Summary
Elon Musk has amassed significant power in Trump’s White House, leading DOGE and embedding his tech team into federal systems.
Musk is using his X account like a personal White House pressroom podium to dominate the news cycle, pushing conspiracies and undermining Trump’s announcements.
Ironically, Trump now struggles to control Musk, who is doing to Trump what Trump did to the GOP—pushing limits and amassing a devoted fan base. Trump knows that Musk is willing to out-crazy him.
While Trump tolerates him for now, tensions may rise as Musk’s influence grows.
Of those actually in power, as a rule they don’t idolize Trump and I would say are manipulating Trump more than Trump is manipulating them.
Trump’s straightforward enough, he’s a megalomaniac. Make him rich and/or stroke his ego and you are golden. Trump doesn’t really have a lot of ideology outside of self-worship.
Much of his executive administration is the brainchild of the Project 2025 folks. Those folks are basically being like Dick Cheney, all agenda zero interest in “taking credit”. Trump is useful, they just have to say “Trump is great” and feed him a mountain of executive orders to sign and he’ll happily do it, while asking for a one liner vaguely describing the order, marveling about it and signing it and moving on.
Musk is different because while the PJ2025 people are all too happy to yield the spotlight, Musk is very loud as he is also a megalomaniac. He’s fine with buying and placating Trump’s ego, but he also must be front and center screaming “look at me”.
To the extent these folks are working together it’s because their interests don’t conflict. RFK Jr. wants to play with a health system that no other stakeholder in this game cares about, but otherwise doesn’t care. The PJ2025 people might not have gone this viciously after USAID as Musk’s vendetta is taking him, but they certainly don’t mind.
So what happens when interests collide? Well see when Trump declared the US was going to go in, take over Gaza, and spend shit tons of US resources on rebuilding that for resort development while doing an ethnic cleanse. That’s a lot of evil to try to hide, more than I think they like trying to pull off this soon, but more importantly to them that’s an expensive thing they don’t want to pay for. So they just pretended that Trump never said the things he said and invented a new narrative retroactively and acting like the media was stupid for failing to understand. The manipulation continues, and Trump is fine because they played it so that he was always right, even as they retroactively changed what he said about US troops and investment. Netanyahu’s manipulation worked, but then his administration manipulated a different way.
Now if PJ2025 and Musk reach a conflict, don’t know how that will go.