Elon Musk evaluates a SpaceX launch with Donald Trump in 2024. Little did the world then know Musk would be appointed a “special government employee” in charge of efficiency, instead slashing USAID and other programs.

Inventor-turned-wrecking ball Elon Musk is a sick man. This he may not even know, since zeal can sit atop a malady, making its symptoms seem normal. For the purposes of argument, let us call his illness Minus Rapture, or MR, which better suits this time of abbreviation. Now in his early fifties, Musk came into young adulthood at precisely the time that computer software increased its depth and range. He was around for the birth of bots, tiny machine surrogates, and is now flush in the middle of an era that celebrates artificial intelligence as the Ark of the Covenant. As an inventor, he found that these advances suited him perfectly. His world was expanded, and his many imaginative projects accelerated. Literally, he could see the future, needing no prompting from fiction.

What Musk was given on a silver platter, fantasists of the mid-twentieth century, men named Huxley, Asimov, and Philip K. Dick, had repeatedly predicted. Many had conjured fictional machines and robots that could do the work of humans as well as humans, or better. People were enraptured, hence MR, stunned by how much could be done for them or at their command. Musk, something of a fantasist himself, imagined electric cars and spaceships to Mars. His imagination, abetted by technological advances, played as much of a role in his dreaming as associates and offices, to him outdated even as the new century dawned. With machines and his mind, Musk could all but go it alone. In fact, the concept of anything bureaucratic would be his enemy as it would only slow him down. All red tape should be slashed and burned. It should have no role in the world he envisaged. Nor should meddling apparatchiks, his enemies from the start.

So it was that MR was born. The future would be a minus with Musk as its plus.

The sickness served him well as a private citizen and inventor. His malady helped transform him into something of a superstar.

With machines and his mind, Musk could all but go it alone. In fact, the concept of anything bureaucratic would be his enemy as it would only slow him down.

And that superstar status, as well as his hatred of all federal limitations, led him to Donald Trump, another man stricken joyously with MR.

Together, odd couple that they are, they imagined a Washington slash-and-burn like no other in history, and lo and behold their decimating rocket is now in full orbit.

Tens of thousands of Washington humans, some well-trained if not essential, are being deleted to allow the MR men to construct their grave Minus. Some of these beings, say Musk’s decimation team, can be replaced by bots or AI. Others, their secret records plundered, are said to be useless. Let them please send an email with a single word, RESIGN. A brutal like for pithiness is typical of MR sufferers. They also express glee at all the wrong things and imagine building rich Rivieras in war zones, the Trump Gaza foreseen as a luxury hotel.

But Musk is in some respects more dangerous than Trump because he is younger and sicker, which is to say more sincere. He truly does not believe that those summoned to work in Washington have anything to offer the American Republic. He conjures a Minus so vast and flattening that agencies long known to ensure the pubic good are erased.

Some may call this a policy choice, but to me, who watched some Washington agencies rise to great height, it is the offshoot of the worst kind of chronic MR, in which the patient is blind to all history and the culture it represents. USAID, which at its best sent a message of hope as well as basic assistance to needy nations, for the purposes of Musk’s minus game is a plague that insults that which postwar America stood for. Sadly, as is clear, MR cancels all notions of moral responsibility, perhaps replacing it with fifteen special bots.

I watch all this from afar, from Rome, Italy, a country that without American help would have struggled to overturn Fascism and later recover from the ravages of war. It is shocking and painful to behold, and has elicited a sense that MR possesses another symptom I never considered at its core, and yet, as the slaughter continues, there it is: Stalinism.

Not the kind that murders tens of millions but the kind that cows a nation and its citizens into submission. Oppression that, over time, contaminates all with MR and instead of leaving the afflicted heartbroken and shocked at what they have wrought, turns them, like our man Musk, rapturously giddy.