The easy answer is that this is just Trump’s style and Musk is unpredictable. That is true, but it does not clearly assess the strategic efficacy of deploying gamified smash-and-grab antics.
Musk’s escapades are political posturing staged like a video game side quest. The DOGE playbook is to target an office of which most Americans have only a vague notion. Then Musk’s operatives label the office a villain in overblown comic terms – “a criminal organisation” as Musk called USAID. Then, the executive branch uses DOGE to pick a fight it knows it can win.
Musk’s fans love his narration of power as a vicarious gamelike experience of dominance. These fans don’t find the DOGE escapades chaotic or confusing. If anything, the bombastic flouting of norms and laws makes the world more sensible to them. It is government and civic life they don’t understand. Musk clarifies a scary world for them, putting it in terms they understand. Bad guy. Good guy. Evil. Villain. Kill. Win.
This is propaganda, but it is also a skilled manipulation of content in a content-saturated culture. Increasingly we cannot escape the closed world of bite-size performativity that feels like the real world. All of our emotions are fuel for the content machines that don’t care what we feel, only that we do.
Musk’s playbook makes us feel, with all the drama of a middle school burn book. His purchase of Twitter came with similar dramatics. He made an offer and tried to back out of it, while his online fans painted the social media company as Marxist and censorious. After completing his purchase, Musk walked into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink. It was something comic book fans recognised as an Easter egg – a semiotic message that looks absurd or chaotic to outsiders but makes perfect sense to insiders who know the Musk lore.
And that is what Musk does well. He turns routine cutthroat corporate shenanigans – stock buyouts and finance deals that usually would not leave the business press – into content for his fans. When he did that for Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX, it made an otherwise uncharismatic billionaire seem like a real-life Tony Stark.
Loading
Now, he is making the same kind of chaos-as-content in the federal government. But here, the stakes are far higher, and all of Musk’s preening on social media obscures what is actually happening. That is what content is really good at doing. It feels transparent to see an influencer bake bread in her grandma chic retro kitchen or to see a billionaire storm a corporate headquarters to vanquish his enemies to unemployment. But content does not reveal the machinery of influencing – the deals signed, the nondisclosure agreements issued, the metrics used to measure the dollar value of the audience’s emotional response. In politics, content can hide the money and power at play.
Content feels a lot like old school political spin, but unlike spin, it can be completely captured, its amplification manipulated and the response to it monetised. It can look like information while conveying little real meaning. But the problem with content isn’t that it is inherently empty or fake; it generates real emotion. But when it comes to civic life, it does everything in its power to keep you from taking any action beyond its economic interests.
It is fast becoming clear that this content-driven chaos is going to be the MO of Trump 2.0. Trump may have learned in his first term that there is a political price for not feeding your loyalists enough content. Governance got in the way of the content machine he built on the campaign trail. Since then, he has had four years to refine his strategy. Chaos is central to his deployment of unchecked executive power. But chaos has to be tended like a fire. It needs the right amount of constant oxygen to keep it going.
That is Musk’s utility to Trump. He is willing to fill in for Trump by consistently producing DOGE’s bureaucratic takeovers as content.
If you are confused when you see Musk narrating a serious civic affair like a video game side quest, understand that you are not the intended audience. What looks like chaos to you is actually clarifying content to someone else. Those who understood Musk’s sink bit thought that a chaotic world made a bit more sense. Everyone else wondered why a billionaire was lugging around a porcelain fixture.
Loading
So wherever the content seems unbelievable, inscrutable or chaotic, it is best not to look away but rather to look around it, for actions or effects that are far more portentous. Musk, for all his antics, is now at an office that aligns with his technological expertise, his contacts, his grudges and his financial interests. His content may be about USAID one week and the CFPB the next. But looking beneath the content’s chaotic veneer reveals a strategic takeover of national interests that will demolish the state’s functionality in a way that benefits the ones swinging the hammer.
What we have is a president who made his career as a real estate developer and an empowered minion leading the federal government to move fast and break things. It is a politic of socialism-for-me and scarcity-for-thee: chasing government contracts while simultaneously compromising the government’s ability to pay its bills.
Chaos wants to shut down thinking and feeling by trapping us in the emotional state of its choosing. Name-calling, rudeness, childishness and pettiness put those of us who do not want to be the Twitch audience to Trump and Musk’s content on the defensive. Looking away would preserve our sanity. But content’s secret politics is that it wants people to look away while it works on the people who don’t. So what do we do about it?
You acknowledge that the chaos is smoke, but the heist is the fire. Don’t look away from the smoke. Look through it for what is being taken, redefined and reallocated. Stop pointing out the hypocrisy. The other side does not care. Its content makes the people there feel powerful but action is the only real power.
The left wing of the Democratic Party finally convinced the once-resistant Schumer that opposition is action. It is the best tool that a minority party has. More important, it expands our field of play beyond the area that Trump and Musk now control. If you are not inciting yourself or others to act, your political rhetoric will not eclipse Trump’s chaos.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
