After another exhausting week of Elon Musk’s chaotic West Wing antics, even President Trump is starting to understand why America has only one president at a time. Far from being an extra hand in his effort to dismantle the federal government, the mega-billionaire is rapidly becoming one of Trump’s biggest political and legal liabilities.
Musk’s latest scheme — asking millions of federal workers to send uncoordinated emails explaining what they do all day — seems to have been too much even for the president’s closest lieutenants. Newly installed FBI Director Kash Patel instructed his employees to ignore Musk’s demands. So did the State Department and the Pentagon. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) called the email “absurd.” Tough crowd.
Musk endeared himself to Trump by pledging to do the heavy lifting of slashing federal spending while Trump played the role of marketer-in-chief. Instead, Musk sparked a costly (and very public) power struggle between Cabinet officials and his Department of Government Efficiency. With a huge government funding deadline looming next month, Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles may be asking herself whether the world’s loudest billionaire has become more of a problem than a solution.
The skies around Musk have darkened considerably since December, when he was virtually inseparable from Trump at official events and rented a swanky cottage just a few hundred feet away from the president’s Mar-a-Lago doorstep. At the time, Musk was considered one of the GOP’s best assets, not only for his practically bottomless supply of cash but also for his perceived managerial genius. After all, this is the guy who puts rockets into space!
It was only later that many Republicans realized Musk’s real passion is playing the political agent provocateur — even if his provocations often cause more blowbacks than breakthroughs. Now party patience is running thin.
Public criticism of Musk’s judgment, once whispered, is now amplified daily by influential MAGA outlets like Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Bannon recently called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” Earlier this week, Trump special envoy Ric Grenell joined the fray, torching Musk’s bogus claim that USAID-funded nonprofits supported terrorism.
Some of that is almost certainly the jealousy inherent in Trump’s pseudo-imperial court. Proximity to a president is always desirable, even more so within a MAGA movement that regards Trump as something between a king (his words) and directly anointed by God. It hasn’t helped that Musk loves to flaunt his official impunity, which hasn’t done much to endear him to resentful Republican lawmakers.
There’s also the thorny problem of how Musk exploits his unparalleled access. It’s increasingly clear that Musk ordered the Office of Personnel Management to send a bulk email to federal workers without any White House review or approval. Such a brazen breach of protocol raises urgent questions about chain of command and communications security at the White House. In a government this complex, confusion about who is and isn’t giving the orders can quickly become a matter of life and death.
Meanwhile, Musk’s actual cost-cutting isn’t exactly living up to expectations. One contract DOGE claimed was worth $8 billion was actually valued at $8 million. The Wall Street Journal analyzed DOGE’s alleged $55 billion in federal spending cuts and found only $2.6 billion in actual savings. In fact, most of the cuts Musk claimed involved contracts that had already been canceled.
History is littered with examples of unofficial advisers given official prominence. Many of those stories end the same way: Overconfidence, overstepping and overthrow. It didn’t matter that Sejanus was a better administrator than Tiberius Caesar, or that Thomas Cromwell understood court politics better than Henry VIII. Even an inattentive leader will eventually realize he has been sidelined. Judging by how little Trump has said in his adviser’s defense, the lightbulb may finally be flickering on above the president’s head.
Despite recently defending Musk on Truth Social, Trump will certainly hear about Monday’s incident at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where TV monitors throughout the building aired AI-generated footage of Trump kissing Musk’s bare feet. Musk’s increasingly toxic child-custody battle with MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair is also pulling focus from Trump’s effort to move his budget through a razor-thin Republican House.
If Trump and Republicans want to make it through March without a cascade of Musk-related political crises, they’ll need to toss Mister X overboard before he capsizes their entire ship. That won’t be pretty, but it beats the catastrophe nearly guaranteed by another month of unmitigated Musk. Good thing Trump knows something about firing people.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
