Elon Musk may now have unique sway over the US Treasury

Don't be so quick to fold. One of the things we've seen over the past few days that it's easy to overlook is that Trump doesn't have the power to do whatever he wants with executive orders. Look at the spending freeze. They reversed the order already because it was clear that they don't actually have the authority to turn off spending without legislative approval.

Trump and his team don't really seem to know what they're doing. One could argue that they're testing the waters, but that doesn't really hold up. It would make sense to slowly chip away at the changes they're trying to make and erode the balance of power. Instead they've basically challenged the supreme court and the legislation to let go of their own relevance. Some Republican representatives seem willing to do this, but so far the supreme court seems less than willing to make themselves powerless.

Frankly, giving full power to the executive branch would be a stupid move for the Republicans. They've spent all this time gaining power in three branches and securing a hold. It makes much more sense to use that power now than to pull their own teeth out just to appease a single administration.

Trump is pushing his luck. Corporate media seems happy to overstate the inevitably of his efforts succeeding, whether they support them or not, but that's just the money-fueled propaganda machine at work. We're already seeing that he can't actually just do whatever he wants, and the more he tries to the more we're going to see the rest of the system's resilience.

Don't give up hope yet.

more like 40 years of republicans

More than half the nation voted for this, ostensibly. Bc of... (checks notes) egg prices, and bc Biden lied about merely having a cold, before finally doing the right thing and stepping down from running again since he was too old to handle it.

Whatever comes, we brought this on ourselves. With our geriatricracy (geriocracy? either way, I have just decided that is a word that needed to have existed, so there, now it does:-) and abuses of the system that finally killed it. Even Rome fell. No nation has ever survived devolving into a mere 2-party system, the only surprise here is how quickly it fell (and even that mostly to those not paying attention to how powerful Faux News had become).

He's not even a U.S. citizen.

Same way Trump's family did in his first term.