The Brooklyn Rail

Elon Musk and his DOGE minions have now gained access to highly sensitive personal data belonging to millions of Americans that is held in trust by the Social Security Administration, causing the top official at the SSA to quit her job rather than comply with DOGE demands. The information Musk and his unvetted interns now have access to includes bank and other financial information for anyone with a Social Security number, plus employment information and earnings records, addresses and phone numbers, the names and ages of one’s children, and comprehensive medical records of people who have applied for medical disability benefits. The president of Social Security Works said “There is no way to overstate how serious a breach this is.”¹

DOGE has also sought access to sensitive data at the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service. It appears that very soon they will be in control of the largest cache of personal data on US citizens that has ever existed in one place. In a world where data is power, this is a monstrous breach. What are the DOGE interns going to do with our data? Who knows? But we do know that the DOGE imagineers are right now imagining new thresholds of social Control. The public imagination needs to catch up, and quickly.

Will they use this information to target potential dissidents and identify informants? Will they be able to turn on and turn off sources of income and assistance? Will they be able to manage consent on a granular basis by targeting mis- and disinformation more accurately to specific individuals? Will the US surveillance state finally eclipse that of China?

These actions by DOGE are clearly illegal, but in the early days of the Trump regime, the rule of law has been too slow and deliberate to repel the “ready, fire, aim” tactics of DOGE, and the long-term effects of their malfeasance may be devastating.

On February 15, Trump declared on Truth Social and X that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” People thought he was quoting Napoleon, and the statement can be found in a collection of Napoleon’s maxims and thoughts put together by Balzac in 1838, translating “Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi.” But I doubt very much if Trump read it in Balzac. It’s more likely he may have heard it as a line delivered by actor Rod Steiger playing Napoleon in the 1970 movie Waterloo, a co-production between Italy and the Soviet Union. The extravagant battle scenes in the movie were shot on location in Ukraine and may have given Trump ideas. The maxim from Napoleon “has been cited in various political and ideological contexts to defend or rationalize actions perceived as outside legal or ethical norms but claimed to be in the service of national salvation. It sometimes serves to justify the erosion of legal norms in pursuit of nationalist goals.”² But when the people of Norway read Trump’s post, it was immediately clear to them that Trump was in fact recalling the line used in 2011 by the Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik as a justification for his murderous attacks on 22 July that killed 77 people in cold blood. In prison later, Breivik became a strong supporter of Donald Trump.

I found this all on Wikipedia, which I used to denigrate, but now celebrate and support as one of the last islands of truth online. My admiration for it increased considerably last month, when Elon Musk called for his supporters to “Defund Wikipedia!” because he discovered that his own Wikipedia page carried these lines about his Inauguration Day speech: “Musk twice extended his right arm toward the crowd in an upward angle. The gesture was compared to a Nazi salute or fascist salute. Musk denied any meaning behind the gesture.” It is just a straightforward description of what happened. But to Musk, it was more fuel for his campaign to portray Wikipedia as “controlled by far-left activists” and convince people to “stop donating to Wokepedia.” Musk now controls an astonishing amount of online life, and it galls him that this control does not extend to Wikipedia. As Lisa Shroff pointed out in The Atlantic on February 5th, “At Donald Trump’s inauguration, the CEOs of the companies who run the world’s six most popular websites sat alongside Trump’s family on the dais. There was no such representative for the next-most-popular site: Wikipedia.”³

VP JD Vance put forward his own lawless, counter-constitutional doctrine on February 9 on X, maintaining that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Vance had laid the predicate for this doctrine on a podcast in 2021, when he stated that the future Trump administration should fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, [and] replace them with our people. When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Andrew Jackson never said that, but the sentiment is accurate. It refers to the case of Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, when the US Supreme Court vacated the conviction of Samuel Austin Worcester and held that the Georgia criminal statute prohibiting non-Native Americans from trespassing on Native American lands without a license from the state was unconstitutional. In doing so, it laid out the relations between tribes, states, and federal governments and became the foundation of the doctrine of tribal sovereignty in the US. Samuel Worcester was a Christian missionary and a believer in Cherokee sovereignty.

Andrew Jackson was then trying to push the Cherokee people off their lands, leading to a signal event in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of these peoples that became known as the “Trail of Tears.” When the Supreme Court ruled against Jackson in Worcester v. Georgia, Jackson actually wrote in a letter that “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” The effect was the same. The Supreme Court had decided, but they had no army, and thus no way to enforce their decision if Jackson chose to ignore it.⁴

This is the position that we may get to sooner rather than later with Trump and Musk and JD Vance, and it will be a constitutional crisis, constituting what political scientists call an “autocratic breakthrough.”

For more accurate quotations, Musk, Trump, and Vance should all rely more on Wikipedia. The connection between the Napoleon quote, its use in 2022 by Anders Behring Breivik, and the recent one by Trump was made on a new Wikipedia page that went up right after Trump posted it. By Tuesday, February 18, this Wikipedia page was red-flagged and “nominated for deletion.” Next to the sign for the scales of justice was the statement: “The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met.”