Was this weekend a trial balloon for a coup?

"Yesterday was the trial balloon for a coup dtat against the United States," writes Yonatan Zunger on Medium. The "administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored."

Combining all of these facts, we have a fairly clear picture in play.

1. Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you.
2. The regimes main organizational goal right now is to transfer all effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress, or the Courts. Departments are being reorganized or purged to effect this.
3. The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize unchallenged power; yesterdays moves should be read as the first part of that.
4. The aims of crushing various groupsMuslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the pressare very much primary aims of the regime, and are likely to be acted on with much greater speed than was earlier suspected. The secondary aim of personal enrichment is also very much in play, and clever people will find ways to play these two goals off each other.

Image above: "The seniormost staff of the Department of State. Blue Xs are unfilled positions; red Xs are positions which were purged. Note that the filled positions are not actually confirmed yet."