It’s the rare moment when Donald Trump actually undersells something, but he might well have done so in a recent interview with Elon Musk and Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

“I think he’s gonna find a trillion dollars,” said Trump of Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency when Hannity asked him what we can expect DOGE to uncover.

On Tuesday, having been at it for less than a month, Musk’s small band of T-shirt-clad twenty-somethings issued DOGE’s first progress report, which claims to have found some $55 billion in savings. You can see it for yourself, exhaustively itemized, right there on the DOGE website, complete with a Top 10 list of both total contract savings and contract savings as a percentage of budget. (Spoiler Alert: USAID tops both lists.)

But while $55 billion is a very nice recovery, it’s still a far cry from $1 trillion.

A day earlier, though, DOGE said that it had uncovered a stunning $4.7 trillion in payments from the Department of the Treasury that are virtually untraceable because of a fundamental failure to assign a payment identification code — called the Treasury Access Symbol — to specific budget line items.

“In the Federal Government,” DOGE explains, “the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.”

To be fair, the vast majority of this $4.7 trillion may well have been legitimately spent, but shouldn’t we be able to know that for certain? Perhaps this slush-fund accounting system is why Big Government Democrats are so dead-set against DOGE. But a trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon these guys will be saving us taxpayers some real money. “This is not some roving band,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a recent Bloomberg TV interview. “This is methodical, and it is going to yield big savings.”

Behind all this is, of course, the mercurial Musk, who was sitting right there next to President Trump while Hannity teased out their fascinating friendship.

“Elon is to me a patriot,” said Trump, and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. Rather than tending to his own considerable fortune, Musk is trying to save our nation from the financial ruin that a $36 trillion debt foretells.

“Elon called me,” said Trump. “He said, ‘You know, they’re trying to drive us apart.’” Trump was referring to the mainstream media, which has taken to calling his “unelected” friend “President Musk.”

Trump then added, “But you know what I have learned, Elon? The people are smart. They get it. They get it. They really see what’s happening.”

“I guess we must be over the target,” said Musk. “They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful. Look, all we’re really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president, and what we’re finding is that there’s an unelected bureaucracy — speaking of ‘unelected’ — there’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president.”

What Hannity’s interview revealed is the genuine affection that these two men with their outsized egos seem to have for each other. Trump was continually complimenting Musk for his genius: “He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a great guy,” said Trump while smiling and ribbing him about the way he and his team dress. Musk, for his part, was continually defending Trump and deferentially referring to him as “the president.”

“You know, I wanted to find somebody smarter than him,” said Trump. “I searched all over. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. I couldn’t find anyone smarter.”

To which a sheepish Musk replied, “Well, thanks for having me.”

There’s of course a business genius to both men: Trump with his charisma and his leadership and his weapons-grade communications skills, and Musk with his incomprehensible brilliance and his extraordinary ability to tackle the most complicated challenges — like building a differently fueled car company from scratch, or using satellites to deliver broadband Internet anywhere on the planet, or catching a spent rocket booster with a pair of tweezers, or helping blind people see with his Neuralink brain-implant enterprise.

Asked by Hannity about the fierce resistance that the two of them are getting, Musk said, “I think what we’re seeing here is the sort of thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.”

Hannity also asked about the potential for conflicts of interest, given Musk’s ties to so many crucial industries. “I haven’t asked the president for anything, ever,” he said. Trump then weighed in, saying Musk won’t be involved if such an issue arises, to which Musk added that he’d recuse himself under such circumstances.

“Also,” he said, “I’m getting sort of a daily proctology exam here. You know, it’s not like I’ll be getting away with something in the dead of night.”

The prospect of such an exam is an image best left unseen, but the partnership of Trump and Musk, if it holds together amid the inevitable strain, will be well worth watching.