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In a move straight out of his tenure at X, the everything app, Elon Musk announced his departure from Washington last week. His sudden exit comes after six months of dismantling the federal government, failed space launches, potentially killing hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest children, and, allegedly, joining a disgusting throuple with Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie. Musk, of course, isn’t leaving entirely. As Splinter notes, his chief lieutenants remain in place, and even Musk says he’ll continue working with the government. A DOGEing this is not.
Regardless, The Daily Show ran with the idea that Musk’s time as a special government employee is ending and used his supposed exit to discuss what working for the Trump administration has done to him. They certainly had a lot to go on. From the fresh black eye Musk was sporting during his final humiliating press conference to the cocktail of drugs The New York Times reported Musk was ingesting on the campaign trail, Musk looked like a total wreck as Trump handed him the golden commemorative key. It wasn’t the last indignity, Stewart says. Trump undid whatever DOGE had been doing for the previous six months with his Big Beautiful Bill that will increase government spending by $200 billion. Musk says he believes this “undermined” the work DOGE did, such as cutting off support to USAID, which experts believe could kill as many as 163,500 kids per year from malnutrition.
But as disgusting as that is (and, boy, is it disgusting for the wealthiest man in the world to take food and medicine away from the world’s poorest children), Stewart noted that Trump has moved on to another maniacal billionaire. The Trump administration is teaming up with Palantir, a data-hoarding firm presumably named after the magic seeing stones used by the bad guys in Lord Of The Rings, to create a “master list” of every American for surveillance purposes. Meanwhile, the company’s CEO, Alex Karp, a regular guy obsessed with domination, also shares cute ideas like, “The most effective way for social change is to humiliate your enemy and make them poorer” and “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts who have tried to screw us.” Does this guy know how to cozy up to Trump or what?
However, Stewart’s point is that these guys never stood a chance. On one hand, you’ve got Musk with a black eye being shown the door, and on the other, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino complaining that he misses his wife because he has to go to a job every day. Trump doesn’t care about these guys despite their fealty to him, and why should he? Days after Musk’s exit, he went right back to posting conspiracy theories about how Biden was a super advanced robot programmed to whiff his re-election campaign. Why? Why wasn’t he programmed to debate?
“Trump’s very open secret has always been that he doesn’t believe in or care about any political issue at all,” Stewart says. “He wants attention, he wants his ego stroked, and he wants money. He wants fuckwads and fuckwads of money[…]Meanwhile, the world he said he was going to fix is burning, like so many nuclear-capable planes in Siberia.”
It’s not the strongest monologue of Stewart’s recent stretch of shows, but he makes his point. These guys hate their jobs. We encourage them to quit.
