Memo to Elon: Know Your Boss

To: Elon (and other interested parties)
Re: Let Trump be Trump!

For months, there’s been an invisible countdown clock ticking until President Trump and Elon Musk split. The Trump Show is a one-man play and there’s not room for anybody else, least of all somebody wealthier and with a (nearly) comparable thirst for attention.

But I thought the break would come entirely over vanity not policy. This week suggests that may not be the case.

By attempting to do to the federal workforce what he did to Twitter — down to the subject line — Musk is making a profound misread of what animates Trump. The president is eager for big, beautiful wins and press coverage of the same — not some conservative ideological project to shrink the federal workforce.

In fairness to Musk, a political neophyte, many longtime Republicans also continue to tell themselves that Trump shares their philosophical views on, say, the role of government or taking a hard line against China. But those GOP lawmakers aren’t competing with Trump for global media attention and nor are they attempting to seize control of every federal agency.

The good news for Elon is that he can learn from his mistake and buy himself more time playing HR czar.

But that’s only if he learns from what happened this week.

First off, the lesson Musk should take from Trump’s White House news conference Thursday morning is not that the president impulsively faulted DEI initiatives or his Democratic predecessors for the Washington airplane crash — it’s that Trump’s instinct is to always look for fall guys not named Trump. Not only won’t the president take the blame for anything, his instinct in the face of any bad story is to pin the blame on someone else.

On Thursday, that was former Democratic officials and DEI. But it could just as easily be Musk when there’s another round of tough coverage on something that happens on Trump’s watch. The next time Musk demands the resignation of, say, an FAA chairman, as he did last year, he may find himself owning a crisis.

Musk should also absorb the lessons from the administration’s ill-fated attempt to freeze discretionary federal spending.

This effort — carried out by conservative Trump appointees projecting their own ideology on their boss — prompted chaos, confusion and backlash. A recipe, in other words, for bad media coverage of Trump. Sure enough, the president backed down a day later in the face of negative headlines and anger from his own party.

This rinse-wash-repeat formula should not come as a surprise to any sentient observer, let alone the richest man in the world.

Trump has been singularly motivated by press coverage and the perception of success throughout his public life, since long before he entered politics. And in his first term as president, Trump invariably would grow angry at the press for not giving him “good reviews,” a line he once lobbed at me as if I was on the Oscars beat. And if it wasn’t the press’s fault, it was very nasty Democrats, insufficiently tough Republicans or his own dumb-as-a-rock advisers, never mind that he hired them.

What Musk, and Trump’s ideologue appointees, should also grasp is that the president may say he supports cutting government workers or programs, but he doesn’t really mean it. The moment such efforts prompt anger from congressional Republicans, GOP governors or, again, a wave of bad coverage, Trump will disavow what Musk thought was his mandate. Remember this: The only true meaning of Trumpism is Trump winning.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a brief step down memory lane.

There’s no evidence Trump is a spending hawk. In fact, just the opposite. Recall, during the Covid year of 2020, when he chastised his own party for not printing more cash to hand to Americans. Or take, for example, one of his few long-standing principles: that Republicans shouldn’t even consider cutting Social Security.

More recently, recall that Trump’s main objection to the congressional Republicans’ end-of-year spending package wasn’t the compromise with Democrats, which Musk targeted. The incoming president was entirely focused on raising the debt ceiling and never so much mentioned spending offsets. Trump would’ve been thrilled if his party had lifted what’s effectively the government’s credit card limit or gotten rid of the cap entirely.

Look back at how the then-president-elect pushed Speaker Mike Johnson. It was never about clamping down on spending — he merely nudged Johnson to address the debt ceiling and offered vague demands about “getting tough” when the coverage turned sour. In fact, Trump saved his most savage criticism for those congressional Republicans uneasy about the top-line, namely deficit hawk Rep. Chip Roy of Texas.

I could go on about how Trump is ideologically androgynous. Or, to borrow an old line from Washington’s Mayor-for-life Marion Barry, how he’s a situationist — he’s for whatever the situation demands.

Foreign policy? His entire party views China as a new cold war foe. But Trump would love to do a deal with Beijing. He’s already talked about visiting there this year and invited Xi Jinping to the inauguration earlier this month.

This is to say nothing of Trump’s extralegal attempts to keep TikTok alive in the face of a new law pushed by his own party to block the Chinese-owned app from operating in America. Why? Because he thinks TikTok helped him win the election and he has friends of the show supporting TikTok.

And if you don’t believe that Trump is craving a picturesque stroll with Xi along the Great Wall of China to cap off the biggest, most beautiful bilateral deal you’ve ever seen — one to make their chocolate cake summit a mere appetizer — well recall which president it was who walked across the DMZ with Kim Jong-Un.

Want to talk domestic policy? Trump is up for grabs on most any issue, depending on, yes, the situation. Who can forget how close he came — pushed by his daughter, Ivanka — to supporting gun control measures in the aftermath of the 2019 massacres in Dayton and El Paso. Or let’s take abortion rights. Trump’s legacy is in stone — his Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe — but he still tried to straddle on the issue throughout his 2024 campaign.

Listen, Elon, if Trump can sway with the winds of the moment on the biggest cultural hot buttons of our time, what makes you think he’ll back you to the hilt on reducing the federal footprint?

I don’t doubt that Trump — who’s been obsessive about getting federal employees back to the office five days a week — is broadly supportive of rooting out waste and inefficiency. At least in theory.

But tread carefully. Your political moonlighting will only last so long you recognize what actually drives Trump. And if you think its government efficiency, well, somebody I know has a casino on Mars he wants to sell you.

Tick-tock.