It’s a coup. We usually envisage such events as sudden, militaristic regime changes in a far off nations, usually considered unstable. Tanks rolling through the gates of a Presidential palace, troops seizing a tv station. But some coups are longer in the making.

The greater the constitutional safeguards, the greater the general stability, the longer and more insidious is the coup. The drafters of the US Constitution, wary of power being vested in a single monarch, established three branches of government executive, judicial and legislative to protect the Republic. This represented a system of checks and balances, a separation of powers, a desire to prevent any one individual or group from taking complete control.

For nearly 250 years the Constitution served its intended purpose. To take total power in the US required the seizing of all three pillars of Government. Yet that is the situation that exists today, a collaborative project between those acting on behalf of foreign powers, right-wing ideologues and some of the richest men in the world.

While the attempt to overthrow the election result on January 6th 2021 failed it created an opportunity for deeper preparation for the consequences of the 2024 election. Project 2025 became the template, an understanding by those who would take power that the complete dismantling of the checks and balances must be initiated with undue haste.

The creation of a strike force capable of entering every government agency and disrupting them from day 1 led to the creation of DOGE, a private tech army tasked with undermining every facet of the existing administration. By its actions in programs such as USAID the immediate consequences include hunger and disease proliferation in the poorest countries in the world.

The Congress is ineffective and under MAGA control, the Senate has too many Democrats blind to the threat, too frightened to stand up to the bully or too dependent on financial support from the same sources as Trump. The White House has turned its gaze on the judges who still try to apply the law with a ferocity that concerns even the right-wing members of the Supreme Court.

There’s no point at which a coup slows down or stops, every action is determined by the need to protect those responsible, that means greater control, more restrictions, the loss of freedom. Controlling the sources of information, silencing those who try to use any remaining legal routes to challenge, declaring emergencies to expand authoritarian rule.

Trump and those around him look with envy upon the regimes of Xi Jinping and Putin. Those same regimes need the US to be on the same trajectory to remove any obstacle to their expansive plans. Putin mistimed his invasion of Ukraine, Trump was supposed to be back in the White House and Kyiv unprotected but impatience or economic reality made him invade when he did. Now he gets to reset his objectives. Xi Jinping values a US Government with no interest in supporting Taiwan, or South Korea, or Japan. In return for not interfering in others ambitions Trump gets to cast his gaze on Canada and Greenland.

Why would Greenland be of such interest, not to Trump, but to those who direct him? A massive land of ice a mile deep becomes a massive land of opportunity when the ice melts. To do that requires the end of initiatives to address climate change and yes “drill baby drill”. This coup will decimate North America and, if it beds in, will have catastrophic consequences across the world. There can be no diplomacy with those who have taken control, even to try will be seen for what it is, a sign of weakness.