As Elon Musk and Donald Trump, in a secondary role, steamroll through the federal government, there’s a taxonomy to the players that is important to understand. It’s semi-hidden at the moment. But you can see it showing up if you look up close and it will likely become more visible over time.

There are three big factions operating in Trump’s government with currently overlapping but very distinct aims and strategies. First, you have MAGA, which wants to punish and displace the people who made life hard for Trump in his first term and replace them with loyalists. That’s mostly about power and personal fealty to Trump. Ideology is mostly secondary to the core aim. Second, you have Christian nationalists who want to seize the power of the state to execute a top down re-traditionalization of American society and culture. Russell Vought is key to this group. The basic theory goes back into the aughts, when a faction of conservatives decided (essentially a counsel of despair) that they had lost control of American culture and that state power was required to get it back. Third are people like Elon Musk who want to radically hollow out the government, outsource its functions and replace many of those functions with novel technologies — AI, cryptocurrency, etc. This is a mix of Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” business culture combined with “dark enlightenment” Yarvinian degenerate thought.

Overnight, Wired reported that, contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to “read only” access to department payment systems, this is not true. A 25-year-old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems, which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system.

I wrote a series of posts over the weekend about how to make sense, politically, strategically and even emotionally of the unfolding crisis of governance in DC. Here’s a piece about messaging and morale and another on Trump and Musk’s “shock and awe” strategies. After reading those posts, a number of TPM Readers have asked, okay, what are we supposed to do? Or what are our electeds supposed to do? I want to dig into this more later, but in this post I want to give as best a quick answer to that as I can.

We start with a piece in this morning’s Punchbowl which is simultaneously encouraging and gobsmackingly disheartening. The headline reads: Democrats ask: Why would we help Trump and the Republicans?. Most of you are probably thinking, you’re just getting to this question, guys? Well, they are. As they should, though it’s far more tentative than it should be. I suspect that’s about to change.

Let’s repeat the core fact. Republicans are in charge. As I explained here, the levers Democrats have over any of this are very limited. This is fundamentally a battle over public opinion, one in which the opposition needs to be making the case about the disastrousness of Trump’s policies. But there are levers. And they need to use them. Because even those tiny levers are key to that larger battle. Talk in itself is meaningless. Begging especially is meaningless. In fact, on its own it can be demoralizing — same old, same old, just performatively illustrating either the inability or unwillingness to act.

Right now in Washington, DC, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dominating literally everything. That will start changing quickly, at least in a limited way, in the courts. But the overriding need is for Democrats to get a seat at the table. And they can do that in several ways. The biggest way is that Republicans will need help to pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling. The rubber starts meeting the road on that front next month. Real soon. You can talk as much as you want. But the White House and congressional Republicans absolutely need that help. And Democrats need to be crystal clear that the answer is absolutely no help — without meeting their conditions. That’s where you get the seat at the table.

I wanted to note some details in the rapid evolution of Trump’s misrule over the criminal justice system. It is old hat, expected really, that a Trump-run Justice Department won’t investigate, let alone indict, Donald Trump or any of his top deputies. We also saw in Trump’s first term that accomplices and key supporters will be pardoned or have investigations shuttered. But the dawn of Trump’s second term now sees the rollout of a host of new Justice products and payment plans.

This week, matters took a degree of a step forward (or backward, depending on your metaphor) when Trump had his acting U.S. attorney abandon the criminal case against former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE). Fortenberry wasn’t some high-profile Trump ally. And his crimes weren’t particularly political or Trump-adjacent. He got caught taking laundered political contributions from a Nigerian billionaire and then repeatedly lied about it to the FBI. Pretty generic graft, pretty garden-variety political corruption.

We’re getting clearer indications now that the effort to bamboozle, frighten and entice federal workers into resigning their positions in exchange for non-existent “buy outs” was very much a product of the Elon Musk/DOGE cabal now wilding through and embedding itself within the federal government. We don’t need a lot of confirmation: they left a slew of meme Easter eggs scattered through the process more or less announcing it. What’s notable is that the White House is now going out of its way to tell reporters that it definitely wasn’t them. They were, in that well-worn phrase, out of the loop, etc.

I suspect this is true, as far as it goes. But that understates — straight up ignores, really — the degree to which Donald Trump and his top advisors have, entirely by design and intentionally, spun up a series of independent fiefdoms, with Musk’s being the largest, to move fast and break things and push every boundary in the interest of a number of overlapping but distinct ideological agendas. In other words, they probably did “bypass key Trump officials.” But that’s pretty much the idea when you wind up guys like Elon Musk and Russell Vought with “let’s be legends” gusto and give them the keys.

One of the features of Donald Trump’s flood-the-zone tactics is not only to overwhelm opponents but to spark a mix of overwhelm, angst and confusion that drives those opponents to fall into arguing amongst themselves. If you can’t meaningfully strike back at the instigator, that ravaged energy has to seek release somewhere and it erupts in doom-scrolling, competitive doomerism and most importantly infighting over who’s responsible for what the instigator is doing. If you can’t lash out at the boss you kick the dog. I’m as susceptible to all of this as anyone. But I would be lying if I didn’t confess that I find those responses eternally exhausting down to the depths of my soul. I’ll just share my own thoughts.

So I write the following with the caveat that everything in the unfolding Trump administration is cloaked in secrecy and uncertain from one moment to the next. But overnight President Trump kicked off, what can only be called both a wide-ranging constitutional crisis, and also very likely a fiscal crisis. He has unilaterally halted – as of yesterday evening, according to an executive memorandum first reported by independent journalist Marisa Kabas – all “grant, loan and federal assistance programs” for at least 90 days. This appears to include everything the federal government does beyond the salaries of federal employees, direct checks to Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries and the US military. Mainstream media journalists are calling this “temporary” or a “pause.” But that’s like saying you’re “temporarily” shutting down Congress or “pausing” elections. “Temporary” isn’t a meaningful term in this case. It’s hard to think through everything affected. Already the halt to USAID budgets has cut off funding for the prison guards holding 9,500 ISIS prisoners in northeastern Syria, according to Syria expert Charles Lister. Cancer research, major parts of every state’s budget, the grants that keep the local daycare center running. This hits basically everything.

Back in June I asked you to tell me about your favorite TPM posts. I read through your responses at the time. But the project I was investigating was soon overtaken by the rush of campaign events, particularly the aftermath of the Trump-Biden presidential debate at the end of the month. I was finally able to go through them more systematically this weekend. First, thank you for the attention and thought so many of you put into those contributions. They were gratifying and illuminating to read. My aim with this exercise was to pull together a list of posts for something kind of but not precisely like an anthology.

Here’s a simple but inarguable point: Trump’s decision to pardon (and/or commute release of) all the January 6th insurrectionists is deeply unpopular. Your best evidence for that is the responses of Republicans who are asked to react to or justify it. They’re doing the most practical thing: dodge the questions and wait for those questions to subside. Wait for it to become old news, something that happened in the past. Democrats’ job is to prolong the period of questions for as long as possible. There are many ways to do it, as I explained yesterday. The job of a political opposition is to spend every day illustrating for the public what’s bad about the current government being in power. That’s not tawdry or institutionally selfish or unhelpful. It’s a functional, essential feature of our political system. To the extent you’re not able to do that, the folks in power must be doing a fairly good job. And that’s a good thing to know, even if it’s an unpleasant reality for the opposition. It’s quite literally what you’re supposed to do for the broader framework of government to function.

Yesterday my colleague Kate Riga noted a trap Senate Democrats keep falling into: in an effort to court Republican defectors they temper their criticism of the various Trump nominees. But since there are and will be no defectors they lose on both sides of the equation, gaining no defectors and making their critiques tepid and forgettable. This is unquestionably true. But we can go a step further still. Far from courting potential defectors, they should be attacking them.

Potential defectors are almost always those from marginal states, and some are senators from marginal states who face voters at the next election. 2026 doesn’t have a lot of great prospects. But there are some. So Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, possibly Joni Ernst and new Florida senator Ashley Moody. The criticisms of the bad nominees should be as intense as possible and all focused on the support of these senators. No one does you a favor in these settings for being nice: senators defect when they think they may pay a price at the ballot box. That is the only way to have messaging that takes the initiative and stays on the attack. If things get too hot and the senator pulls their support, great. If not, that just lays the groundwork for beating that senator in the next election. Those two possibilities are the only outcomes of any consequence and the same game plan advances both goals. It’s simple. When they’re upset or hiding you’ll know you’re doing it right. One more point: no one cares about press releases. Getting on camera or activity on social media matter.