Rubio Still Bends the Knee to ‘Leashed’ Elon Musk

Marco Rubio’s going along to get along. Photo: Saul Loeb/Reuters

Last week there was a now-infamous Trump Cabinet meeting in which (as we know from some intrepid New York Times reporting) Elon Musk clashed with high-ranking administration officials, most notably Secretary of State Marco Rubio:

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 unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.

After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.” Mr. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.

This nasty incident was followed by Trump suggesting that his agency appointees, rather than DOGE, would be making spending and personnel cuts going forward, which was widely hailed in media outlets as a sign of a long-awaited collision between Musk and Trump. But then Trump proceeded to undermine the “Musk has been put on a leash” narrative by telling reporters (per Politico) that “he wanted cuts, and that Musk would remain a power center: ‘If they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.’”

And now, just a few days after Musk was supposedly “reined in” by Trump, Politico is reporting that Marco Rubio is very formally bending the knee to DOGE and even thanking Musk for the kick in the ass to gut foreign-aid programs:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that the United States is canceling 83 percent of programs at the United States Agency for International Development, thanking Elon Musk’s DOGE team for its work amid reports of friction between the two men.

“The 5200 contracts that are now canceled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio said in a post to X, the social media platform owned by Musk. “Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.”

It’s more likely than not that Trump’s alleged brushback pitch aimed at Musk was mostly a ruse to deceive the federal courts and the public about who’s at the wheel of his administration’s effort to demolish the federal government and get rid of much of its workforce. But the other important thing to understand is that in the end it doesn’t matter whether it’s Elon Musk, Russ Vought, Marco Rubio, congressional Republicans, or Trump himself who is pulling the trigger on any particular act of nihilistic destruction. They’re all aiming in the same direction, which is a radically reduced, decapitated, and demoralized public sector dominated by a gang of corrupt billionaires who will receive their ultimate reward in big tax cuts later this year, paid for by the very budget cuts Republicans are now administering by any means necessary.