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The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Elon Musk packed his bags and skedaddled out of Washington, DC, last week, proclaiming that his run as a “special government employee” was done. It’s a good bet that he’ll continue to meddle in administration business, especially when he has a financial interest at stake, and will keep in contact with DOGErs and their ongoing crusade to dismantle crucial government programs. But his very public departure from Trump Town prompted reporters to pen farewells that did not do justice to the profound damage this erratic and dishonest gazillionaire has caused.

Writing up an interview he conducted with Musk, the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport opened with a “reflective” Musk musing, “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized. I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least.” Davenport observed that Musk’s “attempts to reshape the federal bureaucracy ran into fierce institutional resistance.” He allowed Musk to praise himself as a hard-driving visionary—“If we’re not ultra-hardcore, how are we going to get to Mars?”—and to define his mission in Washington as “reducing waste and fraud.”

Waste and fraud was just a cover story. Too many in the news media have enabled this con and even promoted it.

All of this bolsters the phony narrative pitched by Trump and Musk that DOGE was (and is) a project to ferret out the supposed rampant........

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