Why Don Needs Mad Musk

Generally, if a US presidential adviser – someone who’s never been approved by the Senate to hold any real power in the federal govt – were to get into a public spat with the govt of a US ally, they’d be packing up their desk and taking the next train out of Washington DC.But what about when that adviser is Elon Musk? And he’s sparring with the Polish foreign minister over access to the satellite internet service used by the Ukrainian military. Radoslaw Sikorski called out “the ethics of threatening the victim of aggression”. Musk replied, “Be quiet, small man.” Still, he’s not going anywhere.By making himself the face of some of Trump administration’s most controversial and unpopular actions, the billionaire is deflecting some of the criticism that would otherwise be coming Trump’s way, setting himself up as a convenient scapegoat for the inevitable public backlash.While Trump’s campaign promises – reducing inflation, cutting taxes, an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, bringing back factory jobs – are popular, what his administration has actually done so far – alienation of longtime allies, indiscriminate layoffs of govt employees worldwide – is less so.Since Trump took office, inflation has increased, job growth has slowed, stock markets have sunk, even Bitcoin has given back nearly all the gains it has had since the election last year. Before the election, Trump claimed to have a secret plan to end the war in Ukraine before he even took office. But if he has a secret plan, he has yet to reveal it.Public discontent with Trump’s actions is clear from polls but is most obvious at town hall events held in heavily Republican districts. These events are generally quiet affairs, in which members of Congress talk to their constituents about what they’re doing in Washington and stay in touch with their districts.But in recent weeks, Republican members of Congress have been advised by party leadership to stop holding these events, as even members in the most pro-Trump districts have faced angry crowds demanding to know what they’re doing to stand up to Musk and (to a lesser extent) Trump.These crowds are upset because they don’t like what the cuts and firings are doing in general, but also because they don’t like what these mean for their own areas. For decades, members of Congress have conditioned their support for federal programmes on having some of the money spent in their home districts.Nasa rockets and US military equipment are expensive in part because they’re made up of components built all over the country: spreading the cost of production across the dozens of congressional districts and states helps to ensure that Congress continues to fund these projects. Powerful members of Congress get federal money and offices in their home states, even when it doesn’t make any sense. The National Maritime Centre is in West Virginia, a state that is entirely landlocked, but was long home to one of the most powerful members of the Senate.That strategy to build support for federal programmes means that cuts to those programmes are felt all over the country. Republican voters might like the idea of shutting down some federal offices and firing some govt workers, but they don’t like shutting down offices that serve them, firing workers in their communities.Their Republican representatives are trapped. Opposition to the DOGE cuts could attract attention from Trump and Musk, and maybe an electoral challenge; coming out in support of the cuts means angering their own voters. At the same time, they recognise that the last time representatives saw these riotous town hall meetings, in 2009 and 2017, they presaged political disaster for the party in power.Under these conditions, Musk makes for a convenient scapegoat. The issue isn’t Trump, they can say, but rather that Musk and DOGE are going too far, too quickly. This lets them maintain fealty to Trump and to the idea of cuts, while questioning the cuts that hurt their own districts.With approval ratings in the 40s less than two months into his term, Trump is among the most unpopular US presidents ever. The only president less popular at this point in the term was Trump in 2017! But Musk is much less popular than that. In a Washington Post poll from last month, only 34% of voters in US approved of the job he was doing in govt.There are no signs that Trump himself has any problem with what Musk is doing, and that makes sense – Musk is carrying out administration policy, even if it’s not what Trump ran on. But he’s carrying out the parts of the policies that are least popular, giving Trump and Republicans an easy way to displace the backlash against those policies.In his first term, Trump claimed that his failures weren’t his fault, but were caused by the disloyalty and incompetence of the people around him. His former chief of staff was “a total degenerate”, his Secretary of State was “dumb as a rock” and so on. In his second term, he has staffed his cabinet with loyalists, leaving Musk as the most obvious scapegoat as disapproval of the administration increases.Whether he means to do it or not, Musk is doing a valuable service to Trump by serving as a lightning rod, taking the blame for the least popular actions of the administration. Leaving the administration would be a service as well, giving Republican members of Congress a way to deflect the anger of their constituents, and letting Trump distance himself from Musk. The real question, though, is what Trump will do when he runs out of others to blame.The writer is Prof of Govt & Politics and teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University