Trump’s Cabinet meetings show how powerful Musk has become

It’s not unusual for Donald Trump’s meetings to conclude with spontaneous bursts of applause from his underlings. It is unusual for that applause to be directed at anyone but Trump himself. In front of the gathered press after a cabinet meeting on Monday, it was Elon Musk on the receiving end of the sycophancy. It came after a lengthy tribute from Trump himself, who singled out the “senior advisor” and DOGE figurehead for praise. “Elon, I want to thank you. I know you’ve been through a lot with this horrible situation that happened. Very unfair. What he is is a patriot ... He’s become a friend of mine,” Trump said, before threatening terrible consequences for anyone who harms a Tesla.

As Trump spoke, Musk wore a hat emblazoned with the words “Trump was right about everything.” He sat at a table alongside some of the most powerful people in the country with a place setting bearing only his name. No title was needed, apparently. “He’s a patriot more than anything else. He has never asked me for a thing he could have. I always say, I wonder if he’s ever going to ask me for something, and that’s always subject to change, and if it does change, I’ll let you know about it,” Trump added about Musk, who currently heads SpaceX, one of the largest federal contractors, which was awarded $3.8bn in government spending commitments last year. Trump’s comments were followed by a lengthy round of applause from the cabinet as JD Vance, the vice president president and forgotten failson of the West Wing, looked on. But the applause was only the finale of a drawn-out Musk-fest that showed just how much power and influence the billionaire now commands in the White House and beyond, reaching into every department of the US government. Almost every cabinet minister heaped praise on Musk and his mission to cut government spending, and each of them in turn focused their remarks on what they had done to meet the demands of the senior advisor and his team.

His mission has now become the mission of the government. It began with secretary of the interior Doug Burgum, a man responsible for the country’s vast federal lands, who boasted about the “many fraudulent contracts that were caught by the work that Elon and his people are doing.” Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, announced proudly that she had “canceled a $300,000 contract educating on food justice for odd and transgender farmers in San Francisco,” casting an eye and a smile towards Musk.

Many of the claims made by DOGE and its admirers have later turned out to be false, but Rollins rattled off her numbers safe in the knowledge that fact-checkers have no quarter in the cabinet room. It was at this point that Musk spoke up. He offered his own ridiculous claim that the small business administration had given $330m in loans to children under the age of 11, including a $100,000 loan to a 9-month-old baby. And on it went around the table. Almost every cabinet member, each with their own responsibilities and goals and aims and designs, all seemed to be laser-focused on praising the work of Musk’s DOGE. That is almost as shocking as Musk’s previous claim that DOGE had found 150-year-olds claiming social security benefits — a claim that was later debunked.

Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was next, claiming to have cut $22 billion worth of contracts. “The partnership with DOGE and Elon Musk has been incredible at EPA. Their team is very talented. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without them,” he added. Even Robert F Kennedy Jr, perhaps the most ideological person in the entire cabinet, who was picked precisely because of his deeply entrenched views on how to make Americans healthy again, chose to ramble about cost-cutting the health department’s IT expenditures. “We are, with Elon’s help, eliminating the redundancies. We are streamlining our department. We’re going to go back to providing gold-standard science. We’re going to get the money to the scientists and to the patients, rather than to the administrators and to the bureaucrats,” he said.

Given all of the massive waste and fraud uncovered by Musk and his minions, it must be no small embarrassment for Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, to have failed to bring any prosecutions for all of these alleged offenses. In lieu of subpoenas, she offered a word salad. “As far as the... we are hearing a lot about fraud, waste and abuse. A lot of waste and abuse, but there is a tremendous amount of fraud and Elon, thank you for your partnership. Thank you for your team. You have uncovered so much fraud in our government, and we will prosecute you,” she said, accidentally threatening the world’s richest man. “We have an internal Task Force now working with every agency, sitting here at this table, and if you’ve committed fraud, we’re coming after you. Thank you, Elon, for that,” she went on. The meeting was proof, if anyone needed it, of Musk’s ever-growing power.