But... He's Dragging The Regime's Popularity Down With Him
Musk isn’t just sinking in the polls, he’s dragging down Tesla, Trump and congressional Republicans. Only 36% of Americans— basically Republicans— approve of the way Musk and DOGE are handling their tasks. 60% disapprove, including 16% of Republicans and 68% of independents. 54% of voters are savvy enough to understand that Musk and DOGE are hurting the country.
The White House has noticed. Yesterday, Tara Palmeri reported that Musk isn’t very popular in the White House either— other than with Trump, to whom he just gave another $100 million. “The tolerance for Elon Musk inside of the White House is wearing thin,” she wrote, “as they deal with the fallout of his calamitous interview with Larry Kudlow when he touched the third rail— entitlements. Even though Trump’s staffers are terrified of Musk, they know that if you try to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, you die, politically speaking. ‘It’s no longer simmering resistance, people are fucking furious,’ said a source with knowledge of the situation. ‘Medicaid is not just for Black people in the ghetto, these are our voters,’ said a Republican operative close to the White House. Even before the interview, I’m told that the White House communications team was adamantly against letting Musk do the interview with Kudlow, even though he’s a former administration official and ally. They know that FOX News is a network that their older, white working-class voters watch closely and this was a rare televised interview for Musk, not the same as getting high with Joe Rogan. Now they’re playing cleanup. Sure, they sent out a ‘Fact Check’ memo from the White House highlighting that his words were garbled when he said he’s looking at the ‘waste and fraud in entitlement spending,’ not entitlements all together. But then Musk went further, falsely claiming in the interview that Democrats use entitlement programs to attract illegal immigrants into the country so that they can add them to their voter rolls. It doesn’t help that earlier this month, Musk referred to Social Security as ‘the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.’ You can even see Kudlow shifting around uncomfortably during the interview.”
I can’t even begin to explain the anger I’m hearing from within the White House and agencies over Musk. If he’s telling the Polish Foreign minister Radosław Sikorski, “Be quiet, small man” and reminding Trump’s cabinet that he’s the billionaire in the room, then you can only imagine how he treats a White House official, even at the deputy chief of staff level, and there are many of them in this top-heavy White House.
“He’s demonstrably dismissive of people who have incredibly important jobs because he doesn’t understand the government,” said the source with knowledge of the matter.
I’ve been reporting for months that Musk has been disrespectful to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles… “He treats [Wiles] like a secretary in front of people,” the source with knowledge of the matter said. “The second most powerful person in Washington, the first woman and someone who has done a good job of keeping the trains running on time.”
But I’ve heard that it’s even become too much for Wiles, who for the most part has been delivering on what matters most to Trump— producing the Presidency with a daily event featuring co-star Musk and a cast of cabinet members for the press. She’s a professional and a survivor, but she’s being bombarded with calls from cabinet secretaries furious over cuts and members worried about state programs.
“Susie doesn’t like how Musk is a freelancer and has direct access to Trump and she’s complained to Trump about it,” said a source familiar. Cheung denied this.
Administration officials have a myriad of feelings toward Musk: they hate him, they’re afraid of him and they think he’s creepy for doing things like sleeping on a cot in his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where five guards stand outside of his door.
“The [staff] hates him,” said the source with knowledge of the matter. “Part of it is policy and part is that he’s not human. He treats Susie like a fucking secretary. But they’re petrified of him.”
Wiles’s deputies are extremely loyal to her, and the cabinet secretaries and their deputies are still getting their sea legs while they attempt to wrangle control of the agencies.
“They’re like ‘Fuck this guy, he’s not communicating what he’s going to cut, he’s just cutting,’” said a well-placed source. “Whenever they get a call, everything goes to shit. They’re trying to run their agencies, and then they have this guy who thinks he’s trimming the fat, but it isn’t fat.”
“He treats cabinet secretaries like they’re messenger boys,” the source with knowledge of the matter said.
“The GOP’s fears about DOGE,” wrote Russell Berman, “appear to be growing… [T]he Trump administration’s campaign to slash the federal workforce could threaten not only their constituents but also their party’s chance to retain its narrow majority… In gently criticizing DOGE, Republicans seem to be weighing their desire to reduce the government’s size and scope— which they have campaigned on for decades— against their unease with the way the administration is going about it. Musk has gloated about feeding entire agencies ‘into the wood chipper,’ and neither he nor Trump has expressed much interest in consulting the branch of government that putatively controls federal spending.”
“[O]nce Trump actually took office,” wrote Paul Krugman yesterday, “he quickly revealed who he was, and always has been. Investors and CEOs had somehow managed to convince themselves that Trump wouldn’t follow through on his threats of trade war. In fact, he’s imposed tariffs higher than anything he suggested during the campaign— then un-imposed, re-imposed, and re-un-imposed them. His erratic behavior may be doing as much damage as the tariffs themselves. Then there’s Trump’s decision to give vast power to Elon Musk, who is displaying a combination of arrogance, ignorance and incompetence worthy of Trump himself. I mean, how clueless do you have to be to imagine that it would be a good idea to end phone service for Americans filing retirement and disability claims? … [M]y sense is that media opinion— even at hard-right venues like the Wall Street Journal— has turned even more strongly against Trumponomics than consumer sentiment or news reporting. The mad king himself certainly seems to think so:
Will Trump respond to the public backlash by moderating his policies or hiring some actual adults? That seems less ever less likely. What has happened, as I noted a couple of days ago, is that his top economic officials have embraced “liquidationism,” the view that the economy needs to go through a period of suffering (“detox”) to compensate for previous excesses. Shades of Herbert Hoover!
…For one thing, it’s awkward to center your economic messaging on claims that Americans need to suffer for President Biden’s (imaginary) sins when Trump’s message throughout the campaign was that he would fix everything on Day One. It’s also remarkable, if you think about it, that Trump officials are in effect offering excuses for a recession that hasn’t happened yet and is at this point only a possibility.
Also, who’s hearing these messages? I would be curious to know what percentage of voters have any idea who Scott Bessent or Howard Lutnick are or what they do, but I’m sure it’s not a big number. (Actually I’m not clear myself on exactly what Lutnick does.)
Another president might be making speeches, even doing fireside chats, to reassure the public. But Trump seems focused instead on annexing Canada, a subject on which he has grown ever more obsessive even as Canadians recoil at any thought of associating themselves with a nation that seems to be turning into the Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale.
So the closest thing we have to an economic spokesman for this administration is Elon Musk, who sees dead people collecting Social Security. And here’s the thing: while there’s still a dwindling Musk/Tesla cult, to a first approximation everyone else hates Elon.
Trump won the election because a number of people believed, wrongly, that he would do great things for the economy. It has taken him less than two months to squander all that undeserved trust.
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