Transcript: Trump Officials Openly Defy Musk as GOP Voter Rage Worsens
Sargent: Wow, that’s pretty extraordinary. Over the weekend as well, Musk did this crazy tweet telling federal employees that they’d soon receive an email commanding them to document what they got done last week. He said, “Failure to respond will be taken as resignation.” Boy, that sounds very powerful and decisive, doesn’t it? But then after the Office of Management and Budget send out the email Musk promised, new FBI Director Kash Patel told employees not to respond. A senior State Department official sent a similar email to its employees. The New York Times’s Ed Wong reports that this happened at other agencies as well. Leah, Trump officials themselves are saying Musk is the emperor with no clothes. What do you make of that?
Greenberg: Well, first of all, this was an obviously bananas management technique, and also a very, very obvious massive security risk. It’s not an accident that the folks who run agencies that have real concerns about what information is available to who are the ones saying, Please do not respond. So that is one element here that this is just a completely disruptive thing. And you’re seeing the interests of people who actually have to run agencies—malign as they might be—clash with the interests of someone who’s just an utter chaos agent. It’s Godzilla versus Mothra; none of these people are good, but they’re coming into conflict with each other.
Sargent: It seems to me the combination that we’re seeing—voter revolts at the DOGE cuts plus Trump administration officials openly defying Musk—suggests that there’s a broader opportunity here to use the DOGE cuts and firings to divide the new Trumpier GOP coalition. The MAGA faithful will still believe that Musk is succeeding at cutting waste and fraud no matter what happens. But you’ve got the non-MAGA voters—lower propensity, less engaged, working class, some nonwhite—who aren’t in that ideological place, who maybe see all this in a different light, [who] don’t deify Musk. Is there an opportunity to win some of these voters back with some of this stuff?
