Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President Donald Trump listens as Elon Musk speaks in the Oval Office at the White House, February 11, 2025, in Washington.
Elon Musk is running the United States government. That much was made clear at a Tuesday press conference in the White House in which President Trump signed a new executive order granting Musk sweeping authority over every federal agency and department, through his organization DOGE. It stipulates that a “DOGE Team Lead” will be in charge of all hiring and firing decisions at the agencies, and that a new staffer can only be hired after four are fired, along with other austerity requirements. As Josh Marshall points out, “I don’t know what else to call these people besides political commissars.”
An unelected individual, whose sole qualification for office is spending about $44.2 billion on the last election—who is in fact ineligible to run for president—is making wildly illegal budget, staffing, and policy decisions throughout the government, and stacking federal agencies with his cronies who are all doing Watergate-grade crimes about 300 times per day. Most recently, they straight up stole $80 million in duly disbursed FEMA funds right out of New York City’s bank accounts.
I mentioned before that what Musk is doing bears some resemblance to how Stalin consolidated power over the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It’s worth recalling that history in more detail.
Now, this is not to say that the policy program of Soviet Communism is identical to DOGE. Stalin ruled a gigantic impoverished empire that had been ruined by years of war. He pursued a policy of breakneck industrialization through state-directed investment, funded by de facto enslavement of the peasantry, which also touched off a major famine. America has a highly developed economy and chronic large food surpluses, and unlike Stalin, Musk doesn’t appear to have any particular macroeconomic goal other than more money for himself and fodder for the worst imaginable epic bacon jokes on Twitter/X.
The similarity is in the specific mechanics of how Stalin came to power. During the Russian Revolution and following civil war, Lenin had been the undisputed leader of the Russian communists, while Stalin played a more modest role. But in 1922, Lenin suffered a severe stroke, forcing him to largely withdraw from politics. After several more strokes, he died in 1924.
Stalin won the ensuing struggle for power by stacking the Communist Party, as well as the rapidly growing Soviet bureaucracy, with his loyal henchmen. Leon Trotsky, who had been vastly more important during the revolution as leader of the Red Army, was an arrogant intellectual who did not have Stalin’s knack for plodding intrigue. Trotsky was sidelined, exiled, and eventually murdered by a Soviet assassin. All the other Old Bolsheviks who had been core to the revolution were similarly defeated, and many of them also later murdered during the Great Terror. The Soviet government and the Red Army were permanently watched by party officials—political commissars—to ensure loyalty to the party and Stalin, backed by the threat of deportation, torture, or murder by the NKVD.
The danger is real. But that doesn’t mean Musk is guaranteed to win.
The Soviet Union thereby developed a political system in which the formal constitution, drawn up in 1936, was almost entirely inoperative. The official post of the head of government, the premiership, was largely ornamental; real power was held by the Communist Party, in particular its general secretary, who sat as dictator over the whole country, until the USSR collapsed in 1991.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this is more or less the playbook Elon Musk is following, however unknowingly. The leader of the Republican Party and nominal president, Donald Trump, is 78 years old and plainly in steep mental decline. That much is demonstrated by his signing this order granting Musk so much power in the first place (also by his increasingly incoherent speech patterns). Any developing authoritarian regime with a power-sharing agreement almost invariably ends with the aspiring autocrats turning on each other, in which only one person can be triumphant. It’s not only Russian history that demonstrates that. Trump may well be putting his power or even personal safety in danger.
If and when Trump is incapacitated or dies, there will be a fight to fill his shoes. Like Stalin, Musk is taking steps to make sure he will be able to command key government agencies in that eventuality by setting up a parallel nongovernment institution under his direct control: DOGE. At the same time, both he and Trump are undermining the competing power centers of Congress and the courts. That way it won’t matter who occupies the official presidency, much as few remember the name of Alexei Kosygin (the Soviet head of government when party chief Leonid Brezhnev actually ran the show), and the words printed on the Constitution will be meaningless.
The next step will be to set up centers of political punishment to threaten retribution against enemies of the Musk regime. That process is already started with plans for a greatly expanded concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, as well as potential deportations to friendly regimes with handy torture dungeons. The New York Times reports that a Venezuelan man who had not committed any crimes, but only applied for asylum according to U.S. law, was recently kidnapped and taken to Guantanamo. His sister only found out when DHS Secretary Kristi Noem tweeted a picture boasting about it.
Should Musk succeed, DOGE could become the most important political institution in America. How Americans live—what they can say, what they can read, where they can go, what they can eat and drink, what kind of medicines they can take, and on and on—may well be determined by one visibly unhinged ultra-billionaire and his crew of online neo-Nazis. That at least is their clear intention.
The danger is real. But that doesn’t mean Musk is guaranteed to win. The greatest difference between Stalin and DOGE is the speed at which everything is happening. Stalin was a monster, but he was also extremely clever and patient. It took him years of careful planning and intriguing to consolidate his regime.
Elon, by contrast, is barging in and trying to do everything all at once before he has key institutions under firm control. The legislature is not completely subordinated, neither is the judiciary, and he has not yet set up systems to defraud elections. Most critically, he does not have DOGE commissars at all levels of the military. On his current path, sooner or later Musk will have to order American troops to fire on their fellow citizens for attempting to exercise their constitutional rights, and he will need loyalists down to the unit level to force them to do it, not just a few pet generals.
I suspect this reflects the different historical contexts of the two men. Stalin had to help fight and win a revolutionary war, and then wage a pitched political battle against several formidable adversaries at once. That made him brutal yet cautious. Musk, by contrast, discovered over time that American politics and society were so profoundly rotten that he could get away with outrageous regulatory violations at Tesla and SpaceX, and gradually concluded he could do literally anything he wanted. So far, it’s working: Republicans are already falling in line, and Democrats are demoralized and confused. Even Trump’s officially designated successor, Vice President Vance, is defending Musk’s teenybopper fascists.
But the free rein Trump has given Musk has also given him a new burst of extreme hubris. I suspect he could have fairly easily consolidated a dictatorship if he had bided his time and knocked out the supporting pillars of democracy one by one. Instead, he is moving so aggressively that he risks not only a popular (or military) uprising, but a shattering financial crisis that will destroy his own wealth, should his wet-behind-the-ears DOGE imbeciles cut the wrong wire in any of a dozen federal agencies. As my colleague David Dayen writes, OMB Director Russell Vought recently had to hurriedly restore a key procedure at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when he realized that fully shutting down the agency would destroy the home mortgage market.
The marginal Trump voter that put him over the line in 2024 was plainly not voting for Elon Musk to become God-Emperor for Life, much less for him to tear great chunks out of federal agencies that underpin the basic functioning of American life, even if those swing voters take them entirely for granted. It’s the task of everyone who believes in democracy to make Musk’s story of hubris end in the traditional way that the Greek playwrights dramatized so well.
