"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," Cooper wrote.
"Most recently, they straight up stole $80 million in duly disbursed FEMA funds right out of New York City’s bank accounts."
The closest parallel to the powers that Musk has accumulated might be Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his rise in the 1920s, Cooper argued.
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"Now, this is not to say that the policy program of Soviet Communism is identical to DOGE," Cooper wrote. "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 power struggle by placing loyalists throughout the Communist Party and the growing Soviet bureaucracy, and he sidelined and eventually murdered his greatest rival, Leon Trotsky. He violently purged other enemies 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 [secret police force] NKVD," Cooper wrote.
"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."
That's largely the same playbook Musk is using, whether or not that's intentional, to grab power from the newly inaugurated president, Cooper wrote.
"The leader of the Republican Party and nominal president, Donald Trump, is 78 years old and plainly in steep mental decline," Cooper wrote. "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."
Musk is shoring up command over key government agencies by setting up a parallel government with the Department of Government Efficiency, and if and when Trump becomes incapacitated or dies, Cooper wrote, the tech mogul will have a major advantage in the battle to replace him.
"Should Musk succeed, DOGE could become the most important political institution in America," Cooper wrote. "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 biggest difference between Stalin's rise and Musk's ascension is the speed at which they gathered power, Cooper wrote, arguing that Stalin was "clever and patient" in consolidating his regime, while Musk is moving quickly to put key institutions under his control – but he critically lacks 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," Cooper wrote. "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."
That speed and hubris could prove to be Musk's undoing, Cooper wrote, hopefully.
"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," Cooper wrote. "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."
