Call it what it is.

A week ago, I wrote a piece here called “Is It Really a Coup?” My answer, based on the evidence in front of us, was yes. Since then, life has gone on and DOGE has mostly gone on (despite what they seem to view as the inconvenience of a few temporary restraining orders), committed to nothing less than the radical transformation of government by a small band of unelected, quasi-official people, who are operating outside of government transparency rules. It has all the characteristics of a non-military transformation of a democratic government into something entirely different.

In a statement that made me proud to be a lawyer yet again, the American Bar Association (ABA) all but called it a coup, but without actually using that word: “No American can be proud of a govt that carries out change in this way. Neither can these actions be rationalized by discussion of past grievances or appeals to efficiency. Everything can be more efficient, but adherence to the rule of law is paramount.”

This morning in the Washington Post, Alan Charles Raul wrote an excellent piece on DOGE. Mr. Raul served as the associate White House Counsel under President Ronald Reagan and went on to serve as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan and President George H.W. Bush. He is a lecturer at Harvard Law School. Not exactly a liberal.

In his piece, titled, Why DOGE is unconstitutional, he writes, “What is not debatable, however, is that Congress has not authorized this radical overhaul, and the protocols of the Constitution do not permit statutorily mandated agencies and programs to be transformed — or reorganized out of existence — without congressional authorization.”

It’s such a polite way of saying it’s a coup without saying it.

Maybe now that the Reagan Republican guys have shown up, we can all agree we are living through the quietest of coups. If we don’t start calling it what it is and putting a stop to it, it stands a fair chance of succeeding. The lawyers are hard at work, but that will not be enough alone. They are holding the ground until the public catches up. It would be nice if Congress and the Supreme Court did their jobs too. But for starters, let’s call the coup a coup—while we still can.

Lest you think that’s hyperbolic, yesterday, the Associated Press reported that they “were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office.“ Later in the day, they were refused access. It’s a clear and also an extremely petty, violation of the First Amendment, which prevents the government from imposing prior restraints on anyone’s speech, let alone the press.

Apparently, it’s easy to ignore such a ridiculous moment, and most people seem to have. But this is a form of Newspeak, the Orwellian construct of language that a government insists people use in order to narrow people’s range of thought. Sure, it was only over what we call the Gulf of Mexico, but this was not trivial buffoonery; it was a significant moment, a testing of the waters to see if this new White House could get away with stepping on the First Amendment without causing a furor.

Raul started his piece by questioning whether “the 49.8 percent of the electorate who elected Trump want all of this, and whether the 50.2 percent who voted for Kamala Harris or a third-party candidate want any of it.” My question is, who voted for a coup? And if we didn’t, why are we staying silent (or being excessively polite about it) now?

It’s a good sign that people are beginning to describe what’s happening in the language of a coup, even if they are doing everything but calling it one. But we can’t stop there, afraid to call it a coup, as though using the word itself is somehow a bridge too far, too frightening. Hiding from a problem doesn’t make it any better.

We’re in this together,

Joyce