Like many Americans lately, I am seized with curiosity about who is actually running the government of the United States. For that reason, I watched Sean Hannity’s Fox News interview tonight with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

But I am still not sure who’s in charge. If there is a headline from the interview, it is that the president of the United States feels that he requires the services of a multi-billionaire to enforce his executive orders. Trump complained that he would write these “beautiful” executive orders, that would then languish in administrative limbo. Musk, for his part, explained how the president is the embodiment of the nation and that resisting his orders is the same as thwarting the will of the people. Hannity, of course, enthusiastically supported all of this whining about how hard it is to govern a superpower.

In other words, it was an hour of conversation among three men who have no idea how American democracy works.

The goal of the interview, I assume, was to calm some of the waters around Trump’s relationship with Musk, and especially to present Musk as just another patriotic American who is only trying to help out his government in a time of crisis. Hannity deplored how shamefully the richest man in the world is being treated despite trying to create technologies to “help the blind to see.” Trump and Musk bemoaned how the world is trying to drive them apart, but affirmed that they like each other very much. “I wanted to find somebody smarter than him,” Trump said in one of his classic insult-praise combination punches, “but I couldn’t do it.”

[Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president]

They may have even been telling the truth: Trump loves people who publicly love him back, and Musk seems to be grateful to be in a place—in this case, the White House—where people aren’t judging him for supporting Trump, a new social opprobrium that clearly stings him. “The eye-daggers level is insane,” he said, after recounting that people at a dinner party reacted to Trump’s name as if they’d been hit with “a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies.” (This, from a man whose social media feed is a daily exercise in trolling.)

The interview was arduous both for the viewer and for Hannity, because everyone who interviews Trump must always contend with the president’s apparent inability to hold a single thought for very long. Hannity, as usual, tried to throw softballs; Trump, as usual, missed every pitch. Hannity at one point noted that Trump has “become a student of history” and then asked how the Framers of the Constitution would view his efforts to rein in the bureaucracy. Trump verbally wandered about before returning to his talking points about Musk, who he said is “amazing” and “cares.” So say James Madison and the other Founders, apparently.

And so it went, with Trump digressing into various riffs drawn from his rally speeches, ranging from immigration to the money he saved on contracts for Air Force One to hurricane damage in North Carolina. (He was trying to praise Musk for providing Starlink access to stricken areas, but it was evident that Trump has no idea what Starlink is or does.)

A few other news flashes from the interview: The president of the United States thinks that the government should not pay its bills in full. It should lowball its contractors and force them to accept half payment, he said. Former President Joe Biden was going to leave two American astronauts marooned in space for “political reasons” according to Musk. Also, Biden wrecked America in every possible way, but they’re fixing it. Musk said he has never seen Trump do anything “mean” or “wrong,” while Trump claimed that he’s always respected Musk. Musk added that he’s never asked Trump for anything, ever, and that if a conflict should arise in his DOGE efforts, he’ll recognize it and recuse himself.  (Earlier today, when asked why DOGE and SpaceX employees are working at the FAA and DoD, agencies where Musk has contracts or regulatory relationships, Trump said: “Well, I mean, I’m just hearing about it.”) Finally, Trump and Musk expect to find a trillion dollars of fraud and waste in the government.

Musk did generally behave himself, instead of stealing the show as he did a few days ago in the Oval Office. When prompted by Trump, he said he very much liked “Bobby”—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. —who he said was demonstrating the scientific method by questioning science.  And in an interesting moment of inadvertent candor, Musk also defended some of the people working for DOGE, noting that they were taking much lower pay to help the government rather than the salaries they could command in private industry—much like the people he’s working to get fired.

[Tom Nichols: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy]

Hannity at one point brushed away Musk’s status as an unelected functionary by noting that no one votes for the Cabinet, either, which returns us to the problem that this conversation took place among people who do not understand the basic structure of their own government. (Cabinet officials, unlike Musk, are confirmed by the Senate and impeachable; the days when Republicans objected to Hillary Clinton’s task force on health care because she was unelected and unaccountable are now only of blessed memory.)

After an hour of this rambling and sometimes weird conversation, all I could think of was George W. Bush’s reported reaction to Trump’s first inaugural address: “That was some weird shit.”

This low-key fandango was probably good enough for MAGA fan-servicing purposes, but seems unlikely to reassure the millions of Americans doubtful that the president and the plutocrat know what they’re doing. The president seems only dimly aware of the details of Musk’s adventures, but he’s certain a smart guy like Musk is furthering his agenda—whatever it is. Musk, who answers to no one, is full of fervor to kill off government agencies he does not understand, because unelected rich men firing probationary federal employees is apparently how true Jeffersonian democracy is restored to an ailing America.

How long this chaos can go on is anyone’s guess. At some point, Musk might cross one of Trump’s other officials, or he might bring enough bad press that Trump himself could end up throwing Musk off the ship of state, as he has done to so many other of his loyal subordinates. But no matter how it ends, Trump will still be president, and Musk will still be rich. The rest of us, unfortunately, will be living with the damage done.

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.

Donald Trump campaigned, in part, on returning political power to American Christians. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump promised a room full of religious news broadcasters in February 2024. “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5.” At different campaign events, he vowed both that Christian leaders would have a line “directly into the Oval Office—and me” and that he would create a federal task force to “stop the weaponization of our government against Christians.” Now, not even three weeks into his new term, he has begun down quite the opposite path.

Among the Trump administration’s first efforts were orders that delivered a stunning blow to humanitarian organizations, including the suspension of foreign aid pending review, the halting of refugee-resettlement programs, the dismantling of USAID, and the freezing of all federal grants that normally flow to nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, the official domestic relief agency of the Catholic Church. Catholic Charities represents a network of 168 local groups nationwide offering disaster assistance, meals, and housing for people in need, and refugee services and programs for migrants. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the freeze was part of a broader effort to root out “wokeness,” though it’s difficult to match that descriptor to this particular organization. And although the freeze on federal grants and loans was paused two days after Trump signed the order, many organizations are still unable to access funds.

[Read: You can’t just unpause USAID]

Late last month, hundreds of leaders from Catholic relief and aid organizations met for the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, D.C. What ensued was “a scene of real panic,” Stephen Schneck, the chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me. “They were in shock, and they were disturbed, and they were feeling really panicky about the situation and wondering what to do.” Schneck recalled speaking with an attendee from El Paso, Texas, who was suddenly unable to buy diapers for babies in his charity’s care. “And this happened with no warning, no extensions,” Schneck said. “It just happened overnight.” Catholic agencies providing relief overseas were also affected by the freeze on foreign aid, which came with a stop-work order that suspended operations.

Along with the shutdown of federal funding for so many Catholic charitable organizations, Trump also revoked a Joe Biden–era policy that prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending people in or near “sensitive locations” such as churches and schools. The change elicited a statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which registered its dismay at the transformation of places for “care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need,” and called for “a better path forward that protects the dignity of all those we serve, upholds the sacred duty of our providers, and ensures our borders and immigration system are governed with mercy and justice.”

The statement set off a back-and-forth between the bishops and Vice President J. D. Vance, who responded to the bishops on Face the Nation late last month, saying that “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” The USCCB followed up with another statement, saying that “faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving refugees … In our agreements with the government, the USCCB receives funds to do this work; however, these funds are not sufficient to cover the entire cost of these programs. Nonetheless, this remains a work of mercy and ministry of the Church.”

[Read: Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message]

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

Catholic politicians disputing the bishops’ witness to the faith is nothing new, though the allegations of avarice and corruption are somewhat surprising, and presage bitter conflict ahead. Perhaps that could be helpful, insofar as it would sharply distinguish the teaching of the Church from certain politicized versions of Catholicism tailored to the ideological preferences of their confessors. The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.