PITTSBURGH (TNS) — In one of the most perceptive gags in one of the best television comedies of all time, “Arrested Development,” the effete therapist Tobias Fünke tells his wife Lindsay that he has advised several unhappily married clients to pursue open relationships.

Did it work, she asks. “No,” he says with a dismissive laugh. “It never does. I mean these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but…” He turns to Lindsay and continues with confidence, “But it might work for us!”

This is the apparent thought process of every person, in and out of politics, who attempts to form a stable partnership with President Donald Trump.

LAUGHING OR CRYING

It’s a testament to the irresistible allure of power, and to the durability of hubris in the human psyche, that people continue to delude themselves into thinking that they can be the one whom Mr. Trump allows to share his spotlight.

The latest example, as American governance descends further into farce, is Elon Musk.

The jokes about the entirely predictable, and predictably petty, breakup between the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man have piled up faster than used Teslas at Bay Area dealerships. Among the most popular: Who will get Vice President JD Vance in the divorce? And: what a shame (or, alternatively, how appropriate) that this right-wing romance should implode during Pride Month.

Humor is the only honest way to confront a reality — that of the state of the government, and of Trump’s attempts to change that government — that defies rational analysis. At the same time, the immediate recourse to humor exemplifies a political culture that seems to have lost its ability to confront serious problems with serious resolve.

Take the “waste, fraud and abuse” that Musk and his acolytes have sought to discover and to unwind. It turns out this is much more complicated than a twenty-something whiz kid can figure out with a spreadsheet and a security clearance. (And that Musk defines “waste” as anything, or anyone, he doesn’t want to spend money on.)

This isn’t because the government is managed by the evil masterminds of the deep state. It’s because its problems are much more about the decades-long accretion of rules and habits and incentives — each rational in isolation, but together an indecipherable tangle — than they are about direct malfeasance.

Trump did not realize this after his first four years in office, and seems to have genuinely thought a brash outsider could solve it like Alexander slicing through the Gordian knot. That was an early sign that the man at the top still doesn’t understand the government he purports to run.

Joe Biden didn’t understand it, either, even on his lucid days. No one does. What’s left to do but laugh — and profit?

NO HIGHER PRINCIPLES

The way the Trump-Musk conflict proceeded exemplifies the unseriousness typical of decaying empires. The days of Cato and Cicero, statesmen and intellectuals of the later Roman Republic, are far behind us. We’re now in the age of bickering emperors and pretenders and senators and viziers — all with social media accounts.

What’s particularly notable about the Trump v. Musk cascade of posting last week, and even much of the response to it, is the lack of even the pretense of a public or civic spirit. The question of what is good for the United States of America is deployed only incidentally to the personal feud.

I think about the Coen brothers’ 2008 film “Burn After Reading,” which may be the best evocation of the true spirit of contemporary American governance. Only a comedy, and a dark and absurd one at that, can truly capture it. Self-important dramas like “The West Wing” are the real fantasies.

The film, described by one critic as “an anti-spy thriller in which nothing is at stake, no one acts with intelligence and everything ends badly,” was seen at the time as dissonant with the optimistic spirit of the dawning Age of Obama.

But the Coen brothers had actually identified a deeper vein of egotism and nihilism in post-Cold War American politics, where the people and leaders of a bored empire have little to motivate them but the stupid pursuit of their own self-interest, without even a wink at higher principles.

It was there in 2008, but only became apparent to everyone as the real driving force of our political system eight years later.

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT

America is stress testing the extent to which its governance structures can tolerate human venality, stupidity, incompetence and weakness. The fact it’s done so well so far testifies to the enduring wisdom of the Founders, who couldn’t have foreseen the radical changes that were to come, but did know something about unchanging human nature.

Minutes after Tobias proposes the open marriage, Lindsay tells Tobias she’s in a relationship. (She isn’t.) Obviously upset, he declares with poorly feigned enthusiasm, “Let the great experiment begin!”

The experiment of partnering with Donald Trump appears to have failed for Elon Musk — though he at least temporarily gained a lot from it — as it has for everyone else who’s tried it.

The problem with the American experiment in its current form, on the other hand, isn’t just with Trump: It’s with governance detached from a shared and serious national purpose. That, too, has been tried again and again. And, eventually, it always fails.

(Brandon McGinley is the op-ed page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)