This article by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic is confronting:
There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing – How regime change happens in America
She describes the destruction of the 100-year-old US civil service and its replacement with a patronage system in which appointees must demonstrate fealty to a patron—either President Trump or Elon Musk—rather than the Constitution.
Anne has written extensively on autocracies. Her early books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956, and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She is also the author of the recent New York Times best-sellers Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
Conclusion
We are witnessing the end of an era. The damage done in the next two years is unlikely ever to be restored.