Conventional political wisdom argues that winning campaigns need enemies. No matter how solid your own candidate is, you must give voters good reason not to like the other party’s guy or gal.

In his four-year political exile, Donald Trump, tainted by January 6 and written off by many, fit that bill perfectly. Confident that Trump’s ego would drive him to run again in 2024, Democrats went to great lengths to bolster their characterization of Trump as the single most dangerous presidential candidate in modern history — fascist, Nazi, Adolf Hitler admirer, and a convicted felon (34 times over!).

But then, a funny thing happened. Last November 5, the American electorate — no doubt impressed by Trump’s energy and resilience and clearly not thrilled by the other side’s candidates — put him back in the White House. Trump won the Electoral College vote handily and even won the popular vote, the first GOP presidential candidate to do so since George W. Bush in 2004.

Stung by their loss but evidently believing Trump’s 2024 win to be yet another fluke win (like 2016), Democrat strategists quickly adopted a Plan B strategy to shore up their depleted base: sit back, watch the new president self-destruct, and proclaim, “See, we told you so!”

And then, another funny thing happened. Wild-man Trump has been a human dynamo, hitting on all cylinders and running circles around his critics. After just four weeks in office, Trump’s approval rating is already higher than it was on November 5. Ah, time for a Plan C — and Democrats need a new enemy.

Enter Elon Musk, the electric vehicle pioneer and not long ago a darling of the Left. But Musk committed the unforgivable sin last year, flitting over to Team Trump, campaigning vigorously for him, and now taking over the head job at the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

By any objective accounting, Musk is a wonder of our times, a man who has achieved breathtaking success in a wide variety of endeavors, every one of which adds inestimable value to society. But he’s now Public Enemy #1.

Credit Dems for — on such short notice — coming up with so many reasons to hate or fear Elon Musk. Over the past week, we’ve heard them all in angry demonstrations, pronouncements by elected Democrat officials, and ceaseless media hand-wringing. Let’s dissect them:

He’s the world’s richest man. Oligarchy! Joe Biden warned us of the creeping threat of oligarchy — uber-wealthy kingmakers whose money rules the country from the shadows. Biden himself is quite familiar with that concept, having been on the George Soros gravy train for decades. And where do we think that Kamala Harris’s overnight billion-dollar campaign stash came from? Billionaires.

The difference, of course, is that Musk is hardly in the shadows — his DOGE work has been in the headlights, constantly, to the point that every move is critiqued energetically in the public square. Interestingly, most of the criticism has targeted DOGE’s fearlessness in ripping away the curtain, not the foolishness of the expenditures behind that curtain.

DOGE findings are just a drop in the bucket! True enough. But think about it: that’s not because the drops are small but because the bucket is so incomprehensibly, unmanageably huge. If anything, the frightening realization that we can save a billion here and a billion there and still make just minimal progress toward fiscal stability serves as a wake-up call about the enormity of our economic challenge. We need DOGE on steroids.

Musk wasn’t elected! Of course not. That’s because our Constitution calls for three different branches of government and defines how they are to be populated. One of those is the executive branch. Of the executive branch’s four million employees (including the U.S. military), only one is elected — its chief executive officer, our president of the United States.

Musk has zero experience in government operations! Please. We can be pretty sure that the guy who built the first (and best) electric vehicle manufacturing company in the world, and in his spare time ran circles around NASA in launching rockets into space, and also purchased and rebuilt Twitter, and whose Neuralink firm is doing breakthrough medical science work, can penetrate the mysteries of government bureaucracy.

DOGE is a government office of cabinet-level importance, and therefore Musk’s appointment should be approved by the Senate! Not unreasonable — but does anyone out there think that his appointment would flunk the Senate’s advice and consent test?

It’s unconstitutional! DOGE is usurping congressional responsibility for fiscal appropriations! Nonsense. Congressional appropriations authorize spending at a high level. Government bureaucracies then interpret the intent of legislative authorizations and execute specific expenditures. DOGE has been empowered by POTUS to evaluate the proprietary of those expenditures.

The examples unearthed in the past two weeks tell the tale. Did Congress intend for USAID spending to propagate LGBTQ+ thinking worldwide? Obviously not.

The people Musk has engaged are unqualified teenagers! Some don’t even have college degrees! Be honest. How many readers of this column turn to their grandkids — or to any convenient 10-year-old — to cope with the complexities of 21st-century technology?

This entire Musk flap is silly. To any who are concerned that Elon Musk is worming his way into government operations in order to enhance his own portfolio, my guess is that the richest man in the world has little thirst for becoming even richer. He has better things to do. Musk is a longtime Democrat, a liberal by definition, and a public servant in a very real way. Now he’s working his tail off to help our nation dig out of our deep, deep financial hole — one that he understands better than any of us.

Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, recognize that he is hard at work translating his campaign promises into real achievement (a rarity for any politician). Engaging and empowering Musk’s remarkable capabilities to help actually achieve what politicians have promised forever — to eradicate waste, fraud, and abuse in spending — is a masterstroke.

Elon Musk is not our enemy. This is what progress looks like. Be happy. Embrace it.