Flooding Trump’s Zone: Networked Warfare Still Works

In the period leading up to Trump’s inauguration, spokesmen for the President-elect repeatedly stressed that he would hit the ground running. Metaphors like “fire hose,” “shock and awe,” and “flooding the zone” were common from those both officially and unofficially associated with Trump. 

And hit the ground running, he did indeed. ICE sweeps in Chicago and elsewhere, and a flurry of executive orders ranging from the blatantly illegal and unconstitutional to the ridiculous, marked his first week in office. And starting late in his second week, and proceeding through this week just past, it seems like the snot-nosed punks representing Musk’s DOGE have hit another agency or department every day. 

The people inside and outside of government, who would normally be expected to put up some resistance to this, were seemingly paralyzed by shock. Most Congressional Democrats insisted on normalizing the situation, most likely as a coping mechanism against having to acknowledge the fascist onslaught for what it is. Despite talk in committee hearings, most of Trump’s nominees so far have sailed through. People like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who repeatedly (and correctly) warned before the election of Trump’s authoritarian threat, are now forbearing to make use of most of the weapons available to them for resisting such authoritarianism: e.g., denying unanimous consent and making quorum calls on every single action in the Senate, whether appointment confirmations or legislation. Schumer also, speaking for his party, stated their intention to wait until Trump “really messes up” — a standard which attempting to abolish statutory agencies and impound appropriated funds by executive fiat apparently doesn’t rise to — and then “lie down on the train tracks.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has repeatedly emphasized Democrats’ powerlessness — “What leverage do we have? We’re going to continue to try to find bipartisan common ground…” — this despite a GOP majority so razor-thin, divided internally by so-called Freedom Caucus craziness, that Speaker Johnson will certainly be unable to pass a budget without help from Democrats.

But the Trump onslaught, overwhelming as it has been, has progressed arithmetically. The coalescing resistance, although it began by being caught flat-footed, has for the past ten days or so increased geometrically. It began with legal action by assorted civil liberties nonprofits, and followed by similar legal action by labor union and state attorneys-general, to secure court injunctions and stays against Trump’s executive orders.

Parallel to this, the sharing of information did much to impede the execution of Trump’s policies. Immigrant rights activists around the country, by informing potential targets of their legal rights (most notably their right to refuse admission to ICE agents armed only with administrative warrants not signed by a judge), evoked frustration from “border tsar” Tom Homan:

Sanctuary citizens are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, very well-educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE. I’ve seen many pamphlets from many NGOs: “Here’s how you escape ICE from arresting you”; “Here’s what you need to do.” They call it “Know Your Rights.” I call it “How to escape arrest.”

In Blue Cities and States around the country, local school systems and other government buildings have refused admission to ICE agents.

Meanwhile, federal workers’ unions, labor lawyers, and career staff quickly disseminated advice on responding to the memo (obviously drafted by Musk) offering a so-called “buyout.” Journalist Jay Willis, early in Trump’s second week, reported:

Hearing from federal employees tonight who are getting messages via their agency’s emergency notification system, which is usually reserved for snow-related office closures, that’s like DO NOT RESPOND TO THAT EMAIL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, WE HAVE NO IDEA IF ANY OF THOSE PROMISES ARE REAL

Federal employee subreddits and other Internet communities, similarly, quickly became clearinghouses for information.

Advice circulated widely on social media, encouraging government workers and anyone else in a position to do so to obstruct implementation of Trump’s policies through deliberate inefficiency and inaction. The OSS’s 1943 sabotage manual experienced a resurgence in popularity.

Perhaps most importantly, the general public, after a slow start, began to mobilize in exponentially increasing numbers, with the support of dissident Democrats like Alexandria Occasio-Cortez who take their jobs seriously. And the size of the crowds outside all the federal office buildings taken over by DOGE has emboldened even Schumer to employ somewhat more combative rhetoric. Elizabeth Warren and others have joined the crowds, and Sen. Brian Schatz has taken the step the entire Democratic Party should have taken from the beginning of announcing his intention to use the full power of Senate rules to obstruct all Trump nominees until the situation is resolved.

So far none of them has gone so far as to take Musk’s punks on their threat to call U.S. Marshalls, and force Marshalls into the uncomfortable position of deciding whether to arrest them in front of the crowds and TV cameras.

Journalists at a handful of outlets like Wired are doing the kind of investigative reporting that whipped dog publications like the NYT and Washington Post used to be known for. The latest bombshell dropped is that Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the broccoli-haired fratboy participating in DOGE’s hostile takeovers, had a history in extremely toxic online networks like 764 and The Com which engage in black hat hacking and child sexual extortion. I only found out about it this morning (Feb. 8) while checking my news feeds, so the shockwave has barely had time to register with the public; but the fact that people like this have been put in a position to compromise government payments — like, you know, Social Security — seems quite likely to swell the scale of public outcry significantly.

Over the past week, Trump has lost almost all of the court cases against him, and the first wave of injunctions and temporary restraining orders has come in. It remains to be seen which way Trump will ultimately go on compliance. So far, compliance with court orders has actually been uneven, not monolithically defiant. Kraus, the DOGE Treasury liaison, complied with removing non-employees from payment system access, and Elez apparently hasn’t been rehired despite Musk’s claims. It’s a safe bet that defiance will result in another order of magnitude surge in the size of the crowds, and a similar surge in demands that Congress do their damned job.  

Meanwhile, the internal strains on the Trump administration are mounting. The situation could not have been better designed to heighten personal tension and antagonism between Trump and Musk. Trump has shown repeated signs of annoyance — just look at his facial expression as Musk “jumped around like a dipshit” behind him onstage, to borrow a phrase from Tim Walz. And there’s a history of people who hog the limelight or cause Trump inconvenience to get cut loose quickly, as we witnessed in the first administration. Constant jibes about “President Bannon,” and Steve Bannon’s selection as Time Person of the Year, led to his demise within months. And the unlikeable Elon Musk, with the most punchable face in the world, has been a lightning rod for hatred not only from Democrats but from Republicans who are afraid of their lives being disrupted. This includes White House functionaries, according to anonymous reports. 

The situation is clearly wearing on Musk himself, who has been camping out on a couch and undoubtedly relying on high-powered amphetamines to get by on next to no sleep for the past two weeks. By all reports, he was not expecting anywhere near this level of public attention or outcry. He claims to have received death threats. The speed-fueled paranoia and sleeplessness, coupled with the blow to his fragile ego from unavoidable reminders of his unpopularity, have to be taking a toll on him. This was two years ago:

Elon Musk reportedly suffered a mental breakdown after facing angry boos at Dave Chappelle’s San Francisco show in December 2022, which added to the billionaire’s fears that his reputation as a tech visionary had been damaged by his seemingly chaotic moves in buying and running Twitter. . . .

“He got to a point where he locked himself in his office, was so upset that the Twitter employees were considering calling a wellness check by the San Francisco police because they thought he was going to self-harm himself.”

It’s obviously a point of weakness to hone in on and exploit mercilessly.

It’s also hard to imagine Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles not being upset over the political damage Musk is doing to Trump, but things have probably not reached the point where she’s willing to gamble on making a strong move against him. Meanwhile, she’s most likely to keep quietly nudging Trump every time Musk causes another public embarrassment or an outcry from his base constituencies alarmed that the leopards are eating their faces. At some point, as the damage in the polls and complaints from his base continue to roll in, Trump will be primed to put the blame for the clusterfuck on Musk and throw him to the dogs. My guess is this will occur within a couple of months, if not weeks. As to what happens to a former ally after Trump cuts him loose as a liability, just ask Rudy Giuiliani.

Regardless, I don’t believe Trump is capable of consolidating dictatorial power. He inherited a system in which the federal government possesses next to no state capacity, compared to the national governments of other major powers, and relies almost entirely on the state bureaucracies and law enforcement for executing its policies. And not only has he launched assaults on multiple fronts, which might as well be calculated to piss off as many of his constituencies as possible and consolidate an opposition, without first securing his control over the military and bureaucracy; he’s actually in the process of alienating the bureaucracy and the officer corps and gutting their effectiveness.

Most of all, he’s awakened a sleeping giant. Our capacity for helping and supporting one another, for using the power of networked organization to get vital information to the people who can best make use of it, and swarming would be strongmen with opposition, is beyond anything in Trump’s playbook. He wanted to flood the zone, but we’re flooding his.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative

Source: https://c4ss.org/content/60152