Why Did Trump Just ‘Reign’ In Elon Musk?
There is breaking news right now that Donald Trump has clipped Elon Musk's wings.
According to Politico, and other publications like the New York Times, Trump called a cabinet meeting where he made clear to his key advisors, including Musk, that the individual departments are in charge of hiring and firing, not DOGE directly.
Politico reports:
Trump stressed that he wants to keep good people in government and not to eject capable federal workers en masse. But his administration has in recent weeks fired tens of thousands of federal workers across numerous agencies in a series of blanket terminations. A federal judge and the chair of a federal civil service board have both concluded that the terminations were not tied to performance issues — and may have violated civil service laws.
This also corresponds to Trump posts on Truth Social about the need to use a "'scalpel' rather than the 'hatchet.'"
Politico and others are right to point out that this is coming on the heels of DOGE firing people in multiple departments, only to have to rehired them because they were key to the running of that agency. Employees from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the CDC, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs and others have been rehired after they were hastily fired by DOGE, and the rehiring process has often been messy and incomplete.
But this is only part of the story. The bigger story is that there is a war going on inside the administration and inside the Republican party, that war is taking place privately, and major media organizations have failed to report it.
The bigger question is why Trump had control before and why Trump cares now.
Clues Inside The Social Security Administration
On Friday night a news story broke that nearly escaped everyone's attention. Layoff notices were sent inside the Social Security Administration, notices that could have impacted up to 50% of all SSA employees, closing a substantial portion of SSA offices across the country and potentially impacting benefit payouts. A huge story, one of the darkest chapters of the administrative coup.
Why didn't this make the news? To answer this question you have to first understand an important thing about how many government offices work. If your shift ends at 4:30 pm, it's possible that all of your digital tools, including email, are also shut down at 4:30 pm. This means that an email sent at 5:35 pm will be seen by virtually no one. Knowledge of the email will have to be leaked by the few who happen to be in the know. Furthermore, DOGE has installed significant amounts of hardware into the government networks, and one of the tools they are using is inserting subtle changes to the emails sent to each person. The email employee A gets may have an extra space between two words, or another similar hard to spot change, meaning that screenshots of emails could potentially be traced back to the person who received that email. Employees know this, and are unwilling to share this kind of hard proof of internal communications.
You also have to understand how major media organizations work. NPR, or the New York Times, are going to be uneasy about breaking a news story, utilizing only unnamed sources, without any evidence to back up the claims. This is particularly true since emails sent inside the government can be deleted like they never existed.
I won't hide these things from you. Trusted sources have given me the information, much of it is coming from multiple sources, and you have the right to know.
And so Friday night these emails were sent, and almost nobody knew (this was made worse by the fact that the news outlets and most Americans, most of the world, were preoccupied by the news about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's now infamous visit to the Oval Office). Saturday, Elon Musk took to the Joe Rogan show to prime the propaganda talking points against Social Security, but almost no one knew that the program had already been cleaved.
But some did pay attention. Social Security is called the third rail of politics for a reason: anyone who messes with it will face the wrath of voters. Privately, many inside the Trump administration, and many Republican lawmakers, raised the alarm. They were concerned about the political fallout if these cuts went through. By Sunday, most of these emails were deleted. It's like it never happened.
But the warning shots had been fired and there were now serious divisions inside the administration and the Republican party.
Multiple sources within multiple agencies have confirmed that the emails described above were sent, and were deleted. Several sources gave another hint as to why things transpired the way they did.
There Won't Be Elections, But Some Republicans Don't Like That At All
I wrote it in my recent post, but all indications are that Donald Trump has no intention of holding elections. He's said it, his policies point in that direction, and nothing he has done makes any sense if he thinks he will hold elections. Furthermore, statements by Republicans like Lindsey Graham about how Trump will remain in office after four years further drive home this point.
Elon Musk is on the "no election" crew. In fact, Elon Musk appears to subscribe to Accelerationism, the idea that society should be destabilized as quickly as possible so the tech savvy billionaires can own and control as much of society as possible. According to multiple sources, elements in DOGE are working as fast as they can to cut jobs within organizations like Social Security, organizations that might find significant amounts of political support should the cuts be debated for too long.
DOGE's goal is to make certain moves extremely quickly, to exert maximum DOGE control, and to do so before Republicans know what's happening. That would put Republican leaders in an awkward spot -- fighting Donald Trump to restore something Trump (or, really, Musk in Trump's name) has already done. So far very few have been willing to do that, instead opting to be "at the table" rater than "on the menu." But opposing a proposal is different. A proposal is just that, an idea that's open for debate.
Social Security proved to be a bridge too far. Multiple sources have also told me that there was pushback that resulted in confusion, and ultimately the emails were gone. The plan is now back to a proposal. The debate has begun.
Also, there appear to be efforts of DOGE and Trump hardliners to cover up some of the proposed plans to lower their visibility. As I reported on Wednesday, the General Services Administration, the GSA, a key government management agency, posted on its website a list of 443 Federal owned buildings that would be deemed "non-core property" and would be sold on the private market. That list was significantly reduced, and then ultimately redacted. To be clear, some of these buildings would be sold as part of DOGE's administrative coup (since they would no longer be needed after all the illegal cuts), while others would be leased back from private owners, likely at great government expense, classic kleptocracy. Furthermore, many of these buildings include IRS data buildings, the military's financial center, multiple FBI headquarters, and other data-sensitive buildings that could lead to physical or cybersecurity risks and increased surveillance. It's also worth noting that real-estate purchases can be made anonymously in the United States, making it easy for foreign governments to potentially buy these properties, a huge security risk. Lots of reasons why the administration might want to hide this.
This episode with the GSA came days after the episode with Social Security. Why? It's likely that some inside DOGE are trying to cool the opposition they are getting from Republican leaders, both in Congress and inside the administration.
Why Does Trump Suddenly Care?
Trump's sudden turn against Musk might appear to come out of nowhere. If you've been reading my posts you'd know that it's my opinion that Elon Musk has effectively been running this country for the last 46 days. Why does Trump suddenly care?
I think that the answer is obvious and isn't terribly "cloak and dagger" -- Donald Trump, for the most part, does not know what's going on. Trump has spent most of the last 46 days playing golf, eating lunches and dinners in public and private functions, attending sports events, and generally enjoying a vacation lifestyle. He's not a details guy. He's just learning about what's going on because the Social Security move garnered so much attention inside the administration and Congress that it finally caused problems for Trump.
For proof of this we need only look at his first term in office. Many of us, this author included, warned about the worst natures and proclivities of Donald J. Trump. And yet our worst predictions mostly did not come to pass. Why? Because in order to win the election, Trump surrounded himself with advisors, cabinet members, and decision makers who were already in the "Republican establishment." And we know, in fact it's very well documented, that some of these people sabotaged his agenda. Files were taken off his desk so he couldn't see them, orders were changed or ignored, and Donald Trump either didn't know or couldn't be bothered to care about what was actually going on. This only changed at the end of his administration, which is how we got January 6, and is why Donald Trump has spent so much time attacking many of his former advisors.
Now Donald Trump has no such constraints. He's surrounded by the worst kinds of sycophants, or people like Elon Musk who have taken the power that they have been given and run with it, consequences be da... actually, until now, consequences be missing.
