President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s relationship has been questioned by both his right-wing allies and voters alike. But how much longer can their bromance last?
Some journalists have said the president has privately complained about Musk’s skulking around, while skeptics have pondered the demise of the Trump-Musk axis since the day it started. But if that wasn’t enough to get the president’s attention, maybe members of his Cabinet clashing with Musk will.
According to The New York Times, Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid into the tech billionaire during a Thursday meeting of Trump’s Cabinet.
After Musk, the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, complained that Rubio had fired “nobody” and had perhaps terminated one of Musk’s beloved DOGE staffers, Rubio reportedly said Musk was lying about the State Department not firing anyone, noting that over 1,500 department officials had accepted the administration’s ludicrous buyout offer earlier this year.
Reportedly, Rubio was already seething after Musk effectively axed the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is technically under the secretary of state’s purview. And that might explain why Rubio then reportedly went a step further, asking Musk sarcastically whether he should hire employees back, only to fire them again—something Musk has been known to do during DOGE’s chaotic job cuts.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
Rubio then laid out his plans to reorganize the federal agency, according to the Times. But this didn’t impress Musk, though, who remarked that Rubio was “good on TV,” implying that Rubio isn’t good for anything else.
Throughout the back-and-forth, Trump just sat there, watching his two cronies bicker “as if he were watching a tennis match,” The Times said. Eventually, the president got tired of it and stepped in. He reportedly said Rubio was doing “a great job” and added that everyone in his administration needed to work together.
Publicly, though, Trump announced his intention to reign Musk in via a post to Truth Social. He said that the next phase of DOGE cuts would be made with a “scalpel” versus a “hatchet,” yet still claimed that Musk’s team was an “incredible success.”
“As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go,” the president wrote. “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’ The combination of them, Elon, DOGE, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level.”
Trump’s tiptoeing—where he publicly supports Musk while simultaneously clipping his wings—suggests he’s aware of the growing unease among those in his inner circle, if not among the public at large. According to The Times, Cabinet officials aren’t a fan of the billionaire’s heavy-handed approach to slashing government spending, which has so far included his haphazard axing of federal employees only to later beg people to come back to work.
Musk’s complaint toward Rubio comes as the Tesla CEO has sought to reshape the federal government through a slew of poorly thought-through layoffs that have been tangled up in the courts. As part of his cost-cutting crusade, Musk has encouraged agency heads to fire their employees, though he’s been sidelined at least somewhat by Trump and his Cabinet members.
Indeed, Rubio wasn’t the only Republican who had a bone to pick with Musk.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy also got into a heated exchange with the DOGE dork, according to the Times. Duffy accused Musk and crew of trying to fire air traffic controllers amid several high-profile plane crashes.
When Musk said Duffy’s claim was a “lie,” the two argued. Musk reportedly demanded the names of those he’d fired, but Duffy claimed there were none because he had stepped in before their positions could actually get cut.
Despite Musk’s clear aggression toward Cabinet members, he claimed on social media that the meeting on Thursday was “very productive.” But Musk has a troubled relationship with the truth. He’s also attempted to skirt the blame for all the federal layoffs despite being the one demanding workers justify keeping their jobs or risk being fired.
Evidently, Rubio doesn’t want to address the discord, either. Tammy Bruce, a spokeswoman for the State Department, told The Times that “Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.”
No honeymoon lasts forever. That’s not only true of Musk’s waning approval rating but also apparently of Cabinet members’ patience toward working with the richest man in the world, who, it needs to be reiterated, was never elected to any role in the government.
How long will it be until Trump takes the hint and disentangles himself from the monster he’s bed with?
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