Billionaire Elon Musk — head of SpaceX, Tesla and X.com (formerly Twitter) and the richest man in the world — was a major contributor to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. And afterTrump narrowly won the election, Trump thanked Musk by putting him in charge of a new advisor group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The Trump Administration, with DOGE's help, is laying off thousands of federal government workers. And Musk is so close to Trump that some of the DOGE leader's critics are sarcastically calling him "Vice President Musk."
Politico's Jonathan Martin discussed the Trump/Musk relationship during aWednesday, March 19 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," predicting that Trump will eventually grow resentful of all the attention Musk is receiving.
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Martintold "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, "I look at this, Joe, on sort of two tracks. One is the political; you could call it the conventional, which is Trump is trying to sort of do government cutting. He's got somebody out there in Elon Musk who's catching a lot of flak for it. You and I know that Trump doesn't like folks who are diverting attention from him, and he certainly doesn't like them when they're not popular. I think that will eventually seal Elon's fate."
ThePolitico reporter continued, "That's one track, and that's kind of the political track — which is, you know, backlash from voters leading up to a midterm. The other track, which is more sobering, is what I call the constitutional track…. And that is people around Trump — not really Trump himself, because Trump's not super sophisticated about some of these challenges — but it's the folks around Trump who, yes, want to exert executive power to the point in which they get some kind of a blessing from the Supreme Court of the United States that they can do this, carry this out."
Musk and other MAGA Republicans are calling for the impeachment of federal judges who block Trump's executive orders. And Martin told Scarborough and Brzezinski that one thing he finds especially "alarming" is the "rise in volume on the attacks on federal judges."
The journalist warned, "We have a history in this country of threats against federal judges. This is really dangerous stuff, and I think some of these comments about these federal judges being impeached or confronted is leading us to a really dark place."