The Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate USAID is many things: an unfolding humanitarian nightmare, a rollback of American soft power, the thin end of a wedge meant to reorder the Constitution. But upon closer examination, it is also an outbreak of delusional paranoia that has spread from Elon Musk throughout the Republican Party’s rank and file.

Several days ago, the administration began promoting the theory that USAID was secretly directing a communist conspiracy of unknown dimensions. Musk, who is running point on Donald Trump’s efforts to unmask and destroy this internal conspiracy, claimed on X, “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” Trump, adopting an uncharacteristic tone of more-in-sadness-than-in-anger, told reporters in the Oval Office: “I love the concept, but they turned out to be radical-left lunatics.”

Soon Musk declared that he had uncovered explosive evidence for this belief: The agency had funneled $8 million to Politico. Why exactly the Marxist plotters at USAID would select Politico as the vehicle for their scheme—its owner, the German media giant Axel Springer, has right-of-center politics with a strong pro-Israel tilt—has not been fully explained. But Musk’s discovery soon rocketed across X, the social-media platform he owns and uses promiscuously, and became official government policy.

“LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” Trump wrote on his own social-media site, Truth Social. “THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000 … THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY!”

[Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president]

In fact, USAID has not given millions to Politico. The agency subscribed to E&E News by Politico, a premium service that provides detailed, fairly boring, and decidedly noncommunist coverage of energy and environmental policy. Most of Politico’s paying subscribers, according to its editors, work in the private sector. Many of them are lobbyists, who are also, as a rule, unreceptive to communist ideology, and who pay for comprehensive coverage of the inner workings of Congress and the federal bureaucracy, which holds little interest for a general audience.

Government officials themselves also subscribe to Politico and other paywalled news sources. This is because, far from masterminding intricate conspiracies, public employees are often just trying to figure out what’s happening using the same information sources available to the public. Thus USAID spent $24,000 on E&E subscriptions for its staff in 2024, and $20,000 the year before. The $8 million figure encompasses Politico subscriptions across the entire executive branch. Musk has been conspiratorially describing these subscriptions as “contracts,” as if the government is paying Politico for something other than articles about the government.

If USAID is a secret left-wing plot, leftists themselves have not been let in on the secret. Actual Marxists despise USAID, which they consider a tool of American imperialism. Jacobin, a self-consciously radical-socialist journal, has spent years railing against the agency for “stealthily advancing the interests of the Salvadoran corporate class,” working to “augment center-right parties throughout much of the Global South,” and even having the effrontery to fund a rock band that criticized Hugo Chávez, among other nefarious capitalistic schemes.

Some leftists have noticed the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate the hated agency, and they’re not angry. The journalist Ryan Grim, who has decidedly left-wing views on foreign policy, has optimistically asked whether Trump’s crusade against USAID indicates a desire “to unwind and reorient American empire.”

The left-wing critique of USAID is considerably more grounded in reality than Musk’s is. Although the agency carries out humanitarian works, those programs have a dual purpose of advancing American soft power and resisting propaganda from hostile countries—originally from the Soviet bloc, and today from China. Not long ago, USAID’s strongest advocates included some of the most anti-communist (and thus conservative) members of Congress. As recently as 2022, Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who now praises Trump’s crackdown on the agency, was calling for it to boost staffing in order to more efficiently disburse humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

[Russell Berman: Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play]

The process by which Musk came to his conclusions does not inspire great confidence. His expertise lies mostly outside public policy. He arrived in Washington, D.C., and quickly set out to prove that he could identify at least $1 trillion in annual waste and fraud, a figure wildly out of scale with the conclusions of every serious expert. He claims to be working 120 hours a week, yet is posting on X at a manic pace, sending more than 3,000 tweets a month, at all hours of the night. Musk has acknowledged that he has a prescription for ketamine, a drug that can cause unpredictable behavior if abused. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that people close to Musk worry that his recreational drug use—including “LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” according to the article—was driving his erratic behavior and could adversely affect his businesses. (His attorney accused the Journal of printing “false facts,” and told the paper that Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.”)

It is entirely possible that Musk genuinely thinks he has stumbled upon a vast conspiracy, rather than an anodyne plan to give public employees access to a rather staid news source. Every response he has made to outside criticism tracks the most typical paranoid thought process. He believes that politicians criticize him because they, too, are collecting “kickbacks and bribes.” He has accordingly interpreted all opposition to his moves as just more proof that he is onto something big.

The ultimate conspiracy that Musk thinks he has uncovered goes far beyond even USAID. On Wednesday, Musk reposted an X post claiming that “all the elections are rigged and fake, all the liberal media outlets have no audience and are kept alive by USAID funding. All their politicians and political pundits are paid by USAID to say what the government wants.” Musk’s commentary: “Yes.”

Any well-functioning political party would laugh off such claims as kookery. Musk, however, has attained a unique place of power because of his simultaneous position as Trump’s proxy and the owner of a powerful communications platform. X is teeming with accounts repeating and amplifying Musk’s firehose of nonsense, spinning it into a grand narrative in which Musk has heroically exposed a left-wing, taxpayer-funded cabal that has orchestrated various disasters behind the scenes.

What remains of the conservative establishment has mostly defaulted to applying a sheen of rationality to Musk’s paranoid fantasy. “Mr. Musk sometimes blows hot air, and he needs to be watched to stay within legal guardrails,” a Wall Street Journal editorial gently scolded. “But he’s also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the U.S. Agency for International Development.”

[Hana Kiros: America can’t just unpause USAID]

“The tofu-eating wokerati at the USAID are screaming like they’re part of a prison riot, because they don’t want us reviewing the spending,” Republican Senator John Kennedy told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “But that’s all Mr. Musk is doing. And he’s finding some pretty interesting stuff.”

The result is that Musk’s most fervent devotees can believe that he has broken open a globalist plot responsible for stealing elections and manufacturing consent for the liberal agenda, while more responsible figures can pretend he’s doing nothing more than auditing funds for waste. This is the same justification process that enabled Trump’s insurrection after the 2020 election: The true believers said Trump had uncovered massive voter fraud, while the Republicans who knew better claimed he just wanted to use his legal right to count the votes and make sure the result was legit.

The Republican establishment may now be calculating that the smart move is to go along with Trump’s and Musk’s delusions. Just cancel some government-agency news subscriptions, maybe zero out a few spending programs, and wait for the howling mob to move on to new obsessions. But if the Republican Party’s leaders have proved anything over the past decade, it’s that the paranoid demagogues they think they can control are usually controlling them.

I      Maps
The corner of Ashmun & Grove & the sometimes
When the only evidence is a map; the disappearing

English of old: plat, a funky word that exists most
In memory, meant to make a plan or map of;
To draw to scale; to plot.

A man who cannot read coordinates can still plot
On his freedom. Imagine a rectangle on the oldest
Map in these nine squares of geography

Once called a wilderness.

         Quinnipiac           Pequot           Paugussett

To plot freedom is to leave the words that matter
Written across everything you own that matters,
As in leave the names that your loves call you
All the places that you traverse.

As in, to name is to announce worthy of remembrance.


II     Property
Some evidence of  this life is always measured
By the weight of  La Llorona’s weeping.

Jethro Jethro Jethro Jethro Jethro
Jethro Jethro Jethro owed his name. Left
This world owed his name. Who enters heaven
Owed their name? Who enters nameless?

        Historical Catalogue of  the Members of  the First Church of
        Christ in New Haven, Connecticut, A.D. 1639–1914
        Compiled by Franklin Bowditch Dexter

                         CATALOGUE OF MEMBERS, 1726–28

May 15.    875.  Patience Mix (John) Alling                      *May, 1786
                          Daughter of Caleb and Mary (494); born March, 1699;                                  wife of 1052.
                 876.  Mary Atwater (Isaac) Dickerman             *17—
                          Daughter of 421 and 338; born Dec., 1686; wife of 605.
                 877.  Experience Perkins (David) Gilbert          *May, 1748
                          Daughter of  David and Deliverance (354); born Dec., 1699;
                          wife of 1111.
                 878.  Jethro Luke (colored)                               *1760–61

Franklin knew his name enough to count
Him more than 3/5ths,

To list his surname & call him colored,
To be counted & named, the fourth member
Whose lineage included a slave ship.
The first non-European with a surname listed,

From an old English variant that sounds like luck,
Or happenstance, which in the land of cotton is a variant

For the word irony, for deliverance, think Luke
Of  the Gospel, Luke the liberator, Luke as
English variant of  Lucas, Lucius, bright, light

For a plot listed in the corner of a map.

Jethro Luke was colored, cast in shadows
Of manacles—or, in the parlance
Of  Marx & Pareto: Jethro was owed,

Left owning little, beyond whatever he held
When his eyes searched the freedom of a night sky:

Brown coat … old great Coat … brown Jacket … white Jacket,
1 check shirt … black stocking … old ax … small tongs …
old gun barrel … great Bible … 8 round bottles … candle stick …
old mare … pair of  oxen … plow share

III   Freedom
Is one way to name this story.
Sometimes only maps be evidence.
In 1748, a corner mark confesses:

Jethro a Black man farmer.
Corner of Ashmun & Grove, a small city park
Cradling the Grove Street cemetery,
& all the freedom not permitted to rest there—

                 Jethro Ruth Mindwell Sampson Betty Joe
                 Jinny Mingo Sanders Sabina Sibyl
                 Phyllis Dinah Pero Sume Pompey Gad
                 Rose Rhoda Phyllis Pompey Williams Newport
                 Amasa Silva Cesar Rose Cato Leah Socoro
                 Peter Alice Little George Jack York Pressey
                 Polly Cesar Peter Simeon Joseph Bristol
                 Nando Jeff Congo Pompey Benjamin Cuff Phillis
                 Sharper Rogers Jack David Gardiner Dinah
                 Bet Alling Jack Geff Ruben Ruth Cambridge
                 Cuff Edwards Amy Belfast Fowler Primus
                 Tim Lenard Eli Harry Sue Daggett Gain Amey
                 Joe Place Jane Cesar Jin Daniel Thomas.

This poem is from Reginald Dwayne Betts’s new book, Doggerel.