Last week, a number of prominent posters from right-wing social media were invited to the White House for the release of files from the investigation into the crimes of financier Jeffrey Epstein. They were given binders of material, lists of names with blacked-out contact information. They posed for photos outside the executive mansion, binders in one hand and Trump campaign swag in the other.

The event was the putative culmination of years of agitation from the Right for more information about Epstein’s death, the demand for which was rooted in QAnon-adjacent theories about predatory Democrats who would be exposed by the information. (That Donald Trump himself was a known associate of Epstein’s was generally avoided in these conversations, including by Trump.) When Attorney-General Pam Bondi arrived at the Justice Department, there was enormous pressure for her to act quickly to offer more details. So she did.

Well, she tried to, anyway. There does exist material from the Epstein investigation that hasn’t been made public, but there is no evidence that other prominent individuals will be implicated by its release. There is a belief that it will, just as there was a belief that, with enough paper in hand, Joe Biden would be directly implicated in his son’s business interests.

What Bondi offered wasn’t that. It wasn’t even new. The list of contacts from Epstein’s address book was published by Gawker a decade ago. It was the Fyre Festival of document dumps, a cryptocurrency-esque rug pull.

In another era, an online conspiracy theory would not percolate to the highest echelons of the Federal Government and so there would be no need to mollify the conspiracy theorists by giving them some sign of action. But this is 2025, a point at which the President and, increasingly, the entire federal bureaucracy have been driven by whatever crud manages to capture the Right’s collective attention. Such as a random blog post praising Trump’s handling of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky or a baseless accusation about Zelensky interacting with former government officials — to name just two examples from the past few days.

Professor Kate Starbird, cofounder of the University of Washington’s Centre for an Informed Public, compared the process of elevating information by the online Right to improvisational theatre.

“As influencers perform, they do call-outs to a shared and engaged audience, which has the power to profoundly shape the performance,” she wrote in a recent essay. “The audience cheers, jeers and steers the actor-influencers as the show unfolds. Influencers stay intensely tuned in, ready to give the audience more of what they want. From this perspective, ‘influence’ on the populist Right doesn’t just flow from the influencers up on the stage out to the audience, but from the audience back to the influencers.”

This has long been Trump’s approach, manifested in his back-and-forth interactions with the crowds at his rallies. There, unexpected applause lines become standard rhetoric. Starbird noted that this process was also in keeping with Fox News host Jesse Watters’s recent description of the Right’s information ecosystem: by the time claims are validated on Fox, the broader Right has already heard them through the Darwinian process that has been created.

“Institutions once shaped a shared reality through discourse - imperfectly, but with structure,” researcher and journalist Eliot Higgins wrote on social media. “Now, that reality has splintered. In its place, engagement-driven ecosystems amplify whatever resonates, truth optional.”

X, the social-media site that replaced Twitter, is a central engine of this process. So is its owner, Elon Musk.

Running X is just one of Musk’s occupations. There are the car company and the rocket company and the tunnel-making company and the brain implant company. He is also a father a dozen times over — and then some — and a prodigious user of his own social-media product. Oh, and he’s also running the effort to uproot fraud and waste in federal spending. You know, on the side.

That last role is made somewhat easier by the slapdash manner in which it is being conducted. One could seek to find overspending or fraud through a careful consideration of spending and hiring, something like what the administration of Bill Clinton did 30 years ago. But Musk — very obviously feeding off the energy of stoking the ire of his social-media audience — is overseeing a slash-and-burn approach to cutting spending. It’s the difference between protecting a house against flooding by carefully raising it on stilts and blowing it into pieces with a few casually tossed sticks of dynamite. Either way, the house will not have to worry about being flooded. But the latter is a more exciting show.

The sloppiness and the errors that have resulted are already obvious to anyone watching. Putting nuclear weapons at risk, scooping up personal information for unclear reasons, hiring inexperienced staffers rather than the Silicon Valley best and brightest who were promised, gutting initiatives to fight Ebola and triggering feuds within the administration — that’s just a partial list, barely over a month into Trump’s second term in office. The administration will not even formally admit that Musk is running the effort — apparently playing dumb in court and belatedly naming someone else as the effort’s leader — even as Trump and Musk crow about Musk’s role to the press and on social media.

Myriad claims made by Musk and his team have been shown to be false. (Journalist Marcy Wheeler is keeping a running list.) The most notable example of this pattern was that a site purportedly articulating “savings” effected by Musk’s team was riddled with errors, overstating some savings by billions of dollars and claiming as “savings” money that had already been spent. There has been no demonstrated evidence of fraud, except when using the term “fraud” or “waste” in the way that was always intended: to describe spending that doesn’t comport with how the political Right wants to spend federal money. The point of the exercise, it is safe to assume, is not cost-cutting but to decimate government so that Trump can rebuild it to his liking.

In 2009, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig warned that making public information broadly available would make it trivial for bad-faith and/or underinformed actors to pick through reams of information to construct misleading or dishonest claims about what the Government was doing. The advent of social media sped up that process significantly. Now, random social-media users can direct Musk’s attention to programmes by cobbling together narratives from searches of public databases.

To some extent, Musk is running a con, insisting to his audience that he is going to deliver on massive, unattainable savings. This is certainly in keeping with past practice; Musk’s failure to hit predicted benchmarks in the past is the stuff of corporate legend. But Trump’s base has even less reason to view his predictions with scepticism than do his shareholders. The constructed reality they share holds that the Government is wasteful and sloppy, spending money on useless things such as “DEI” and “welfare”, and any claim that those things are being halted is taken as gospel.

Republican legislators, needing the political support of those Americans, certainly are not going to note the emperor’s nudity. What’s more, there are political benefits to framing all spending as “waste” or “fraud,” as House Speaker Mike Johnson made clear in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.

What Musk — not the head of the effort, right? — was “finding with his algorithms, crawling through the data of the Social Security system, is enormous amounts of fraud, waste and abuse”, Johnson insisted. Legitimate Social Security spending would not be affected, but that “fraud”, presumably using the Right’s partisanship-flavoured definition of the term? Gone.

Host Kristen Welker pointed out that “the Social Security Administration’s internal watchdog” — the team tasked with carefully and independently evaluating the question — “found that less than 1 per cent of benefit payments were improper”.

“[I] don’t believe it,” Johnson replied. “Don’t believe it.”

No doubt.

It is unlikely there will be a Bondi-style failure by Musk, a rebellion on the Right against an obvious bait-and-switch. That’s in part because Musk is rooting through intentionally private systems, allowing him to bring into the sunlight only things that bolster his existing allegations — which is precisely what he did when he took over Twitter. It is also because Musk has a base of support that overlaps with and jostles against Trump’s, so any such failures would likely be laid at the feet of others — just as Bondi herself tried to do.

Trump and Musk’s allies will find someone non-Trump or non-Musk to take the fall because Trump and Musk are the stars of the improvised show. They are the ones in the spotlight, the ones who can bring others onstage with them. That’s what constitutes the American Dream for the political Right in 2025: cobble together a theory of left-wing malfeasance that gets traction and you might be next Catturd.

• Philip Bump is a Washington Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter How To Read This Chart and is the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America