The Elon empire It is Musk, not Trump, who is running America

"Musk has seized control of many of the organs of state. There does not seem to be any way to stop him"

- Moira Donegan

It's one of the humiliations of our historical moment that the constitutional order has been destroyed by such stupid and unserious people. On the trail with Donald Trump, the billionaire Elon Musk, who financed Trump's campaign to the tune of about $250m, pledged to cut $2tn from the federal budget, a project that promised to wreck the economy, destroy the nation's credit, eliminate programmes and institutions that structure people's lives and create an international economic and leadership vacuum into which America's rivals - namely, China - could step.

This would have been ominous enough on its own. But because Musk is a narcissist and a nerd - because he insists on discarding solemnity and being ostentatiously irreverent and carefree as he destroys people's lives - he named his new project the "department of government efficiency", or Doge, a juvenile reference to a years-old internet meme featuring a shiba inu dog.

It is under this idiotic banner that Musk has upended the American system of government, seizing an unprecedented, unelected and seemingly unaccountable degree of personal power. Less than a month into the Trump restoration, Doge is well under way.