Is The Transactional And Mutually Beneficial Trump-Musk Relationship Sputtering To A Halt?
- Howie Klein
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
Trump Doesn’t Like Musk’s Cooties— But He Loves The Cash & International Clout
New national polling from Marquette surprised me. They found that 38% of Americans approve of Elon Musk. Where do these people come from? Sure, 60% have an unfavorable opinion of the Nazi billionaire but where do they find 38% who think he’s OK? Commenting on the polling, Ali Bianco noted that respondents are also not fans of his work at DOGE and suggested that the underwater approval rating spells trouble for him. Trump has been telling his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Musk will soon be stepping away from his role.
Rachel Bade reported yesterday that Musk is basically Trump’s “governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man” but that it’s a mutual decision. But what else would they say? The impending “exit comes as some Trump administration insiders and many outside allies have become frustrated with his unpredictability and increasingly view the billionaire as a political liability, a dynamic that was thrown into stark relief Tuesday when a conservative judge Musk vocally supported lost his bid for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat by 10 points. It also represents a shift in the Trump-Musk relationship from a month ago, when White House officials and allies were predicting that Musk was ‘here to stay’ and that Trump would find a way to blow past the 130-day time limit.
One senior administration official said Musk is likely to retain an informal role as an adviser and continue to be an occasional face around the White House grounds. Another cautioned that anyone who thinks Musk is going to disappear entirely from Trump’s orbit is “fooling themselves.”
The transition, the insiders said, is likely to correspond to the end of Musk’s time as a “special government employee,” a special status that temporarily exempts him from some ethics and conflict-of-interest rules. That 130-day period is expected to expire in late May or early June.
Musk’s defenders inside the administration believe that the time will soon be right for a transition, given their view that there’s only so much more he can cut from government agencies without shaving too close to the bone.
But many other Trump allies say he’s an unpredictable, unmanageable force who has had issues communicating his plans with Cabinet secretaries and through the White House chain of command led by Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, frequently sending them into a frenzy with unexpected and off-message comments on Twitter… including sharing unvetted and uncoordinated plans to gut federal agencies.
That’s to say nothing of their concerns about Musk as a political liability who has served as a rallying point for fractured Democrats. In Wisconsin, Musk’s opponents seized on his millions of dollars of spending in the judicial race, with some openly calling it a referendum on the polarizing mogul.
Publicly, Trump has shown nothing but admiration for Musk, who spent millions to help elect him. He often touts the waste, fraud, and abuse DOGE claims to have identified, hailing Musk’s work as revolutionary.
But my colleague Sophia Cai reports that Trump is increasingly mindful of next year’s midterms and making sure he doesn’t jeopardize his House majority. He’s kept a careful eye on the town hall outrage over DOGE, even as Republicans have chalked those scenes up to coordinated liberal stagecraft.
...Trump had already started easing the glide path starting more than a week before the election— including at a March 24 Cabinet meeting where he told attendees that Musk would be transitioning out of the administration, according to one of the insiders, who did not attend the meeting but was briefed on the comments. A senior administration official confirmed Trump discussed Musk’s transition at the meeting.
Soon after, Trump invited reporters and cameras in for the tail end of the meeting, where he lavished praise on Musk, who attended the meeting wearing a red MAGA hat. Cabinet secretaries— many of whom had clashed with Musk just weeks before over Musk’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach to cutting their departments— in turn jumped in to hail his bureaucracy-slashing campaign.
“Elon, I want to thank you— I know you’ve been through a lot,” Trump said, mentioning death threats and the spate of vandalism directed at the cars built by Musk’s Tesla before calling him “a patriot” and “a friend of mine.”
Both men subsequently hinted publicly at a transition. When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Musk on Thursday whether he’d be ready to leave when his special government employee status expires, he essentially declared mission accomplished: “I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by $1 trillion within that time frame.”
On Monday night, Trump told reporters that “at some point Elon’s gonna want to go back to his company,” adding: “He wants to. I’d keep him as long as I could keep him.”
“As the President said, this White House would love to keep Elon around for as long as possible,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said Tuesday as election results from Wisconsin rolled in. “Elon has been instrumental in executing the President’s agenda, and will continue this good work until the President says otherwise.”
…[M]any close to Trump are relieved that Musk is expected to soon move on from his central role at Trump’s side and that the litany of DOGE surprises— which have ranged from a weekend email blast demanding federal workers list their work output to accidental cuts to Ebola prevention programs— might finally be coming to a close.
The precise reasons for the expected split are not entirely clear, even to those close to the two men. But three Trump insiders said administration officials continue to chafe at Musk’s lack of communication with senior staff and the Cabinet— an issue they’ve struggled with since January and have tried with mixed success to address with Musk himself.
To wit: Trump’s announcement at the Cabinet meeting came three days after the New York Times scooped that the Pentagon had planned to brief Musk on classified war plans regarding China— a major potential conflict of interest given Musk’s business dealings there. While the Pentagon and the White House publicly dismissed the story as fake news, the headline caught both Trump and Wiles by surprise, leaving them scrambling to find out what was happening.
Trump publicly downplayed the situation but also took the opportunity to draw new boundaries around Musk. “You wouldn’t show it to a businessman,” he told reporters about the war plans, suggesting Musk could be “susceptible” given his business interests.
“People were so pissed about it, because it’s fucking insane,” said one person close to the White House familiar with what happened.
Several longtime Trump advisers told me that the president has been smart to keep Musk around— precisely because he has acted as a lightning rod for Trump critics. Musk, they argue, has been a political heat shield for the president, proudly owning the most controversial aspects of his agenda, such as his gutting of the federal workforce), taking the arrows that would otherwise wound Trump himself.
“Let someone else scoop up the dog shit— the DOGE shit in this case,” as one longtime adviser told me.
But others said Musk can’t play that role indefinitely— especially if his antics are blowing back on the president directly.
“Elon’s taking a lot of bullets for Trump— a lot— and Trump knows that and sees that,” said another longtime Trump ally. “But if it starts to rub off on him, that’s when the honeymoon ends…. That’s starting to happen.”
… One concerned member of Trump’s campaign’s team told me early on that the president didn’t realize that by keeping Musk so close, he was both empowering the tech mogul and potentially undercutting himself. Musk, the person warned, was unpredictable and rash— and it would only be a matter of time before things went sour.
It didn’t take long for that prediction to come true.
First, Musk single-handedly blew up Speaker Mike Johnson’s pre-Christmas spending deal with Democrats, leaving Republicans scrambling to avert a shutdown. Trump hadn’t asked him to intervene, people close to the president said; Musk did it on his own. But due to his proximity to the president, conservatives on Capitol Hill took Musk’s word as gospel.
A few weeks later, when Trump announced a $500 billion artificial intelligence venture, Musk couldn’t help but knock the competitor at the center of the deal, longtime Silicon Valley rival Sam Altman. People familiar with the matter told me at the time that White House aides were furious that Musk had undercut Trump’s announcement.
Despite those hiccups, Trump continued to defend and relish his relationship with the world’s richest man, who seemed to appear beside him more frequently than even his own vice president.
As his second term got underway, Trump made sure he had Musk’s back: When Republican lawmakers started to complain about Musk privately, insisting he show a softer touch as he laid off thousands of federal workers, Trump instead told Musk to get “more aggressive” with his DOGE cuts. When Cabinet secretaries privately fumed about the “five things” email— which Musk ordered sent out to employees without giving the secretaries a heads up— Trump once again defended him.
Problems began to fester, however, both publicly and internally.
Just as Democrats ramped up their messaging on GOP threat to entitlement programs, Musk appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”— a comment that flew in the face of Trump’s crystal-clear vows never to cut benefits. Musk also ginned up the MAGA online faithful after judges blocked his DOGE cuts, pushing for Trump to ignore the courts even as the White House was trying to rebut predictions of a constitutional crisis and vowing Trump would never ignore such an order.
Both of those episodes, I’m told, prompted senior White House officials to speak directly to Musk, who quickly got on message. But many Trump allies continue to believe Musk simply has a hard time understanding how to be a team player. He isn’t vicious or mean-spirited, they say— he’s been willing, in fact, to admit to mistakes both privately and publicly and try to correct them— but he has been hard to wrangle despite Trump, Wiles and others impressing on him the need to coordinate.
“There’s a lack of an understanding about communications and why it’s important, that you massage things, that you talk about things, that you qualify things— they just don’t do it,” said one of the aforementioned allies.
“They think he’s a genius, but he’s a one-man wrecking ball,” added one longtime top Trump adviser.
Musk’s struggles to function within a coordinated political operation aren’t surprising given his background. As the world’s richest man, he has spent years operating in a realm where his word is law, where accountability is virtually nonexistent, and where his wealth shields him from meaningful consequences. He runs his companies— whether Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company or Twitter— with a level of unilateral control that would make even the most authoritarian politicians envious. This is the psychology of an oligarch, not a team player. When decisions don’t go his way, he can fire subordinates, suppress dissent, or simply ignore criticism. But in the political world, particularly in a democracy, leaders must build coalitions, compromise and navigate institutional constraints. These are qualities Musk has shown no patience for.
The idea that successful business figures make good political leaders is a long-running myth, often perpetuated by those who don’t understand the fundamental differences between running a company and governing a country. In business— especially in privately controlled firms like Musk’s— the CEO's power is centralized, and decision-making is largely unchecked. In politics, especially in a system like the U.S., power is distributed, requiring negotiation, persuasion and public accountability. Business leaders like Musk— not to mention Herbert Hoover, Bruce Rauner, Silvio Berlusconi and Trump himself— who are used to issuing directives and having them obeyed without question, usually struggle in political environments where they cannot simply bully their way to an outcome.
Musk’s well-documented erratic behavior and drug abuse only amplify these challenges. His penchant for impulsive decision-making— whether it’s tanking Tesla’s stock with a reckless tweet, recklessly dismantling Twitter’s infrastructure, or engaging in public feuds— makes him a liability to any political movement that requires discipline and strategic messaging. Trump allies’ frustration with him stems not just from his inability to conform but from the reality that he is fundamentally ill-suited for the kind of calculated, methodical coordination that political success demands. His wealth and status have insulated him from consequences in the corporate world, but in politics, where public perception matters, his unpredictability and arrogance become dangerous weaknesses.
