Get familiar with it and stop it The Musk-Trump administration is not looking to reduction-in-force its way to cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. That’s a smokescreen. What they’re attempting, says Paul Krugman, is an autogolpe, a self-coup. And with “the full support of every Republican in the House and the Senate.” “The federal work force is no larger now than it was under Dwight Eisenhower,” writes the economist. Laying off federal workers doesn’t even put a dent in $2 trillion. So why do it? It’s an attempt to capture the government wholesale. It’s a purge. Pure and simple. Throw out the old. Indescriminately. Bring in the newer, truer believers. Even if some Trump babies get tossed out with the bathwater. Republicans have long been willing to scarifice their own so long as they believe far more on the left will die a swift political death. * Krugman writes: Musk-Trumpocracy’s illegal shutdown of USAID should be seen through this lens. Musk clearly hates the idea of helping people in need: just look at the rage he has expressed over the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife. While he may believe that the agency is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”, it also serves the purpose of purging civil servants while demagoguing to Trump’s base. The same can be said of the confected furor over DEI. It hardly needs pointing out that the attempted purge at the FBI, targeting anyone who investigated Jan. 6 rioters or Trump himself, is an…