A foreign billionaire is running the state through a shadow government without formal checks – the constitutional order, now, is largely window dressing

It’s one of the humiliations of our historical moment that the constitutional order has been destroyed by such stupid and unserious people. On the trail with Donald Trump, the billionaire Elon Musk, who financed Trump’s campaign to the tune of about $250m, pledged to cut $2tn from the federal budget, a project that promised to wreck the economy, destroy the nation’s credit, eliminate programs and institutions that structure people’s lives and create an international economic and leadership vacuum into which America’s rivals – namely, China – could step.

This would have been ominous enough on its own. But because Musk is a narcissist and a nerd – because he insists on discarding solemnity and being ostentatiously irreverent and carefree as he destroys people’s lives – he named his new project “the department of government efficiency,” or Doge, a juvenile reference to a years-old internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist