Donald Trump hits the panic button after his cabinet members defy Elon Musk
One of the most basic tenets of human interaction is that if everything is fine and nothing is going wrong, there’s no need to pop up and announce that everything is fine. It’s nearly always a sign that something is off and that you’re trying to cover it up.
Last week Elon Musk sent an email to all federal government employees, demanding that they reply by this past Monday or they were fired. But over the weekend the Trump-appointed heads of five major agencies reportedly told their employees to ignore Musk’s email. It’s not clear what went on behind the scenes after that, but by Monday, Musk was suddenly claiming that the email had been “voluntary” after all. In other words, Trump’s cabinet defied Musk, and Trump failed to back Musk over them.
Of course Musk ended up running Trump’s cabinet meeting today, which is beyond bizarre for too many reasons to list. No one in the cabinet publicly pushed back against Musk during the meeting. But given that several of them defied him over the weekend, there’s a clear animosity and a clear problem.
So when Trump announced today that “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON,” it was a dead giveaway that the opposite is true. Again, the fact that Trump (or whoever is writing his social media posts) had to go out and announce this is all the proof you need that there’s trouble brewing.
When you’re the boss and your underlings are defying each other like this, you have to step in and either force them to get along, or get rid of some of them. Donald Trump, in his declining cognitive condition, appears capable of doing neither. So it’s likely that Musk and the cabinet will continue to fight each other for power behind the scenes – which is a good way for them to get very little done.
