Musk to Leave as Planned, Leftists Claim Scalp
Left-wing hatred for the DOGE chief has cost Musk billions.
Nothing gets a good story going like a formidable villain. For the Leftmedia, I’ll rephrase: Nothing sells advertising like churning stories about a faux villain — in this case, Elon Musk.
Lately, the “news” is that Musk is dialing back his time at the Department of Government Efficiency and looking toward exiting by the end of May.
This isn’t news, though. It was the plan from the beginning. Musk works at DOGE as a “special government employee,” meaning he must leave after 130 days. But This Just In: Musk Plans to Keep Promise isn’t nearly as compelling a media story.
There are indeed questions about what happens to DOGE after Musk leaves. He is a force of nature, and while he has populated the agency with like-minded individuals, past performance is no guarantee of future results without the captain at the helm.
“I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that timeframe,” Musk said recently. It’s natural to grade yourself highly when you’re a salesman, and Musk is at least partly that. We also must temper his estimation with realism.
DOGE has created a lot of welcome upheaval by identifying problems needing fixing and bloated agencies demanding elimination or reorganization. Will it last? The Swamp has only ever grown, it seems, and inertia will likely take it back in that direction soon enough.
Musk is well aware of this. “Starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” he said. “I’ll have to continue doing it for, I think, the remainder of the president’s term just to make sure that the waste and fraud doesn’t come roaring back, which [it will] do, if it has the chance.”
There’s a nagging sense that DOGE’s work is not just temporal but a bit of a mirage. “DOGE’s verified savings have been less than 1/10 of 1% of federal spending,” notes the Manhattan Institute’s Jessica Riedl. “There have been embarrassing accounting errors, lots of public statements that turned out to be false or misleading, or actions slapped back by the courts.”
Musk himself has greatly tempered expectations. On the campaign trail, he said he could find $2 trillion in savings. Once Donald Trump took office, Musk routinely talked about $1 trillion. Now, he’s saying we can expect $150 billion. That’s Swamp inertia.
Despite this moderate success, the Leftmedia still portrays Musk as an Earth-threatening villain. In a story titled “Elon Musk leaves legacy of self-destruction at DOGE,” Axios exhibits the typical Leftmedia antagonism toward Musk and his work for the Trump administration.
“He’s leaving with his reputation wounded, relationships severed, companies in crisis, fortune diminished — and little to show for DOGE but chaos and contested savings,” the report gloats. “He’s still beloved by President Trump, but his favorability ratings have plummeted amid scrutiny of DOGE’s mass layoffs, sweeping program cuts, and unprecedented access to Americans’ personal data.”
Which is it? Is there “little to show for DOGE,” or are there “mass layoffs” and “sweeping program cuts”?
And is all of this really self-destruction?
The Leftmedia has fueled the (sometimes literal) fires of protest, giving widespread coverage of all the protests, vandalism, and destruction perpetrated against Tesla, Musk’s electric car company. Some of that is terrorism, plain and simple, and yet leftists laugh at it all while the hatred and violence have cost Musk an estimated $122 billion in net worth.
A sizable percentage of left-wingers even think it would be legitimate to assassinate not just Trump but Musk.
To blame Musk for that bloodthirsty hatred because he identified some wasteful expenditure of taxpayer dollars is absurd. To say that Musk is leaving because Tesla stock is down 37% this year and quarterly earnings fell 71% is to act as if that was just an unfortunate market event rather than the rage-filled vendetta of sometimes terroristic protesters.
Meanwhile, Politico reports that Musk’s pending departure “will come as relief to some Cabinet officials.” The Washington Post likewise has a story about clashes with Cabinet heads. Forgive me if I suspect that’s more media churn than legitimate dissent in the ranks.
Put together, all of these media stories are telling you a Narrative™ in parts: Musk is a villain, people (who read media stories) now believe he’s a villain, even the Trump administration will be relieved when he’s gone (because he wrecked government and also barely did anything), and his work (read: leftist hatred) cost him dearly.
“I can’t speak more highly about any individual,” Trump said this week. “He was treated very unfairly. … He doesn’t need to do this.” Indeed he doesn’t, and our Douglas Andrews wrote about Musk’s patriotic selflessness last month.
Musk was a left-wing darling until five minutes ago, of course. He built the nation’s most successful EV company (with significant taxpayer help, I might add), which would “save the planet” from emissions-belching gas-guzzlers. He was Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2021.
Not long after that, however, he had an epiphany about how radicalized the Left had become. He soon bought and saved Twitter in the fight for free speech, and leftists quickly turned on him. It became blind rage when he joined Team Trump last summer.
The great success story will be if he exits DOGE as the lightning rod, but his vision for making government more efficient outlives his tenure.
