It's almost impossible to describe the corruption of Elon Musk

But we must.

If history remembers this time accurately, they’ll say we were frogs boiled in euphemisms.

Take this headline and dek from an extremely important story The New York Times published Monday:

There are many ways to describe what Elon Musk is doing, and “scores benefits” may be the worst. This is not to blame the Times in particular, which I consider a singular scourge responsible for much of the horrible media coverage that has overlapped with our prolonged constitutional crisis that began with the theft of the 2000 election.

But think of what they’re describing. It’s not hard! Their own reporting includes this fantastic visual that shows how Elon’s tenure as a “special government employee” has allowed him effectively neutralize, if not erase, more than a dozen inquiries into his own illegal or improper behavior. What they are describing are the two most atrocious weeks of corruption by a private citizen ever committed against the American people in the history of this country.

The failure of the media at this moment is spectacular. But I don’t blame them entirely.

What is happening right now is the United States is almost impossible to believe—even if you describe it accurately.

The richest man in recorded history has exploited the rot of our campaign finance system to spend more money than any single human has ever put into an election to elect a man whose dictatorial ambitions are obvious to everyone but Susan Collins. That money was used to drown voters in false and misleading advertisements that resembled phishing emails more than coherent political arguments.

Now that same man has effectively been put in charge of the government. In the name of increasing efficiency, he’s acting like a mix between a king and a CEO of the sort that the Nerd Reich from Silicon Valley imagined as part of their monarchical fantasies of ending democracy. He's invaded every aspect of our life, gained illegal access to our most private data, and is plundering around like a mad despot as he destroys any hope of holding him accountable for his spree of offenses, any one of which would ruin the life of an average citizen.

It’s obviously unconstitutional. It’s unethical to the point that it mocks the existence of virtue. And it’s unmissable corruption of such an impossible magnitude that words fail to capture it. But you gotta at least try!

So many things made this moment possible. There’s capture of our courts that made elevated money over votes as the currency of democracy. There’s the toxic normalization of both Elon and Trump, feeding off the twin lies that anyone who is on TV enough or rich enough cannot possibly be a massive threat to America’s way of life. And there’s Democrats overwhelming failure to understand that they are in a battle for brains that requires messaging that conveys the truth of the peril we face.

But what’s really getting in the way is fraud.

The worst irony of this moment is that Elonald keeps using “fraud, waste, and abuse” as the frame to justify their attempt to remove the people from their own governance. Elon’s superpower is fraud.

“ I'm not convinced that Tesla would be here today if it weren't for the fraud,” said E.W. Niedermeyer, the author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, who has studied Elon as closely as anyone alive.

That fraud is the veneer that Elon puts on everything as he cruises through life ignoring the laws that kept America as something resembling a free state. And now that fraud has made him our king, until the people decide he’s not. It’s happened before.

But before we throw off our shackles, we’ve got to get rid of the euphemisms.