nothing in Project 2025 that quite reaches the level of extremism and depravity that Trump and Stephen Miller are going for with their mass deportation fever dreams. Nor does Project 2025 mention ending birthright citizenship. Again, I don’t want to overstate the differences: Both sides obviously share a goal of ending immigration of non-white people, based on an underlying vision of restoring white Christian dominance. The point is not that any of the people behind Project 2025 would be opposed to what the hardcore nativists want – it’s that they are all getting what they want, all at the same time.

The Musk coup

Elon Musk is currently executing his own side coup that is distinct from both Project 2025 as well as the nativist crusade. If he is following a playbook, it might be similar to what he did when he took over Twitter in late 2022: Occupy the place, disrupt operations, get rid of everyone who knows what they are doing, bring your own lackeys, and tear everything down – starting with simply not paying for anything you, based on little more than grievance and a completely uninformed hunch, don’t think is cool. This bunch of software engineer boys Musk is installing? They are not coming from the personnel database Project 2025 has been building up. Their only qualification seems to be that they are loyal to Musk and idolize the tech gurus. I doubt these are the types of “conservative warriors” Russell Vought wants to see installed across government. Think about it this way: The unprecedented planning operation that was Project 2025 was fundamentally about shifting the equation from “malevolence tempered by incompetence” in the first Trump administration to “competently enacted malevolence” this time. I don’t think a bunch of Musk fan boys playing around with the treasury’s payment system gets you there. And sure enough, reporting indicates that others in the Trump administration, even though they may be sympathetic to what Musk does, have very little control over his actions. Musk feels it’s time to play CEO-king and wipe away what he perceives to be a deficient system of democratic government, just as he would tell his software engineers to wipe out bad code. Start programming from scratch.

We are definitely looking at different factions doing their own thing, at least to some degree. But does it really matter? Aren’t they fully aligned anyway?

We certainly shouldn’t overstate the level of disagreement. All these factions are acting as part of a breathtaking assertion of power. They don’t believe the constitutional order places any meaningful restrictions on what they can do, and they evidently don’t care about checks and balances. All of these factions are staunchly anti-democratic: They are profoundly opposed to the very idea of equality, instead seeking to entrench or restore an order of hierarchy in which the individual’s status and access to power is determined by race, gender, religion, and wealth. They are, furthermore, driven by a conspiratorial view of the “deep state” as the enemy, perceiving the federal government as a hot bed of leftist subversion. In that sense, they all share the desire to dismantle “leftist” power – and tear down any meaningful legal and regulatory limits that may prohibit them from doing as they please. Isn’t Elon Musk, whether he knows it or not, just a henchman executing the vision behind Project 2025? Or is Russell Vought ultimately just helping to usher in tech baron rule?

A MAGA feeding frenzy

I understand the desire the boil the situation down to that one thing, identify the one master plan that is being executed. But accepting that the assault on the system comes from several distinct angles and factions matters not only because it describes what is unfolding more precisely. It also tells us something important about the Trumpist regime.

One of the biggest questions about the MAGA movement has been: Who would be in charge once they take power? Would the different factions get along and be able to cooperate within the regime – or would their infighting and rivalries constitute a serious impediment to Trumpist rule?

The latter assumption got a big boost just a few weeks ago when two of the defining Trumpist factions got into what was quickly dubbed the MAGA civil war. Remember Steve Bannon going after Musk and MAGA activists like Laura Loomer raging against the tech oligarchs? In a narrow sense, they quarreled over work visas. It was an interesting window into two different conceptions of the future: America First white Christian ethno-nationalism vs tech feudalism. The rightwing tech lords maintained they should have unfettered access to cheap labor – if that brings a few brown people into the country, who cares? The tech right, to be clear, aren’t any less racist than the MAGA nativists. They are eugenicists who strongly believe in racialized and gendered hierarchies. But they aren’t quite as focused on the nation as the container for their eugenicist dystopia – at the very least, they believe the nation must make allowances for their business interests. Musk is not generally opposed to foreigners being here working for him for little money and with little rights; he is opposed to any political project of egalitarianism.

In that sense, the MAGA civil war was the public manifestation of real differences and friction. It was therefore reasonable to assume the Trump regime wouldn’t be able to keep everyone happy. Who would get their way? Who would have to take a step back? Who would be sidelined?

The answer, as of right, seems to be: They all get to enact their agenda and act out their fever dreams. All at the same time.

To some extent, this is a dynamic that often characterizes authoritarian regimes: They integrate different factions via escalation – by ramping up the fearmongering against a real or perceived enemy, for instance, and by channeling all internal discontent into aggression towards that enemy. We are seeing a version of that now. How do you keep the different factions on the MAGA right from turning on each other? You give them all the green light to go berserk on the system. This helps explain the remarkable speed and aggression we have been witnessing: Instead of trying to bring the different camps in line, they have been told to rage against their common enemies – against vulnerable groups who deviate from the white Christian patriarchal order as much as against the constitutional order itself. The result may be chaotic, but it is comprehensive.

Integrating the MAGA Right

In some ways, this is not a new story. Modern Conservatism as a political movement and project coalesced in the middle decades of the twentieth century as an alliance between two distinct factions. One the one hand, there were reactionary traditionalists and, especially from the 1970s onwards, a newly mobilized Religious Right. On the other, there were market-fundamentalist libertarian factions, and a business right staunchly opposed to the New Deal state and post-1930s liberalism. And in the background of Modern Conservatism, there hovered an “Old Right” of nativists and far-right extremists who didn’t quite know what their place in that coalition was supposed to be.

This constellation on the Right has never been static, there has always been friction. What kept the rightwing alliance going was the fixation on a common enemy. Its political project was always centered around its commitment to a specific societal order – and by its hostility towards the “left”-coded forces working to change, undermine, or subvert it. Much of the modern Right’s political identity has always been wrapped up in rejecting “the Left” – a term comprehensively applied to anyone and anything seeking to level hierarchies of race, gender, religion, or wealth. And perhaps more than anything else, the Right has been defined by a sense of being under siege from these “leftist” forces, of being victimized by the constant onslaught of a “liberal” offensive in all spheres of life.

That siege mentality has escalated in recent years – to the point where it’s become dogma on the Trumpist right that conservatism is just “not enough” anymore. The Right today is dominated by people who are convinced there is nothing left to conserve, that our moment requires not “conservatism,” but a radical “counter-revolution.” And this is, basically, what we are faced with: “Counter-revolution” unleashed – and in this moment, no one on the Right cares all that much what form it takes, or what script it follows, or who is in charge: Just be radical, be ruthless, destroy the enemy.

I don’t think any of this is sustainable as a governing strategy – or even as a long-term strategy to integrate the different MAGA factions. It works right now because they all feel a sense of radical excitement and euphoria as they are releasing new executive orders, taking over a new agency, purging a new department every day. But the insurgency will inevitably slow down, there will be setbacks. When the revolutionary zeal tires out, they will be reminded of their differences. Right now, however, this feeding frenzy is unleashing an incredibly destructive potential. Unless it is stopped very soon, it will do severe – and potentially irreparable – harm to both the system of constitutional government and the civil rights order. The crisis is here.