Anyone who thought Elon Musk was going to dive into the DC Swamp and, in mere weeks, reform its ruinous ways was simply delusional.

Furthermore, anyone who thought he could emerge from the muck without smelling like rotten eggs and without having stepped on a few rusty nails was even more delusional.

Normally, a hot shower and a tetanus shot would restore such a man. But, sadly, not in this case. Our bloated bureaucracy — and those sworn to protect it — are an eye-gouging, groin-kicking, throat-punching lot. Think about it: Any institution that can run up a $37 trillion tab while continuing to pass Monopoly money is a racket that organized criminals can only dream of.

The world’s richest man no doubt knew this going in, and yet he still took one in the neck for the team. Because he knows, as Lincoln did, that America is the last best hope of earth. If this ongoing experiment in limited representative government fails, we can’t simply emigrate to another shore or blast off to Mars and try again.

Still, Elon Musk accomplished much of his mission: He raised our awareness of what we’ve created. He pulled back the curtain, and he exposed the rot of our woefully inept, egregiously inefficient, and disastrously profligate federal government.

And corrupt. Definitely corrupt. Did I mention corrupt?

Elon Musk did all this at tremendous personal cost. He did so, much as our Founders did, by pledging his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. “I’m nauseatingly pro-American,” he said in December. “I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible.”

He also said this: “I will fight to my last drop of blood to ensure that it [America] remains that land of freedom and opportunity.”

The man is a Patriot. Full stop.

And so it was on Friday in the Oval Office, with Musk standing to Donald Trump’s right and sporting a seemingly symbolic black eye, a shiner ostensibly incurred while playing with his five-year-old son. He was there to officially end his status as a “special government employee” and return to the private sector, to his entrepreneurial empire.

It should’ve been a moment more celebratory than sober, but the mainstream media had other ideas. As the Musk-loathing legions at NBC News predictably report, “The physical proximity belied a growing philosophical divide between two of the world’s most powerful men, resulting in the tech mogul’s abrupt announcement that he is departing Washington — without having achieved his goal of decimating the federal government.”

What NBC News is doing here isn’t terribly creative, but it’s part of the reason why we hold the legacy media in the same high regard as we hold ambulance-chasers and used-car salesmen: They moved the goalposts. Musk isn’t leaving abruptly, but as planned all along. They’re making it seem like Musk was a failure because he didn’t balance the budget, eliminate the deficit, and slash our national debt before leaving. I’ll say it again: No one thought Musk and his DOGE team could do all that in such short order. No one.

“He came, he saw, he folded,” said former Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon, who clearly took the mainstream media’s bait.

Did Musk and Trump see eye-to-eye on everything? Of course not. They have, at times, competing interests: Musk with running his businesses and Trump with running the world’s greatest country. “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit … and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk told CBS. That is entirely understandable. What was it someone said about legislation and sausage?

Donald Trump wasn’t biting, though. “He had to go through the slings and the arrows,” the president said, “which is a shame because he’s an incredible patriot.”

There’s that word again: Patriot.