Opinion | Look Past Elon Musk’s Chaos. There’s Something More Sinister at Work.

Whatever you choose to call it, Elon Musk has captured the inner workings of the U.S. government on President Trump’s behalf. His operatives reportedly infiltrated the General Services Administration, gained access to the nation’s system for issuing payments like tax refunds, locked workers out of computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management and strong-armed U.S.A.I.D. into halting humanitarian work across the globe. They have vowed to slash essential research budgets and have put the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in their sights.

Republican voters signed up for “The Trump Show: Politics Edition.” Musk is producing and distributing that show, one chaotic bite at a time.

In response to a brutal week for democracy, the Democratic leadership in Congress held a news conference. Chuck Schumer led those gathered in a chant, “We will win,” hands held high with Maxine Waters. Elizabeth Warren did a nice job of explaining what the payments mean to regular people. They framed the takeover of the Treasury Department’s payment system as an unprecedented overreach of power.

But the minority party cannot just chant. It has to act on what isn’t debatable: Trump has deputized a questionably legal extragovernmental actor. His mission is not just to dismantle the federal government, but to demoralize it.

So far, Musk’s DOGE gang has outmaneuvered the Democrats and produced a governmental soap opera that confuses some Americans but feeds their fans what they want. Storming anodyne cubicles as if they’re Waterloo creates chaos and it satisfies fans’ desire to vicariously storm the seat of world power. In Musk, Trump has found something important for his stylistic approach to authoritarianism. He needs a muckraker who can create content for our media environment.

I could not help but feel that the Democrats’ response, staged for 20th-century media with a lectern, microphones and standing outside in the cold, could not compete with the emotional power of content. And that could have disastrous consequences. DOGE is a democracy wrecking machine. It is targeting the government’s plumbing, the infrastructure that makes the state reliable and legitimate for millions of Americans.

DOGE is also a propaganda machine. A friend asked me recently why a president who controls both legislative chambers would need to elbow his administration’s way into relatively small, if important, bureaucratic offices. Why, he wondered, all the questionably legal mafia-like tactics?

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 organization” as Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development. 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 recognized 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 Elon 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 Space X, it made an otherwise uncharismatic billionaire seem like a real-life Tony Stark.

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 NDAs 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 monetized. 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 M.O. 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.

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 U.S.A.I.D. one week and C.F.P.B. 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 Chuck 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 indicting yourself or others to act, your political rhetoric will not eclipse Trump’s chaos.