TRUMP WANTS US TO BELIEVE HE'S REINING MUSK IN, WHETHER OR NOT IT'S TRUE

Imagine you were a poll-obsessed Donald Trump, and you were concerned that Elon Musk's weak popularity numbers risked dragging you down. Now imagine that you also wanted Musk to stay in the administration and continue doing what he's been doing -- because you have a schoolboy crush on his money and dictatorial brutality, and because he's done the dirty work you want done, which frees you up to play a lot of golf -- but you also tell yourself every day, I'm the king -- me, not Elon. Elon reports to me. What would you do?

One thing you might do is ask your aides to spoon-feed a story to the media conveying the impression that you've reined Musk in. The story might read something like this Politico report:

President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet in person on Thursday to deliver a message: You’re in charge of your departments, not Elon Musk.

According to two administration officials, Trump told top members of his administration that Musk was empowered to make recommendations to the departments but not to issue unilateral decisions on staffing and policy. Musk was also in the room.

Maybe you'd feed some juicy details -- real or exaggerated -- to Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman at the Times. Details like this:

Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world....

You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency....

Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? ...

Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.

After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.”

Or this, about a Musk exchange with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy:

Literally the dumbest people in the world are in charge of decisions like this. pic.twitter.com/T6jOrUqDJt

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) March 7, 2025

All of it leading to this conclusion:

The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk....

The president made clear he still supported the mission of the Musk initiative. But now was the time, he said, to be a bit more refined in its approach.

From now on, he said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.

Here's how you know that Trump wanted this out: When the story broke, he didn't say, "The fake news is lying again." He and his subordinates didn't offer an alternate narrative. Instead, he backed up the reporting. From Politico:

Trump posted about the meeting on Truth Social after this story posted, promising to hold similar meetings every two weeks.

“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,” he 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.”

The president later told reporters he wants Cabinet members to “keep all the people you want, everybody that you need.”

But he also said he wanted cuts, and that Musk would remain a power center: “If they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

So Musk still has the last word, according to Trump. If he were planning to cut Musk loose, he wouldn't have said this.

Maybe The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire is right to say that "Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration." But I doubt it.

Trump probably believes that he's fully in charge and Musk should respond to a public humiliation the way Trump subordinates generally do, by sitting and taking it.

Or it's conceivable that both Trump and Musk realize it's useful for Trump to suggest that Musk is being reined in. I don't think that's the case -- I can't imagine that Musk is happy with reports that Trump seemed to side with other people rather than him. But for all his arrogance, Musk might accept a certain degree of dominance from Trump, who, as I've pointed out, is the same age as his father. Musk does sometimes give the impression that he likes thinking of Trump as "Daddy." And I think Musk wants to keep doing this work, which (understandably) makes him feel extremely powerful, and gives the him an opportunity to hurt people who, in his opinion, are lesser beings who shouldn't be surviving and breeding.

A follow-up story at Politico tells us that federal workers don't believe anything's changed:

None of the more than a dozen federal workers POLITICO spoke to reported being told by their supervisors or labor unions that anything had changed directly due to Trump’s Cabinet meeting and subsequent comments.

“I don’t really expect them to necessarily start implementing what they say they will,” said David Casserly, an employee at the Department of Labor who said he was speaking in a personal capacity. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” ...

“It’s total bullshit. I don’t know what else to say,” quipped a second Labor Department employee. “I don’t trust a word of it,” said a third federal worker, who described it as Trump “attempting to insulate himself a bit from the court losses and the shift in public opinion, but I don’t think it will change anything.” ...

“Zero optimism and zero trust,” said one Agriculture Department employee.

They're right. Nothing will change in a meaningful way. Trump is an ignorant Fox News viewer who, like all ignorant Fox viewers, genuinely believes that Musk is primarily cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. (Trump includes alleged vestiges of "wokeness" in these categories.) I think Trump truly believes that Musk and his team are operating in good faith and that the cuts Cabinet appointees have complained about are unfortunate errors.

Trump thinks this media leak will recalibrate the coverage, and that's all he wants. He doesn't want the process to change in any meaningful way. He just wants the public (and his Cabinet secretaries) to stop grumbling about it.