In the good old days, running a coup was a fairly straightforward business. If it was to be a military coup, you simply rolled up outside the main government building of your country with a couple of tanks, seized the radio and TV stations and caused your predecessor to disappear.
The only downside was that the same process might, in due course, be repeated on you and so best practice suggests that, in fact, contrary to the suggestion above, you should treat your predecessor with the respect that you might hope would be accorded to you in the fullness of time.
Civilian coups tend to be altogether messier as, typically, unarmed civilians are likely to be confronted by armed forces of law and order. It takes a very demoralised regime simply to collapse like a house of cards and, even with extreme restraint on both sides, blood is likely to be shed.
Learning from experience
The attempted insurrection of 6 January 2021, in which an armed mob attacked the US Capitol, was eventually quelled when it became clear that significant police reinforcements were arriving.
We are now seeing an interesting new evolution of the coup, apparently orchestrated by the US President, although, as in 2021, having once unleashed forces that undermine governmental authority, retaining control of events can be harder.
Seizing the new levers of power
The chief executive of a very large company and supplier to the US government has simply introduced members of his team into a range of government departments, apparently with the aim of pillaging information from their IT systems. The “revolutionaries” are not manning the barricades in the traditional way. They are actually youthful geeks, fiercely loyal to their leader, apparently without their own moral compass and with rather less knowledge of the US constitution.
There is concern that access to the Treasury payment system has not only exposed the personal details of US citizens in receipt of federal money, but also companies, so that the competitive position of major US businesses is now visible to others. The databases of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Social Security Administration are also on the shopping list. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before there is major push back from other tech bros as one of their competitors helps himself to their inner secrets.
Who had previously ever heard of SCIFs (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility)? As the title suggests, these have always been treated as extremely secure communications facilities that are used to handle classified information and are built to prevent outside surveillance.
The geeks have accessed these facilities and the technology that they contain. This access could potentially have compromised the absolute integrity with which the facilities are maintained. More routine government systems appear also to have been compromised. This is an achievement of which hostile foreign powers could only have dreamed.
Who is in control?
The thing about coups is that, like wars, they are much easier to start than to stop. Jacques Necker’s modest ambitions to reform French government finances in 1789 led remorselessly to the Committee of Public Safety in 1793. And, in early 1917, Alexander Kerensky could hardly have predicted the outcome of the Russian revolution. Once the basic rule of law is torn up, events have a habit of taking their own course.
In the US coup that we are currently watching, it is far from clear who is in charge. Does Donald Trump really understand or care about the implications of the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) subversion of the US Government system? Can any of us yet appreciate the consequences? And is the DOGE only following Trump’s directions or does it have agendas and ambitions of its own? Is it a Frankenstein’s monster let loose in government?
If Trump were to issue another of his executive orders, one which disempowered the DOGE, would its director quietly revert to being a humble, multi-billion dollar defence contractor or would he resist the closure, ignore it even? And has he perhaps already planted the seeds for continuing interference in the government system anyway?
What next?
So far, this latest coup has all been bloodless, unless you count those who will die as a result of the freeze on the US Agency for International Development (US AID). So far, we do not know how deeply compromised the infrastructure of the US government might be. And, so far, the obvious beneficiaries appear to be the Chinese, who will step into the vacuum created by the closure of US AID.
The opportunity to enhance soft power at the expense of the US will be hard to resist. Vladimir Putin will also no doubt be happy to see the chaos created in US government agencies but, so far, there has been unsurprisingly little benefit to the average American.
So, the current US administration shows us a new kind of coup in which the levers of power have been unilaterally seized but which has all the uncertainties that a coup will always bring.
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