Donald Trump and Elon Musk prove that the whole is greater than the sum of its two parts.
There have been many famous pairs in history. Rodgers and Hammerstein. The Wright Brothers. Oppenheimer and Groves. Laurel and Hardy. The list could go on. One new addition will be Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
The two make an interesting pair. Both were liberal in the past and supported Democrats. Both are businessmen who have seen their fair shares of ups and downs in their respective fields. But the two of them came to the realization that together they could do things that previous presidents either never tried or could not get done. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and its conversion to a far more open platform, X, laid the groundwork for Donald Trump reaching much larger audiences than he could in the past. Donald Trump, a firm believer in the American people and their God-given rights, realized that Elon Musk had the capabilities and desire to reform a hidebound Washington. The result? DOGE.
The two men together have set out to audit every line of the multi-trillion dollar federal budget. They want all 2 million federal workers to justify their salary or face retirement or firing. That which they are doing has not been done in my lifetime and the scale of their activities is beyond comprehension. For years, workers could work at home or perform little work for full salaries. The Pentagon could spend billions on items that could be purchased for much less. It didn’t matter as nobody cared and nobody was looking anyway. And then came DOGE. With Donald Trump’s full support, Elon Musk and his team can question any expense or demand that every employee justify his employment. And people in government and their beneficiaries outside of it are in shock. How dare Elon Musk, with Donald Trump’s full backing, demand that workers explain what they did last week. And how do the folks at DOGE have the nerve to go through the books and root out ridiculous grants and expenses? I remember as a graduate student that we met with our professor every week. Oy if you did not have some progress to show him at those meetings. Also, every expense had to be recorded and justified. Trump and Musk are asking for no less from the federal government; those in the various executive offices have never had such demands and don’t know what to make of them.
It was said of Sam Walton that he had a computer on his desk. He admitted that he had no idea how to use a computer but he knew that it would be important for growing his business in Bentonville, Arkansas. He told his lieutenants to integrate computers into the business and they did so for monitoring goods and their transportation. With the largest truck fleet in the U.S., Walmart could move goods from one store to another based on demand and need. Donald Trump does not know how to create the algorithms to root out waste and fraud in the U.S. budget. Elon Musk knows how but he needs a president/friend in order to be given the keys to the palace in order to get the U.S. government working efficiently: a leaner budget, fewer workers, and less regulation. The synergies between Trump and Musk are reminiscent of Groves and Oppenheimer, who were also worlds apart in manner and background. General Groves might not know how to crush a sphere of plutonium and get massive amounts of energy released, but he knew how to buy large tracts of land and get tens of thousands of workers to build massive structures quickly. Robert Oppenheimer wouldn’t know how to coordinate with the air force for bomb delivery but he could get many Nobel-level scientists to work together towards a single scientific goal.
We are currently living through the phase of rearranging one’s clothes closet where everything has been thrown onto the floor. Workers are complaining, judges are interfering, the mainstream media is shrieking and the markets don’t know what to make of DOGE’s efforts. In a while, we will have a leaner, more responsive government with less regulation and fewer workers. The armed forces will actually scare enemies instead of making them laugh. Illegal aliens will be reminiscing on how great life in the U.S. used to be. Small businesses will be able to succeed without suffocating rules. The country in a few years will be more successful, wealthier, and far more nimble in dealing with economic, political and military adversaries around the globe.
Donald Trump has changed and grown enormously in the decade since his ride down the Trump Tower elevator. In his first administration, I doubt that he would have wanted to share the spotlight with someone like Elon Musk. At that time, Musk would never have thought about working with Donald Trump. He saw himself as a liberal and held that Democrats were closest to his political leanings. How times have changed. When Musk and Trump are together, one gets the impression that they really are friends and that there is a great deal of respect between them. That Musk showed up recently to the first cabinet meeting with a shirt reading, “Tech Support” tells a great deal about Musk’s self-effacement in this gargantuan task of righting the federal ship. When Donald Trump said that the DOGE crew dress worse than Musk, one could see the playful relationship between the two billionaires-turned-fixers of the federal mess.
If only it was the Biden administration that had wasted money and destroyed America’s institutions, then the job would be manageable. But the decline goes back over two decades. There is an enormous amount of work to do to get the Executive Branch working again for the American people and American interests—and not giving money to terrorist groups or leaving billions in American military supplies in Afghanistan. Rather than be dismayed by the task at hand, Musk and Trump seem excited by the challenge.
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