Explosive details about a Cabinet meeting confrontation between Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were revealed by The New York Times on Friday.
The exchange, in which Musk and Rubio apparently went back and forth heatedly over cuts to the State Department, puts a spotlight on larger questions about President Trump’s more politically questionable moves since returning to the White House.
For a start, the decision to give Musk such a high-profile and consequential role has plainly rubbed even some fellow Trump Cabinet members the wrong way. The Times reported on other tensions, albeit of a less combustible nature, between Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, as well as with Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins.
Beyond any personal tensions, however, there is also the question of the sweeping cuts to the government that Musk and his quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have pushed.
While Trump has seemed mostly enthusiastic about the effort, the scale of the layoffs and the harsh way in which they have been enacted has caused some pause.
Democrats find Musk an inviting target — the richest person in the world slashing departments upon which millions of Americans depend — even as they acknowledge there is some level of waste and inefficiency in government spending.
The DOGE efforts to enact radical change have been matched by dramatic actions in other quarters in the early weeks of the Trump administration.
That’s especially true of tariffs, where Trump has been volatile even by his standards. This week alone, he brought tariffs on Mexico and Canada into effect, then created a carve-out for automakers, then stalled the tariffs more broadly for a month, then said he might impose levies on Canadian lumber and dairy products after all.
Those swings — and the doubts that they engender — have helped roil financial markets this week, and for much of the time since Trump returned to power.
The S&P 500 has declined by almost 5 percent since Trump’s inauguration, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq has dropped even more, by roughly 7 percent.
Neither of those drops is close to politically fatal, but they sit uneasily with a president who bragged on the campaign trail about how his business acumen would boost the nation’s economy “on Day 1.”
Separate from all of that, there is the crisis over the war in Ukraine. Trump’s fractious meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was the most dramatic moment in a process in which the U.S. has pulled back from assisting Kyiv.
Trump’s approach has caused consternation across much of Europe, as other nations try to figure out how to shore up Ukraine’s position against the Russian invasion, which began in February 2022.
Speaking at the White House on Friday, Trump was notably lukewarm about whether he would even be willing to provide security guarantees to Ukraine as part of an agreement that would end the war.
The human drama of the Musk-Rubio clash, however, seems sure to seize Washington’s attention.
According to the Times, Musk attacked Rubio for having fired “nobody” at the State Department, only for the former senator to shoot back that more than 1,500 people had taken buyouts — and inquire whether Musk wanted him to rehire them so the proprietor of X could ostentatiously fire them again.
Musk also apparently referred to Rubio as being “good on TV,” which the Times’s reporters noted included “the clear subtext … that he was not good for much else.”
Trump apparently let the verbal scuffle continue for some time before weighing in to back up Rubio.
Asked for comment on the report, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Hill the Cabinet meeting was “great and productive” and that “everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient.”
Trump, asked later on Friday in the Oval Office about the clash, criticized the reporter posing the question as “just a troublemaker.”
“Elon gets along great with Marco, and they’re both doing a fantastic job. There is no clash,” Trump said.
Still, Musk’s breakneck pace and grandiose pronouncements seems to be giving Trump some level of pause. In a Thursday post on social media, Trump contended that the administration would be taking a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” to the workings of government.
Trump noted in the same post that “it’s very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it’s also important to keep the best and most productive people.”
Tellingly, Trump also emphasized that departmental secretaries “can be very precise” in figuring out who is required and who could be laid off — an implicit, if mild, limit on Musk’s power.
For all the Musk drama, however, the real threat to Trump’s political standing is likely an economic downturn.
To be sure, there are millions of more liberal-minded Americans who see him as a danger to democracy itself. But those opponents were not numerous enough to deny him a second term. Economic misfires could shift the sliver of “soft” Trump supporters away from him.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released earlier this week found a mere 31 percent of adults approved of how he is handling the cost of living.
To that end, new jobs figures released Friday morning were less than stellar.
The number of new jobs created in February came in at 151,000, slightly below expectations. The unemployment rate ticked up by one-tenth of a percentage point, to 4.1 percent.
In recent days, the CEOs of Target and Best Buy, among others, warned that Trump’s tariffs, if enacted, would raise prices for American consumers.
The bottom line, Musk aside, is that since Trump took office, unemployment is up, the stock market is down and tariff talk is causing turmoil.
For all Trump’s strength right now, the dangers are plain to see.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
