Who said Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t have a sense of humor?

After Musk helped significantly to bankroll Trump’s return to the White House with total campaign contributions that have been estimated to exceed $275m, Trump appointed the Tesla, “X” (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX owner to head something he grandly created and called the Department of Government Efficiency. As an acronym, that becomes “DOGE”.

While most Americans seemed to shrug and accept that this new name and new office would assist Trump and his allies in their pledged efforts to trim government waste and inefficiency, the term Doge actually has some interesting roots. They are thoroughly Italian.

And it’s appropriate to explore those roots while we remain amazed that literally on the last full day of his life, the 88-year-old progressive-tending Argentine-born Pope Francis managed to include a very brief photo op in the Vatican with US vice president JD Vance. The two spent less than two minutes together.

The Pope had not been ambiguous in his response to some of the policies of Vance and the new Trump administration. According to the US Guardian newsletter, “Francis had been as outspoken as could be without naming names, when he criticised Vance in his February letter to US bishops; but he was not just registering his rebuke of Trump and Vance’s cruel treatment of refugees and migrants. He was reacting to a broader trend of instrumentalising religion for nationalist and authoritarian populism.”

But back to the Doges. And here’s where Trump and Musk may be showing us something we rarely experience from either man – a subtle sense of ironic humour. And perhaps even a knowledge of and respect for history. Who knew?

For eleven hundred years (697-1797), the Doge was the individual who held the highest role of authority in the powerful Republic of Venice. (The term Doge is a corruption of the Italian word “Duce”, or leader, that became universally known and feared when Italian dictator and Adolph Hitler ally Benito Mussolini adopted the term to describe himself leading up to and during World War II.)

The Doges’ Palace remains to this day one of the most revered and photographed monuments on Venice’s famed St Mark’s Square.

During this Venetian period of regional hegemony, spanning over one millennium - 11 centuries! – the city of Venice was the seat of power for what has been described as one of the most powerful and expansive empires in recorded human history.

Fitting in on the geographic fringes of Roman hegemony during an era of European and Mediterranean political, economic and military domination by the powerful Catholic Church and its allies, the Republic of Venice managed to achieve practical autonomy due to a series of agreements between the more powerful Holy Roman Empire to the west and north, and the Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople (now Istanbul, in Turkey).

Venice, at the apex of its power, controlled most of the eastern Adriatic Sea coast all the way down to and including much of modern Greece, as well as numerous strategic islands in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Venice relied on naval power funded by wealth from maritime trade, as well as cunning and sharp practice in diplomacy.

One historian has observed that Venice was like the Silicon Valley of its time, excelling in what were then cutting-edge commercial enterprises like glassmaking.

Venice, as a maritime colonial empire with a focus on its naval power and trade, presaged more modern European colonial and neocolonial empires of which it was a predecessor. The British Empire, to whose remnants we in The Bahamas are of course still linked through tradition and the Commonwealth, may be the best example of such imperial dominion.

Somehow, it seems altogether appropriate that Elon Musk should have been chosen to head an agency whose acronym recalls such imperial grandeur. Musk does seem to embrace the power and influence of the Doges.

As he cuts a swath through the massive US government that employs over three million workers, however, Musk and his coterie of committed fellow travelers do appear at times to be overreaching. There are no doubt millions of liberals, Democrats and assorted Trump-haters all over the US and indeed worldwide who are salivating over the prospect of Musk’s inevitable fall from grace.

After all, isn’t that the fate that awaits virtually everyone outside his own family who falls under the demagogic spell of the US president? How much are you hearing these days about Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, John Eastman, and the hundreds of others who have for a time basked in the reflected glow of Trump’s allure and then faded away into the shadows or even prison?

And what about people like Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo and others who served Trump loyally during his first term but for various reasons have since been excommunicated into obscurity and even threatened with harm?

There are signs almost every day that Musk’s outsized influence is fraying and waning. The other day, the liberal press seized upon a report that US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent had successfully appealed to Trump to overturn some personnel changes Musk had prescribed for the US tax collecting Internal Revenue Service.

There were many reports that the US federal Office of Personnel Management – the government’s human resources department – had managed to ignore Musk’s order that all federal employees must submit a list of their activities and accomplishments at the end of every work week.

Speculation continues that Trump inevitably comes to envy and resent any subordinate whose glitter and notoriety he feels may represent a challenge to his own fame. There’s a lot of evidence to support that theory.

Still, Trump is an instinctive, intuitive politician who recognises the usefulness and even need for political cover. That means he knows he will benefit if someone else takes the bitter criticism his policies increasingly elicit from some of his own most public obsessions – tariffs and cuts in government services, for example.

Musk, for whatever reason, seems to so relish the spotlight that he exhibits little regret at receiving so much criticism in the spotlight of his imperial authority.

The conventional wisdom is that Trump will keep Musk around for as long as it suits the president’s purposes. And a few years from now, it will be interesting to see if Musk, who is clearly a visionary, classical American entrepreneur whose success may have made him the world’s richest person, feels any regret for some of the financial and personal decisions he is continuing to make every day.

Maybe the process of reflection and perhaps even regret has begun. The New York Times reported yesterday that “billionaire Elon Musk said he will step back from the US DOGE Service next month and focus on Tesla, his reeling electric vehicle company, which on Tuesday reported a stunning 71 percent plunge in profits compared with the first quarter of 2024”.