What did Donald Trump do today?

He criticized whoever it was that used his authority as President of the United States to appoint a friend of Elon Musk to head NASA.

Trump is feuding with his chief political patron Elon Musk—or at least making a good show of it. Yesterday, Musk announced he was forming a new political party, something Trump today called "ridiculous" and evidence that Musk was going "off the rails. (Trump's first serious flirtation with running for public office was as a presidential candidate for the Reform Party in 2000.)

He punctuated his anger at Musk by, in effect, accusing himself of cronyist corruption for nominating Musk's space-industry ally Jared Isaacman to be the administrator of NASA. Trump posted to his private microblogging site that it was "inappropriate" for someone with close business and personal ties to Musk to be heading the agency that Trump intended to hollow out, thus creating more lucrative contracts for Musk's company SpaceX. 

Notwithstanding heroic efforts on Isaacman's part during his confirmation to conceal the extent that Musk had been involved in his appointment, Trump withdrew his nomination on May 31—just as his spat with Musk was heating up. In today's social media rant, Trump patted himself on the back for choosing to "protect the American Public" rather than make the "inappropriate" appointment that he did, in fact, make.

Trump did not elaborate, nor has he commented on why he gave Musk—whose fortune is almost entirely built on electric vehicle tax credits and government space contracts—enormous and sweeping powers to benefit himself directly as the head of the so-called "Department of Government Efficiency."

Why does this matter?

• This is a pretty good example of why presidents don't usually hand over the powers of their office to drug-addled billionaires who bankrolled their election. 

• Putting ultrawealthy cronies in charge of the parts of government that enrich them is called oligarchy, and it's not a great system.