The Papua New Guinea Courier's overseas correspondent on America's Coup Klux Klan

To America where Elon Musk, the world’s most economically wealthy and spiritually impoverished man, is staging a coup.

Over the weekend the self-styled Teslamensch deployed a team of young DOGE software engineers to take the US Agency for International Development offline and seize control of the federal government’s payment system at the Treasury.

These coders, aged between 19 and 24, with close links to Musk and anti-democracy fan Peter Thiel, are reputed to be part of the Qbitler Youth.

President Trump, meanwhile, is busy with other things, like vendettas, and jabbering. He’s so completely absorbed in an unwinnable war with his own insecurities that he has unwittingly become the Persian cat to Musk’s Blofeld – so preoccupied with exacting revenge that his pussy has been grabbed by the Stay-Puft billionaire.

It’s all vaguely amusing, as in the way that watching slow-motion car crash test dummy replays on ITV2 is vaguely amusing, until they tell you how many road deaths they represent.

For example, he’s packed his cabinet with sycophantic villains so superficial, Marvel would reject them for being one-dimensional. Or again: since Gaza’s waterfront location could be the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’, he calls for the enforced dispersal of the Palestinians who live there.

The fact that we’ve become used to Trump shaping his agenda for government from the controversial thoughts he’s blurted out to see what sticks should not mask the fact that only an amoral shuck could think, let alone express such things. The expulsion of Palestinians to create the Plaza Strip is not a ‘tantalising’ new narrative with which to generate copy. It’s ethnic cleansing. Broadcasters take note.

Trump’s plans are petulant, cruel and arbitrary. Musk’s have the air of premeditation, albeit probably calculated during a Relentless and ket-fuelled Diablo 4 marathon. The point is, like all good Bond villains who would rather colonise Mars than go to therapy, Elon has revealed his plans with more than enough time to stop them before the film ends.

Doing so, however, does call for people to step forward. The Coup Klux Klan can be foiled. But for those of us who instinctively tilt towards subtlety and gradation, it’s time to stop nuance mongering and call Nazi salutes, purges and forced removal of people for what they are.

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