Reports about the daily drama of the second Trump administration often feel less like normal political news than recaps of a reality TV show. This is an administration where the actual official name of the president’s signature legislation is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Meanwhile, Vice President J. D. Vance regularly beefs with mid-tier journalists on social media, and when Trump and Vance dressed down Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Trump actually said the words “This is going to be great television.”

It was only to be expected that, when the Trump and Elon Musk bromance finally soured, things got very personal and very ugly. Media coverage and social media commentary have tended to focus on the respects in which this too is “great television.” But the threats and counterthreats about Musk’s government contracts have been a vivid demonstration of how deeply enmeshed the billionaire’s business empire is with the American state. We should be able to step back from the immediate absurdities of the Trump Show to recognize that this is a much larger problem.

There’s no reason it has to be like this. We don’t need to have a privatized space program propped up by state funding. We don’t need vital satellite internet infrastructure to be controlled, through that company, by a single ultrawealthy individual. We can just nationalize SpaceX.