Donald Trump, facing terrible coverage, softens tone and tactics for Elon Musk’s DOGE crusade
Most people think of government workers as part of a faceless bureaucracy with cushy and clearly useless jobs.
Now it’s true that the federal workforce is bloated and needs to be trimmed. But the politics of Elon Musk’s mass firings are shifting, prompting President Trump to soften his approach to the DOGE campaign.
A major factor in this evolution is the negative media coverage, which Trump follows with great interest. It’s no accident that he said the other day the budget cutbacks should be done with a “scalpel” and not a “sledgehammer.” He’s acutely attuned to the growing backlash against the massive layoffs–which include 80,000 at Veterans Affairs.
Many of the stories, on television and in print, follow a formula: Lead off with one person who has been booted or negatively impacted by the Musk bros. That puts a face to the story, an actual saddened person whose life has been upended.
Consider this New York Times piece:
“At the Veterans Affairs hospital in Pittsburgh, researchers spent months preparing for a clinical trial of a new drug to treat advanced cancers of the mouth, throat and voice box.
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“They were ready last month to start enrolling patients — veterans whose cancer had spread to other tissue and who had run out of treatment options.
Then a problem arose.
“The hospital was unable to renew the job of a key staff member involved in running the study, a typically routine process thwarted by a hiring freeze imposed under the government-cutting project led by President Trump and Elon Musk. Suddenly, the clinical trial was on hold.
“‘They were ready to enroll,’ said Alanna Caffas, the chief executive of the Veterans Health Foundation, which administers the trials. ‘They had the lab kits on site. They had the drug to dispense. But they couldn’t get the clinical research coordinator renewed.’”
Here’s a Washington Post report from Texas:
“Jaylee Williams needed to find somewhere to deliver her son.
The 19-year-old knew more about barrel racing on her horse Bet-n-pep than the complicated metrics of who takes what health insurance. But relief for Williams and her boyfriend, Xander Lopez, came when they realized Medina Regional Hospital — just 15 minutes from their home — accepted Medicaid, the federal-state program that covers medical costs for lower-income Americans. “Provider groups an hour away in San Antonio had refused to take the insurance, she recalled while cradling little Ryker. ‘You never know when something could happen,’ Williams said, with Lopez adding, ‘I have no idea where we would have gone’ without Medina Regional Hospital.
But the lifeline that the 25-bed critical-access hospital offered to Williams and Lopez could disappear in Hondo and other communities like it.”
That’s because rural hospitals are fearing “massive Medicaid cuts,” since they’re so dependent on the federal-state program. Trump says he will not allow cuts to Medicaid, as well as Medicare and Social Security, but that would be the only way Republicans could save a promised $80 billion. Some 72 million people are on Medicaid.
In the Atlantic, Jonathan Lemire says Trump’s shift on DOGE began on Feb. 19.
“Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show ‘The Five’…told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. ‘I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,’ said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to ‘be a little bit less callous.’…
“Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story.”
Lemire adds that “over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk.”
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Trump decreed that agency heads should make the layoffs and cutbacks, and Musk should step in only if they fail to take action. The move also may be aimed at the various lawsuits against Trump, since Musk is only supposed to be an adviser and not a government employee.
Tensions have been rising behind the scenes (as well as publicly at town hall meetings, to the point that the GOP urged its members to stop holding the events). As the Times reports:
“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.
Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Mr. Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.
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. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
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? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
“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.”
The president, who eventually defended Musk, has denied that such a confrontation took place. “ELON AND MARCO HAVE A GREAT RELATIONSHIP. ANY STATEMENT OTHER THAN THAT IS FAKE NEWS!!!” he posted.
Another source of conflict involves Steve Bannon, the former campaign chief and White House official whose “War Room” podcast is hugely influential with the MAGA crowd.
“In mid-February,” says a story co-authored by Maggie Haberman, “the president told Mr. Bannon that he wanted him to lay off the attacks on Mr. Musk and for the two men to sit down privately, according to two people familiar with the comments.”
Bannon has, among other things, called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant” and “truly evil person.” Bannon said last month that he and Musk “have a chasm that is probably insurmountable.”
Musk has fired back on the X platform he has transformed: “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer. What did he get done this week? Nothing.”
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The proposed meeting hasn’t taken place, and may never happen.
More important than the backstage sniping is Trump’s softening on the DOGE crusade as the human toll becomes clear.
One thing Trump hasn’t talked about, and this is directly related to his tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, is the stock market, with the Dow plunging thousands of points in recent days.
The president told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that you can’t look at the stock market, though he loves to boast about it when it’s going up.
On her Sunday show, Bartiromo asked Trump if he expected a recession this year.
“I hate to predict things like that,” he said. “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.”
In journalese, this became TRUMP REFUSES TO RULE OUT RECESSION, though all he did was dodge the question. (But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared on “Meet the Press” that “there’s going to be no recession in America.”)
The DOGE reputation has also been tarnished by an appalling series of mistakes. Musk has acknowledged firing the Ebola prevention team and having to hire them back. He also ousted bird flu experts and those responsible for maintenance of nuclear weapons, and had to hire them back.
And the Musk gang has been caught claiming savings by ending contracts that actually expired years ago.
Would this track record be deemed acceptable in the private sector?
Tesla stock, meanwhile, has been plummeting for days, along with the market, including a 16 percent drop yesterday. Musk’s net worth has sunk by $121 billion since mid-December, according to Forbes. But fear not, he’s still the world’s richest man.
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When X suffered a global outage for hours yesterday, it seemed like a metaphor for Elon Musk’s woes. He later said the site once called Twitter had been hit by a “massive cyberattack.”
Slashing government jobs, with identifiable victims, just isn’t the same as laying off software engineers, and the backlash was inevitable. That’s why Donald Trump is tapping the brakes on the entire effort.