You Can Just Do Things

The DOGE coup and the MAGA will to power.

It turns out you can just do things. You can wake up and change your life. You can start exercising, change your job, move, get married, get divorced, found a company, restore that motorcycle you’ve always dreamed about. Don’t wait for the perfect time. Don’t ask for permission. You can just do things. You can take over the government.

In recent years, “you can just do things” emerged as a self-help-tinged meme in Silicon Valley — an almost earnest call for people to do something, to act without fear or hesitation. Implied in “you can just do things” was that life is short, and people are hobbled by inaction, but anyone can conjure a certain will to power, an ability to break out and change the course of one’s life. On X, people have recently used “you can just do things” to celebrate a guy who “made 10k+/month sending potatoes in the mail” and Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 decision to live in San Francisco over Berkeley.

Exuberant and a little silly, as a lifestyle mantra and meme, it’s not bad. It reflected a period, at the tail end of the ZIRP era, when tech actually made very little substantive or enduring beyond new forms of fraud, digital tchotchkes, and speculative markets. The call from industry leaders like Marc Andreessen that “it’s time to build” stood in dramatic contrast from what tech was actually doing: financial engineering, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, lobbying its way toward greater political influence, and washing money for foreign dictatorships through failed startup investments. As society suffered through the pandemic and stagnation, some people invoked “you can just do things” as a prompt to work on themselves.

In the context of tech’s political economy, “you can just do things” took on a darker cast, especially as Elon Musk, David Sacks, Andreessen, and other right-wing tech reactionaries emerged as pivotal figures in the 2024 presidential campaign. Like its predecessor “move fast and break things,” the phrase reflected an impatient entitlement among tech elites to assume the mantle of power that they believed was theirs by right. In the fetid MAGA swamp, “you can just do things” wasn’t a spirited call for personal change. It was an authoritarian call for the seizure of power and total impunity.

You can see this attitude being enacted in how DOGE has swept through government agencies, sometimes with armed state agents in tow to help force their way past recalcitrant bureaucrats, and its willingness to task 19-year-old coders with the resumes of cyber-criminals to root through and potentially destroy decades-old infrastructure.

You can see it in Trump’s long-standing policy, imbued in him by Roy Cohn, to never apologize, never explain, and always attack the messenger. It’s become a useful descriptor to frame his rambling, impulsive rule by decree.

“Someone told him you can just do things,” wrote Jameson Lopp, a software engineer and prominent crypto industry figure, over a chart showing that Trump had issued more executive orders than any other president at this point in his term.

With its imperious finitude, the executive order is an apt tool for the “you can just do things” era of political governance. But it’s not the end point of this ideological project. We are watching the Trump administration destroy the rule of law — pardoning J6 rioters and financial criminals, repealing consumer-protection regulations, refusing to enforce corruption laws, placing industry executives in government posts where they can capitalize on conflicts of interests, taking payoffs from shady actors like Justin Sun, and, most significantly, allowing Elon Musk and DOGE to perform an administrative coup through which the world’s richest person has subverted the core systems and functions of the federal government. These opening salvos in what promises to be a years-long effort to erode government capacity, privatize services, and empower America’s oligarchs at the expense of the public — they, too, are products of people who believe, with sociopathic disregard for the consequences, that “you can just do things.”

For all of its criminality (and the soft electoral coup that brought it to power), the George W. Bush administration worked within the system it inherited, shoring up executive privilege, empowering the imperial presidency, and launching a globe-spanning campaign of kidnapping, torture, and assassination without challenging the fundamental assumption of American governance: that serious, well-educated elites were at least trying to work within the country’s democratic tradition. The global war on terror, for example, was justified by secret law and policy memos concocted by ghoulish functionaries like John Yoo, who wrote a lengthy memorandum about why particular torture techniques should be authorized. Yoo, of course, was never held accountable for his role in justifying torture because his work was sanctioned at the highest levels and broadly fit under accepted political norms. Indeed, whatever offenses he may have committed, whatever corrupt legal theories he might have advanced, were easily metabolized by an American political system that has become defined by elite impunity. And for his role in upholding this pantomime of legal rectitude, Yoo was rewarded, becoming a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school.

Despite whatever corporatist-libertarian fantasies Grover Norquist may have tried to ventriloquize into being, Bush didn’t succeed in privatizing social security, or bother trying to eliminate the Department of Education. But Trump might, because he simply doesn’t give a shit. Trump, Musk, and the DOGE cadre have broken the kayfabe that dictates the mores — the precious “norms” — of American political life. They don’t care what is legal or popular. They will just do what they want. They will break systems and deport undesirables while their apparatchiks, the dead-eyed edgelord successors to John Yoo’s white-shoed lawfare practitioners, offer dissembling arguments to judges whose “demands for answers” are already being ignored.

Soon, they will dispense with even that formality and stop arguing their cases before federal judges whose authority they don’t respect. One way or another, the judiciary will be sidelined. Chief Justice John Roberts, whose court granted Trump the almost limitless immunity that has helped bring us to this point of constitutional crisis, can complain all he wants about Trump’s disrespect toward federal judges. How many divisions does John Roberts have? And who cares about centuries of pious legal tradition, when you can just do things?