Video

Less than 24 hours after billionaire Elon Musk did his exit interview with Donald Trump in televised Oval Office appearance, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) had a few things to say during an appearance on MSNBC.

Speaking with the co-hosts of "The Weekend," the popular Texas Democrat began by bidding the highly controversial Musk goodbye by laughing and joking, "Hallelujah is what I've got to say. Is it Sunday? Let us all give thanks to the good lord above."

She then got down the particulars of Musk's tenure after he foisted the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on the U.S. voters despite never being elected to office himself.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

"Let me tell you something, he is gone but the musk is still going to linger in the air," she quipped. "We know, as you went through in your intro, that there are so many people that have been impacted by these ridiculous and not thought-out cuts and it's not just the federal workers. It's those constituents of ours, our citizens, that are being impacted the hardest by these cuts."

"And so here it is: you basically let this guy run wild and, honestly I feel like all of the cuts to federal employees there was nothing more than a distraction for the things that he really wanted to do, which is to make sure that there was no oversight over his companies, the companies that were under investigation this was to kind of keep us busy and distracted," she added.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk wants to have his cake and eat it too, said MSNBC's Ari Melber on Friday evening — enjoying the power his relationship with President Donald Trump gives him, while at the same time not taking any responsibility for Trump policies he doesn't agree with or that are unsuccessful.

This comes as Musk formally departs from a full-time role as an adviser to the White House — but even then, Trump himself won't commit to Musk actually being gone, saying he will continue to advise in some capacity.

President Donald Trump on Friday announced a dramatic increase in tariffs on imported steel, doubling the rate from 25% to 50%. But the move is already drawing fire from inside his former inner circle.

“We are going to be imposing a 25% increase,” Trump said Friday during a campaign-style speech in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. “We’re going to bring it from 25% to 50%, the tariffs on steel into the United States of America, which will even further secure the steel industry in the United States. Nobody’s going to get around that.”

Elon Musk acted as hype man for President Donald Trump at his farewell news conference at the White House by urging the assembled journalists to cheer a short video clip he played at the start of the event.

The tech mogul is leaving his government perch Friday after cutting thousands of government jobs, scooping up sensitive private data on millions of Americans and alienating his Tesla customer base, but Trump started off his exit event by playing video of CNBC's Rick Santellli praising his tariffs "Squawk Box" earlier that day.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) dismissed a student's question about the Republican tax cut bill by mocking poor people.

The Wisconsin Republican spoke Thursday at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he defended the extension of president Donald Trump's tax cuts when one of the students asked why the GOP bill focused on spending cuts instead of raising revenue to balance the budget.

President Donald Trump has been "goaded" by recent mockery of his tariff agenda into harshening it, said Bharat Ramamurti, former director of the U.S. National Economic Council, in a panel discussion on MSNBC Thursday evening.

In particular, Trump was enraged by the TACO ("Trump Always Chickens Out") meme circulating to make fun of how he keeps walking back his tariff threats. He blew up at a reporter who asked him about it this week.

CNN's Harry Enten presented a data point that showed how deeply the mocking "taco" nickname had penetrated the public consciousness.

The president suffered a major loss this week in his trade war when the U.S. Court of International Trade blocked his tariffs as unauthorized, but an appeals court reinstated them while his challenge plays out.

With Donald Trump promising a press conference on Friday where he will thank billionaire Elon Musk for his work in setting up the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and proceeding with the dismantling of government agencies, two MSNBC hosts suggested a set-up is in the works.

Discussing the much-hyped press availability, "Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough pointed to a recent Musk interview where he claimed, "I don't want to, you know, speak out against the administration, but I don't want to, because I also don't want to take responsibility for everything the [Trump] administration is doing."

That led Scarborough to joke, "I don't understand the complicated ways of Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., but I do understand that Elon Musk is desperately trying, as sadly as he can, but as clearly as he can, to separate himself from the work that he did over the past 4 or 5 months that savaged his reputation in the business world and has hurt Tesla."

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

"And you can see it there. 'Oh, I'm not going to get specific but, yeah, but I don't agree with everything they're doing. Nod, nod. Wink wink," he quipped.

Co-host Jonathan Lemire predicted Trump will maneuver the press conference to make his billionaire adviser own what DOGE has done.

"What he is going to get instead of that, he's going to get a news conference in the Oval Office where Donald Trump is going to make him grab with both arms a lot of what he did in the administration," Lemire stated before adding, "That's what we're seeing here in a little bit."

He later added, "He [Musk] now sees the aftermath and the impact of what it's done on his businesses, and we've chronicled quite a bit on this show how Tesla has really taken a hit, how Musk's reputation has really taken a nosedive in a lot of quarters around the country and frankly, the planet right now, the way that his companies have suffered in Europe and other places."

"So yes, he is trying he's trying to be subtle, but he is trying his best to separate himself but that's just drawn some ire from the Trump people," he reported. "Stephen Miller went after him on Twitter this week. [House] Speaker Mike Johnson has been critical, and I suspect today we will hear President Trump really try to lash Musk to everything they've been doing in D.C. over the last couple of months."

You can watch below or at the link right here.

CNN's Kate Bolduan repeatedly expressed her astonishment at the breadth and depth of the cuts president Donald Trump made to medical research in his ongoing feud with Harvard University.

The Trump administration canceled hundreds of grants worth millions of dollars for the university's research, which a public health expert from the school told "CNN News Central" had been abruptly halted when that funding was cut off.

During a panel discussion on Elon Musk's last days of assisting Donald Trump in dismantling the government in search of putative savings, one MSNBC contributor brought up a grim report on deaths that have been attributed to the work done by the billionaire's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The panel on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" sat in stunned silence when political commentator Anand Giridharadas started ticking off the damage Musk is leaving behind as he reportedly exits politics.

President Donald Trump finally got an "off-ramp" from his deeply unpopular trade wars, said one of his former White House aides, but the sudden popularity of a mocking nickname might compel him to double down.

The president has been announcing punishing tariffs against China and other U.S. trade partners, sending markets into a tailspin and forcing him to back off, and Wall Street traders have been banking on his predictably lurching economic policy with what they call "TACO" trades – meaning "Trump Always Chickens Out" – and former White House staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin told "CNN News Central" the acronym might backfire.

A decision by Donald Trump to flip out on Truth Social and unload on a close associate of multiple Supreme Court justices will likely come back to haunt him.

That is according to Politico's Senior Legal Affairs correspondent Josh Gerstein who told the hosts on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the president may have obliterated a great deal of SCOTUS good will he could count on when he called conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo a "sleazebag."

After Trump tariff war was put on a temporary pause on Thursday, he turned to his Truth Social account to post an extraordinarily long and vicious attack on Leo as well as the Federalist Society which is home to a wide array of conservative attorneys and judges.

On his way out of the White House door, Elon Musk criticized the so-called "big, beautiful bill" sought by president Donald Trump and passed by House Republicans, but a CNN panelist cast doubt on his sincerity.

The tech mogul told CBS "Sunday Morning" that he was "like, disappointed" in what he described as a "massive spending bill" that undermined the work of his Department of Government Efficiency, but panelists on "CNN This Morning" disagreed about Musk's intentions.