It has been a crowded week for Donald Trump but if he stopped to listen carefully he might have noticed that the Democrats are not giving out about him as much as usual. And if he used a pair of field glasses to spy the street protests from the upper windows of the White House he might have noticed that Elon Musk is the name on all lips, on all placards.
That’s not a scenario that is likely to amuse Trump for long. The startling intervention the South African made on last year’s presidential campaign, when he unveiled himself as an ardent Trump supporter just hours after the July assassination attempt on the Republican candidate’s life, was one of the decisive chicanes in an incredible election course.
Suddenly he was everywhere, turning clunky arabesques of delight on rally stages, beaming out from under his dark Maga cap and contributing $277 million (about €265m) to the campaign. By August, Trump, possibly articulating an idle thought, said that if he was elected he might use the billionaire in some sort of advisory role. Musk jumped on to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter which he bought and gutted, to announce he was ready to serve, with a witty image in which he is standing behind a lectern branded with the Department of Government Efficiency.
The Doge acronym was a play on his cryptocurrency of the same name. It is estimated that Musk’s wealth has increased by $200 billion since Trump’s election win.
The businessman in Trump may admire the canniness of the investment. But some part of him must be beginning to wonder who the real winner in November was. As Trump dominated the global news cycle with his tariff threats and his staggering plan for the Palestinian people and Gaza, Musk and his team of crack-commando efficiency wonks got to work. It has all gone swimmingly.
Midnight Thursday was given as the deadline to the two million federal workers who received an email offering to buy them out of their government jobs. About 50,000 accepted – generally believed to be employees close to retirement or no longer living in the Washington area since the pandemic. Government sources “expect” 200,000 to take the offer up – just 10 per cent.
But already the buyout offer has become mired in lawsuits, with two district federal judges ordering delays on the expiration of the offer to allow further examination of exactly what is being proposed. Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, argues that what Doge is attempting to do is not legal. “And that is why we sued. We are not against the president moving forward with a programme to provide separation incentives to employees. And we are not necessarily against this programme but we are against how they have done it. The confusion. It doesn’t seem to us that it is right. If they are going to do this we want them to do it right. We don’t want them to just eviscerate federal employees for the purpose of putting in Musk’s lackeys,“ he said.
“It is not a buy out. It’s a scam in some ways. They don’t have the funding to pay until September - appropriations lapse in March. This is just Musk trying to do what he did at Twitter.”
That’s one fear. Thousands of people gathered outside the department of the treasury on Thursday to draw attention to the fact that Musk and Doge had in effect taken control of the building and had access to the personal information of millions of Americans.
The decision to immediately suspend USAid has had instant, deleterious effects on vital foreign aid programmes. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had fun this week reading out the dafter USAid grants with triumphal glee as proof of the elimination of government spending. And some the chosen topics did sound bonkers.
Others, such as the assertion that Politico, the news organisation, had benefited from $8 million in subscriptions paid for through USAid, was shown by the company to be untrue.
It also emerged on Thursday that the Trump administration plans to reduce the USAid workforce from about 10,000 to a skeleton staff of 300. That, too will draw lawsuits.
On Thursday evening it emerged that a 25-year-old Doge employee – it’s unclear who is paying Doge workers – had resigned after the Wall Street Journal uncovered racist social media messages traced to an account of his. There’s a shadowy aspect to Doge that has drawn questions even on Fox News. “It is not super clear what they are up to,” one contributor said.
But an unintended consequence of Doge is that it may be the cause around which the shattered Democratic Party begins to coalesce. Several Democratic politicians, including elder statesman Chuck Schumer, rekindled the protest era of their youth by getting in on the act, chanting through microphones, joining hands and vowing to fight back. Symbolically it could be interpreted as a poignant symbol of the Democrats’ new found powerlessness.
But for the first time since the election the Democratic collective voice is audible. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s takedown of Musk as “probably one of the most unintelligent billionaires I have ever met or seen or witnessed” inevitably drew a backdraught of anger, which meant it registered.
“This dude is not smart, and the danger in the lack of intelligence and the lack of expertise that Elon has, I mean, this guy is one of the most morally vacant, but also just the least knowledgeable about these systems that we know of,” she said.
Connecticut senator Chris Murphy described the Doge workings as “a constitutional crisis” and vowed that Democrats in Congress would block and obstruct and impede at every turn.
Even Jared Golden, the usually temperate Maine representative, used Musk’s own social media platform to describe him as an “unelected, weirdo billionaire”, stating he had received a lot of calls from people about him over the past few days.
And their voices will only become louder. Musk was probably too busy on Thursday evening to watch the Sean Hannity Show. But Trump’s go-to talkshow host opened with a comically stout defence of Musk’s general brilliance. It sounded like the owner of a football club giving the dreaded vote of confidence to his relegation-threatened manager.
The fear is that Musk is treating the essential machinery of the US federal system as a plaything and something he owns – and that he simply doesn’t know what he is at. Trump will run with this until he senses it is no longer popular across the republic.
And then? Even Musk knows how it goes with boys and their toys.
