We are supposed to take governance seriously. After all, decisions made in the Oval Office affect all of us. The President's finger is on the nuclear trigger, his executive orders can remake the order of things with the flourish of a pen, and his every word is heard around the world.
Yet it is hard to take the caparisoned Musk cavalcade seriously, suddenly bursting into the offices of USAID - a vaudevillian Anschluss, an upending of inboxes, jackbooted guards at the exits singing the final ode of the Ring Cycle.
Im Feuer leuchtend, liegt dort dein Herr,
Siegfried, mein seliger Held.
Dem Freunde zu folgen wieherst du freudig?
Lockt dich zu ihm die lachende Lohe?
Fühl' meine Brust auch, wie sie entbrennt,
helles Feuer das Herz mir erfaßt,
ihn zu umschlingen, umschlossen von ihm,
in mächtigster Minne, vermählt ihm zu sein!
Siegfried, Donald, my lord and master!
Everywhere in Washington the Grand Guignol was repeated - tumbrels filled with bureaucrats headed for La Veuve, the guillotine, amidst cheering crowds. The crowds grappling to get in to the Ronald Reagan building when Musk's first panzer divisions broke through the gates, pushed and shoved to get a glimpse of the roundup, cheering as each apparatchik, each mandarin, each revenue sucking parasite was tethered, tied, and thrown pele-mele into the curricle.
As the tanks rolled down Independence Avenue, top floor windows were broken and G-15s clambered out onto rickety scaffolds swaying in the cold February wind and began to lower themselves, only to be corralled by the lynch mob below.
Downtown Washington was at a fever pitch, and armored personnel carriers were on every corner. SWAT teams and paramilitary legionnaires carrying bludgeons and battleaxes broke into the lobbies of one government department after another - Education, Social Welfare, Energy, Environment - followed by a rabble of cheering MAGA champions calling for blood.
Lines of coatless bureaucrats were lined up on the curb, hands tied behind their back, spat upon, kicked, and manhandled by the crowd while troopers stood by.
Elon Musk, face and hands covered with blood, but holding the glorious banner of victory high over his head, emerged from the Reagan building to howls of delight, a backslapping, Mardi Gras moment of high drama. Now, this is what I'm talking about, he said.
If only it could have been so, and not the colorless affair that it was. Stunned workers wondering what they had done, deer-in-the-headlights gaping as their computers were confiscated, desks shaken and overturned as they were escorted to the exits. Bureaucracies are warrens of incidental employees, cats' cradles of complexity with no way in or out; magical mazes duplicating each other, turning back on themselves designed with no outlet.
When the Musk troops were back in their barracks, their leader sipped a brandy and smoked a Cuban with his boss who, generally abstemious, allowed himself the luxury of a feet up on the desk moment of celebration. What a find, said the President about Elon Musk, a rabid street-fighting bully with more pissy, fuck you cojones than even he had.
Elon is my man, he said over and over again to anyone within earshot; and after this day of capitulation, abject surrender of the worst, most garrulously inane of any Washington bureaucracy, a bunch of fairies, do-gooders, and diversity queers that never worked for a living and instead sucked the teat of the federal treasure...Well, no more, kiddos, no more.
The two of them shared war stories - the mean streets of New York real estate and the bitchy world of Silicon Valley and lithium miners - and jostled each other to see who had the biggest number. Neither let the other win, and each talked over the other citing KIA and titanic battles. The Robber Barons had nothing on me, said Elon, and that was quite something. After all, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Morgan were no pussies and left no survivors.
Meanwhile Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, went public with his criticism of the President's tariff policy. Watch out, he said, come Super Bowl time, your Corona and guacamole dip will be more expensive, missing the point entirely but summing up the Democrat response to Trump's hectic week of executive orders. That's all he could come up with, Tex Mex chips and beer, while The Man was making waves, telling the world how it is.
Democrat Washington was a St. Vitus' dance - an spastic jumping and howling, a yipping and yelling, an incontinent whooping and tearing of hair - while the President and his minions were following a script he had written years ago. He was only biding his time until the right moment. Now that he was back in the Oval Office elected by a significant majority and his party in control of all branches of government he could do what he pleased. Draining the swamp, his campaign promise the first time around, was child's play compared to what he had in mind now.
Uprooting the sycophantic, money-guzzling, inept and venal bureaucracies was one thing; but restoring America to full-bore power, influence, and geopolitical supremacy was another. The USAID Saturday Night Massacre was only the beginning. 'So sue me', shouted Trump out the window and over the front lawn of the White House to the protestors in Lafayette Park.
'Enough of this', Trump said to Musk; downstairs they went to watch the women of the Folies Bergères, their dates for the night, free as they were from the censorious, petty, Puritanical hectoring of the offended Left. Back to the days of JFK, LBJ, and MLK, Lotharios all, sexual adventurers and macho men like their European counterparts. Sarkozy kept his mistress in the Elysees, and Mitterrand's lover and illegitimate daughter mourned over his grave alongside his wife.
Elon persuaded the American public that he worked all the time, but there was a time and place for everything, and he was very much looking forward to Mlle. de Villiers, la creme de la creme of the troupe, a lady of distinct charm and willingness.
As for the President, he had Marilyn Monroe in mind as he sat overlooking the Rose Garden where Kennedy and Marilyn had tea before bed, and where he would begin what he hoped would be a series of dalliances to do Prince Camelot proud.
'What's up tomorrow, boss?, Elon asked Trump, his blood still hot from that morning's raid. It was a heady moment, that, standing there among the overturned cubicles, watching the bound and gagged royalists thrown into the tumbrel. How he lived the moment, the blade of the guillotine shining brightly in the morning sun, the bucket ready to catch the first lopped head of the day. He was in his element, at the top of his game, and as happy as could be.
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