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Over the last two weeks, President Trump has convened his top advisers for two separate meetings in the Cabinet Room of the White House.
The attendees and the location were the same. The vibes were very different.
The first meeting was held in public on February 26, with Trump and all his Cabinet secretaries sitting around an oval table as reporters watched. With the cameras rolling, Trump introduced Elon Musk — who was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room — and invited him to say a few words about his cost-cutting initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Then, instead of returning to the Cabinet meeting (the first of his new administration), Trump asked reporters if they wanted to ask him or Musk any questions, an unusual move considering Cabinet meetings don’t normally consist of Q&A… and Musk isn’t a member of the Cabinet in the first place.
Is everyone in the Cabinet happy with Musk? one reporter asked. Musk started to answer, but Trump cut him off. “Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” the president asked the room. “If you are, we’ll throw them out of here.” The officials in the room laughed, then broke into applause, a public show of approval. “They have a lot of respect for Elon and that he’s doing this,” Trump added.
Eight days later, several of the Cabinet secretaries — and Musk — were back around the table. This time, the meeting was held in private; according to the New York Times, it was much more tense. Instead of friendly applause, Musk reportedly got into nasty disagreements with at least three officials: Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who was seen giving one awkward, single clap for Musk at the February meeting), Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins.
Musk accused Rubio of not moving fast enough to fire people, saying he was “good at TV” but not his job. (Rubio responded that Musk was “not being truthful,” per the Times.) Meanwhile, both Collins and Duffy said that Musk and DOGE were making mistakes at their departments, by pushing to lay off veterans and air traffic controllers.
As if he was hosting an episode of “The Apprentice,” Trump listened to both sides, then picked a winner. Going forward, the Cabinet would be in charge, not Musk, the president said. Trump wrote on social media that the meeting was “very positive,” but he publicly confirmed that DOGE’s role would be smaller than it has been previously. The group would be using a “scalpel,” Trump said, not a “hatchet” (or, presumably, a chainsaw, as Musk recently brandished at an event).
For most of the Trump administration, Musk has been presented as the president’s closest adviser — which is why it might be surprising that when this first split opened up, Trump sided with his Cabinet secretaries over his multi-billionaire top donor.
But Trump’s decision is less surprising when you consider some foundational facts about the president.
Trump is sometimes given the nickname “Teflon Don”: a suggestion that after two impeachments and multiple felony convictions, nothing sticks to him (like teflon). Trump merely does whatever he pleases, this theory goes, without pausing to consider potential political consequences.
In fact, Trump — even more than most politicians — has proven himself to be highly conscious of public opinion, and responsive to its shifts.
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Trump gave a fascinating window into his philosophy recently, when answering a question about — of all things — Daylight Saving Time. “This should be the easiest one of all,” he said about ending DST. “But it’s a 50/50 issue. And if something’s a 50/50 issue, it’s hard to get excited about it. I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier, because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark.”
“A lot of people like it one way, a lot of people like it the other way. And usually I find, when that’s the case, what else do we have to do?” he continued with a shrug.
Trump is correct about the numbers here: Americans are roughly split about keeping DST or ditching it. But it’s the larger principle that is revealing. Contrary to the popular perception, Trump follows poll numbers very closely (even, apparently, tracking opinion data on the time change) and makes his decisions accordingly, often declining to stray beyond the confines of what’s broadly popular (with key exceptions for a narrow band of policies he’s particularly passionate about).
This principle helps explain Trump’s efforts to move the Republican Party away from highlighting some of its more politically unpopular beliefs, like restricting abortion or cutting entitlement programs. It also helps explain much of his address to Congress last week, when Trump focused on stances that boast support from the vast majority of the country, like increasing deportations and prohibiting transgender women from playing on female sports teams. (As I wrote this week, his focus on tariffs — a personal point of passion — at the expense of proposing a plan to lower prices was one exception.)
And this laser-focus on how his policies are playing across the country also explains Trump’s sudden willingness to break with Elon Musk.
Because Musk is not polling well. According to surveys by YouGov, Musk’s net favorability rating stood at +2 percentage points shortly before the 2024 election. By the first week of Trump’s administration, it was at -4 points. By February, it had declined to -6 points. Last week, it had dropped again, to -8 points. The longer Musk sticks around, the less Americans are happy with his role. In YouGov’s most recent poll, 65% of Americans said they thought Musk had “a lot” of influence in Trump’s administration. Only 17% said they wanted him to wield that amount of clout.
According to The Atlantic, Trump’s fears that Musk’s unpopularity would start to impact his own poll numbers — as well as complaints from lawmakers and administration officials that Musk was overstepping his position — are what led the president to call the second Cabinet Room meeting and ultimately decide to shrink Musk’s role.
A lot of grand psychological theories were floated at the start of the administration for what might precipitate a Trump/Musk breakup: maybe Trump would get jealous of Musk grabbing so much attention; maybe Musk would get jealous of Trump’s power. In the end, the first cracks in their relationship appear to have emerged for much more anodyne reasons: Trump, ever the political weathervane, bowed to the shifting winds of public opinion and to typical Washington turf wars.
But none of this means Musk has been banished from Trump’s inner circle.
Another rule of thumb for Trump-watching is that he rarely kicks people out for good: shortly after firing Steve Bannon in 2017, for example, Trump declared that the onetime adviser had “lost his mind” and “has nothing to do with me or my presidency.” (He even debuted a nasty nickname, calling him “Sloppy Steve” for good measure.) But now, eight years later, Trump still speaks to Bannon regularly — including, ironically, to urge him to make peace with Musk in February.
Musk clearly has not lost his presidential patronage: just this week, as a show of support, Trump even went so far as to publicly buy a Tesla. The DOGE chief is also trying to patch things up with Rubio: they met for dinner on Saturday, then both took to X (which Musk also owns) to praise each other the next day. (On the other hand, Musk unfollowed Transportation Secretary Duffy on the app.) In apparent attempts to keep Trump’s favor, Musk has also reportedly floated the possibility of donating $100 million to Trump’s political operation and started wearing suits, Trump’s preferred mode of dress.
Still, the president has made clear publicly and privately that DOGE — after several embarrassing, widely publicized missteps — must now enter a new phase, playing it safer and serving in an advisory role behind the Cabinet secretaries. (This strategy will also help the administration in the courts. Faced with lawsuits alleging that Musk is acting unconstitutionally, government lawyers have been arguing that Musk is only an adviser, lacking true decision-making authority. Until this new arrangement, however, that had not appeared to be the case.)
The episode serves as a warning to Musk that Trump is willing to throw advisers under the bus, as he did with Bannon and others in the past, if he spies a political advantage. In Trump’s universe, even the world’s richest man can have his wings clipped.
It’s not clear Musk has learned the lesson. According to the Washington Post, aware of their public perception, some DOGE staffers are now looking for more popular initiatives to tackle, such as expanding the number of Americans who can prepare their taxes using a free government website. But even since the Cabinet Room showdown, Musk himself has continued to freelance publicly — including by raising the possibility of changes to Social Security, exactly the type of unpopular moves that Trump has shied away from in the past, for fear of sparking backlash.
The White House, all but acknowledging that Musk had breached a sore spot, rushed to put out a statement clarifying that Trump would not be cutting Social Security.