Elon Musk arrives before the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the US Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.

Before Vice President JD Vance was elected to the Senate from Ohio in 2022, he expressed a radical sentiment now coming to fruition under President Donald Trump.

“We need a de-Ba’athification program in the US,” Vance said as he called for the firing of every midlevel federal government employee and their replacement with Trump allies.

In likening the US government to the purges of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party in post-war Iraq, Vance provides a metaphor to explain what the Trump administration is doing now. The MAGA coalition, led by Trump, Vance and billionaire Elon Musk are an occupying force — a provisional authority — operating in wartime conditions to dismantle the US government. As in post-war Iraq, the previously existing legal order is no more. For Americans, that means the Constitution has been effectively suspended.

The ongoing destruction of the US government by Trump and Musk is already a full-blown constitutional crisis. The executive branch has seized power it does not have from Congress and the American people to eliminate agencies created by Congress, suspend payments authorized by law, break contracts entered into under law, rewrite the Constitution and, potentially, ignore the judiciary when push comes to shove.

All of these actions, tied together, represent not just an unprecedented seizure of executive power by the president, but an intentional subversion of the constitutional order. Or, as Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought wrote in 2022, “We are living in a post-Constitutional time.”

Billionaire Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service is invading federal government agencies and seizing control of payment systems, threatening to cut off funds.

The actions Trump and Musk are taking not only threaten the country’s constitutional structure, but also the material livelihood of all Americans. In targeting government services people need to live their lives, they risk forcing people to stop working to perform childcare, throw at-risk people into homelessness, deny disabled people the right to a free life and cut off the elderly and sick from necessary health care. In seeking to end birthright citizenship, Trump threatens the very right of people born here to obtain the benefits granted to them by the Constitution.

Potentially more catastrophic, Musk’s seizure of the Department of Treasury’s payment system and the possible tinkering his college-age minions are doing to it could crash a decadesold system that doles out the annual $6 trillion budget to Social Security recipients, government employees, grantees, loan........

© HuffPost