The relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk might be the most consequential alliance in American government.
Trump has empowered the billionaire to slash and burn the administrative state, turning him into the commander and the enforcer of his administration’s efforts to shake the federal bureaucracy to its core.
It’s a remarkable partnership between two mercurial men who once publicly disparaged each other — and who really got to know each other only about six months ago. And it’s one that could shape the future of the country.
My colleagues throughout The New York Times have been doing terrific reporting about Musk’s activities across the government, and this morning I asked one of them — the White House reporter Jonathan Swan — to talk us through how this relationship evolved faster than even Trump and his advisers expected.
JB: One of the earliest headlines involving Trump and Musk that I can remember is from 2017, during Trump’s first term, when Musk quit the White House advisory councils he had been part of over Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord. How well did the two men actually know each other before 2024?
JS: They had no relationship. It was very superficial. Musk thought Trump was kind of an idiot. He sort of had a contempt for him. He was critical of him publicly, and he supported Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president. But last year, he began telling friends he wanted to support Trump secretly, and he shared his ideas at dinners with some of the wealthiest people in the world. He began to suggest on social media that he thought it essential that Biden be defeated, although he maintained publicly he wouldn’t donate to either presidential candidate.
He’d also, for the last few years, been engaging in secret political spending on cultural issues, but he didn’t want his name attached to it. His adviser on political spending was Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest aides. But the moment when he decided to go all in was when Trump was shot in the ear in Butler, Pa. And from that moment, he escalated and escalated his support.
At that time, did Trump and his advisers anticipate Musk playing the role he is now?
No, absolutely not. Of course not. Who could expect this? With Elon Musk, things accelerate so quickly. He went from publicly criticizing Trump to considering it his entire mission in life to get him elected. When that’s your mind-set, it moves very quickly into proposing that he’ll slash government spending himself. He seeded this idea with Trump. Trump doesn’t think about the fine details of trimming government spending. He added $8 trillion to the national debt in his first term, and he gave exactly zero thought to that during the campaign. He was focused on winning. But Musk takes it very seriously. So it moved really fast.
How aware is Trump of what Musk is doing, and how much control does he have over Musk?
Musk is effectively unaccountable. He tells Trump what he’s doing, but it’s not like Trump wants to have a detailed conversation about what Musk is up to at the Office of Personnel Management. Trump, at a very high level, knows what Musk is doing. They talk all the time, but Musk doesn’t report to anyone in a regularized or detailed way. He’s very close to Stephen Miller. He’s close to Russell Vought. He’s really a lone ranger, and he’s running very, very fast. And so far, so long as Trump has given him this broad blessing, that’s it.
There are huge legal concerns about what he’s doing, and lawsuits have been filed, but one of the challenges the Democrats are going to face is that the legal system moves quite slowly, and you know, it’s trying to catch up to the facts on the ground.
This week, Trump said: “Elon can’t do — and won’t do — anything without our approval, and we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won’t.” Did you take that as a sign of any kind of discomfort with what Musk is doing?
That gave me a sense that Trump knows there are some risks here. Trump has said privately that Musk is a “wild man,” but I’ll tell you — and I talk to a lot of people around Trump — it’s not like he’s complaining about Elon Musk privately. During the transition, he joked about how Musk wouldn’t leave Mar-a-Lago, but he liked having him around. More often than not, Trump says things about how smart he is or how talented he is.
Trump has said something else publicly, which is provably false: He’s said that if there’s any hint of a conflict of interest in Musk’s activities, they won’t be allowed. That’s absurd, because Elon Musk hasn’t divested from his companies, which hold billions of dollars in contracts with, and are regulated by, the government. It’s one giant conflict of interest. The conflict of interest is actually beyond anything we’ve ever seen in the modern history of American government, and there’s no sign that Trump is willing to put restrictions or guard rails around Elon Musk.
Steve Bannon has been deeply critical of Musk. Are there other tensions between Musk and others around Trump? Does Trump care?
Trump was not happy when Elon Musk started this huge online war with certain people on the MAGA right about H1-B visas. Bannon and the really hard-core immigration restrictionists went nuts against Musk. Trump didn’t like it, but he has never really minded watching people below him fight, as long as they’re all loyal to him.
Democrats are turning Musk into their target right now. Is there any sign that Trump sees political risk in his proximity to Musk?
I would look at it the other way. Knowing a little about how Trump thinks, it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump thought it was kind of good that Musk is taking all this heat, and he’s not.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Gaza pushed some Muslim and Arab Americans away from Democrats. What do they think of Trump?
Last fall, voters in heavily Muslim and Arab American communities like Dearborn, Mich., soured on President Biden and Vice President Harris over their support of Israel’s war in Gaza. After President Trump suggested yesterday that the United States take over Gaza, my colleagues reached out to some of the elected officials and activists who broke with Biden and Harris over the issue to ask how they felt about Trump’s proposal.
Mayor Amer Ghalib of Hamtramck, Mich., a Democrat who endorsed Trump last year, said on Wednesday that he did not believe the United States was prepared to force Palestinians out of Gaza.
“It’s all just talk,” Ghalib said as he waited for a call from the White House.
Hours later, Trump administration officials suggested that the president’s articulated plans were indeed more talk than action.
Others said that as Democrats try to rebuild a winning coalition, they should avoid casting blame for their 2024 defeat and try to win back voters who defected.
“I’m alarmed by the number of Democratic pundits who are going around with an ‘I-told-you-so’ approach to voters and communities who have voted for Democrats for 40 years,” said Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist who had urged the party’s primary voters to reject Biden. “I don’t think condescension and sneering is going to be helpful.”
And Abbas Alawieh, a Michigan Democrat who helped start the state’s Uncommitted movement to push primary voters away from Biden last year, said he hoped Trump’s focus on removing Palestinians from Gaza would lead Democrats to rally around them.
“Right now is a moment when Democratic leaders should forcefully speak out against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” he said. “It’s a way for us to speak to those Democratic voters who have long felt alienated by our party’s refusal to speak up forcefully for Palestinian human rights.”
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