Donald Trump just pulled the plug on Elon Musk
Last month Elon Musk tried to seize control of every federal government agency by threatening to fire all federal employees who failed to respond to his silly email. After the Trump-appointed heads of five of those agencies told their employees to ignore Musk’s email, Musk then claimed the email was merely “voluntary” to begin with. But it exposed a serious problem within the Trump ranks: is Musk in charge, or is the cabinet in charge? At the time, Trump provided no leadership or guidance at all, leading Palmer Report to predict more infighting.
Since then it’s been far from clear who has been in charge of what. Musk has been “firing” people and then two weeks later telling them they can have their jobs back. It’s clear that there has been a power struggle going on. Now it appears to have come to a head.
Trump allowed Elon Musk to run his first cabinet meeting, which went poorly – particularly when Musk gleefully talked about accidentally firing essential personnel and no one in the cabinet laughed along with him. Now Trump has held another cabinet meeting yesterday, specifically to inform cabinet members that they’re now in charge of who gets laid off and who doesn’t. In other words, Musk can no longer fire anyone.
This is the first clear cut instance of Trump pulling in the reins on Musk, and it’s a major one. Musk’s only “authority” was that he got to decide which employees and departments and programs to eliminate, and now that’s been taken away from him. This leaves Musk with no remaining power or function in the government. All he can do is make recommendations, which agency heads can laugh off.
The question now is how much longer Elon Musk will want to stick around, given that Trump has pulled his plug. Musk is far removed from psychological competence, so it’s difficult to predict what he’ll do these days. But as of now, Trump has decided that Musk is no longer President, and the cabinet members are collectively President.
Of course Trump keeps forgetting his own positions and changing them accordingly, so for all we know Trump could hold another cabinet meeting next week and put Musk back in charge of the government. That’s what happens when the President of the United States has symptoms consistent with advanced dementia. But for now at least, Musk’s government firing spree is over. Now he’ll have to go back to screwing up Twitter and Tesla.
