The United States has spent decades perfecting the art of regime change. From Latin America to West Asia, it has overthrown governments, installed compliant leaders and crushed resistance – sometimes with military force, other times through economic warfare. Washington dictated the rules of a unipolar world – and for years, no one could challenge it.

But the tide has turned.

This time, the coup is not in Caracas, Tehran or Baghdad. It is happening in Washington DC. And the orchestrator is no foreign adversary but Elon Musk.

A dramatic photograph, taken on February 11, shows Musk standing in what many have begun calling his “courtroom” while President Donald Trump sat at the Resolute Desk, his presence seemingly reduced to that of a poker chip. The New York Times compared it to a “king’s court”.

In the days since Trump was sworn in, Musk has moved aggressively. The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, was shut down. The Consumer Protection Bureau is being dismantled. Career bureaucrats are being purged. Regulatory agencies – most of which were investigating Musk’s companies and business practices – were hollowed out. Financial systems were taken over by his new department of government efficiency, infamously called DOGE.

Musk’s donations and support for Trump were largely dismissed as political activism. But he did not lobby for power; he seized it. His “buyout offers” – thinly veiled ultimatums – coerced resignations across departments. The message could not be clearer: kneel or be removed.

This is not the traditional influence that powerful individuals and organizations exert on governments. It is a takeover.

The US has long exported this strategy to countries and governments it saw as adversaries. Now, the playbook is being used at home. The institutions of the state are being stripped and repopulated with loyalists. The machinery of governance is being reengineered to serve one man.

These are familiar markers of regime change – intimidation, economic coercion, political purges. The only difference is that this time, the target is the United States itself.

The ambitions do not stop at the American borders.

Musk has positioned himself as a global kingmaker. He is actively forging alliances with far-right parties and extremist politicians. In Europe, he has aligned with Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Britain’s Nigel Farage – all of whom hold deep contempt for the liberal democratic order.

He is cultivating, platforming, and funnelling money to nationalist leaders who see democracy as an obstacle rather than a virtue. His ideological influence is growing and Washington DC, under Trump’s transactional gaze, stands behind him, protecting him from consequences.

On February 14, US Vice President JD Vance, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, openlyendorsed collaboration with the far-right AfD, nine days before the German elections.

The signal is unmistakable. Washington DC no longer exclusively views Europe as a natural ally, nor China and Russia as primary adversaries. Now, it sees the entire globe as a battlefield for ideological expansion. At the conference, Vance was clear: the enemy is not authoritarianism, but the so-called erosion of “free speech”. This not-so-coded phrase, frequently invoked by far-right and conservative parties, has most recently been weaponised by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to justify the deregulation of his social media empire.

The consequences of it all are enormous, but not unfamiliar.

Europe’s leaders have long viewed America as a stabilising force, a protector. Now, they face an unnerving reality: the Trump administration does not defend democracy, it seeks to dismantle it and is willing to intervene in elections to make that happen. For them, this is the construction of an entirely new order – something that Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Recep Erdoğan in Turkey have done with their state institutions.

Political pundits like to describe these developments as an attack on democratic institutions, an assault on the liberal order. But they forget that this has been happening for years, just not in their own part of the world. The only difference now is that they, too, are victims. Musk, who rails against “unelected” judges blocking his enterprise, now stands as the most powerful unelected figure in American politics.

Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and public policy graduate from the Willy Brandt School and Central European University.