Lesotho’s troubled political journey offers American scholars of coup risk a rich narrative of how democracies are captured through cycles of instability. The mountainous kingdom’s history reveals an interplay between militant ambition, constitutional weakness, and politics that almost guarantees a coup.

Lesotho’s government says it is shocked by US President Donald Trump saying that “nobody has ever heard of” the southern African nation. Trump, addressing the US Congress in his first speech since his return to the Oval Office, made the reference… “Eight million dollars to… the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” Trump said, eliciting laughter from some US lawmakers.

Who would make Lesotho so notable in an important speech, such that Trump would make special notice, yet also prompt him to slip out that nobody would take notice unless…?

The country is well known among historians of military intervention also called coups (hey, that’s me!). But it has even more particular meaning to white South Africans like Elon Musk, born in Pretoria during the apartheid era when Lesotho served as refuge for anti-apartheid refugees.

Since independence in 1966 from British colonial occupation, Lesotho experienced a recurring pattern of constitutional authority being gradually eroded until military intervention occurred.

Tension and imbalance began immediately for the new state, when a King attempted to make monarchial powers great again, beyond the freshly written constitutional-monarchy framework. This fundamental disagreement about where authority in a democracy should ultimately rest – with elected officials or elitist monarchs/oligarchs – has haunted Lesotho ever since, much as America debates legislative versus an unaccountable unitary executive power.

Musk and DOGE try to slash government by cutting out those who answer to voters

The Lesotho watershed was 1970, when a Prime Minister facing electoral defeat simply refused to accept the results. He instead declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, and placed the King under house arrest. This precedent has obvious harms: constitutional processes can be set aside when they became inconvenient to those in power.

Indeed, the refusal to accept electoral defeat created the dangerous template that would be followed repeatedly afterwards, including the 1998 crisis when opposition parties rejected election results despite the LCD winning 79 of 80 seats – claiming fraud without sufficient evidence.

Military intervention for state capture then necessarily became normalized in Lesotho’s political landscape. When a Major General finally overthrew the sixteen-long-years’ Prime Minister government in 1986, it marked how military involvement was the next level of crisis. The relationship between civilian leadership and military command was horribly strained, with the inherent power of military factions becoming sucked into political disputes rather than allowed to remain neutral.

The fragility of democracy was further complicated by geographic encirclement by South Africa. Lesotho is extraordinarily vulnerable to external pressures, such as during South Africa’s extreme violence to keep apartheid going (e.g. the failure of which allegedly prompted Elon Musk to abruptly flee in 1988 to America with big bags of apartheid money).

The 1982 Christmas spirit quickly dissipated. [The capitol city of Lesotho,] Maseru residents were in a state of shock and disbelief. The city centre took on a new shape: bullet holes marked the walls of houses, homes were ransacked, windows broken, frames charred, and smoke emanated from debris comprised of a mixture of built fabric and human remains. During the attack [by South African apartheid forces], some people were wrapped in blankets by SADF officials and set on fire. […] This was the period when South Africa was heavily engaged in an onslaught on the rest of the sub-continent and Lesotho was on the top of South Africa’s hit list.

Even Ronald Reagan “deplored” this “Operation Blanket“, named for how South African troops planned to burn political opponents to death (foreshadowing Elon Musk’s death-trap design of Tesla).

While Lesotho was on the right side of history, as it harbored refugees from an international tyranny of apartheid, the rise of South African democracy didn’t eliminate the power imbalances. South Africa, as well as Botswana, and Zimbabwe, repeatedly continued to intervene in Lesotho’s ongoing affairs, even militarily, on the premise of helping “situations” to stabilize.

Recently, Lesotho has experimented with coalition governments, which has created new vulnerabilities. A Prime Minister who faced a 2014 no-confidence vote, suspended parliament and later fled the country claiming a military coup attempt. The military’s confused leadership response – fractured into competing internal claims of command authority – reflected how appointments had been for political convenience and partisan rather than professional positions of best national interest.

For American scholars of coup risk, Lesotho demonstrates exactly how democratic institutions gradually hollow out from within. This goes beyond academic theory into a practical playbook of methods for democratic erosion, tested and refined by opportunistic elites across multiple countries. Elon Musk thus stands out, for obvious reasons.

The formal structures of democracy – elections, parliaments, courts – on the surface continue to exist, but their effectiveness is undermined by corrupted leaders who bypass them or ignore any outcomes.

What appears superficially to be a functioning democracy becomes increasingly vulnerable to undemocratic interventions when constitutional processes no longer provide legitimate paths to resolve political conflicts.

The Lesotho narrative warns that coups rarely emerge from nowhere, and we already know some of the where. They typically follow democratic norms being eroded in the open, where constitutional processes are subverted, and military leadership is politicized.

Those studying coup risks recognize why a bureaucrat like Trump suddenly referenced Lesotho after his close collaboration with President Musk, whose oppressive role brings perspectives shaped by his South African apartheid upbringing of racist regional interventions and imposed constitutional crises.

It’s past time for Americans to examine these deep patterns of institutional decay that made military intervention highly probable – and sometimes even predictable – seeing them not as distant foreign problems but as warning signs increasingly visible in our own democracy’s stress points caused by a South African-led DOGE coup team.

The US Marshals Service has deputized members of Elon Musk’s private security detail, which means they will now have certain rights and protections of federal law enforcement agents.