Trump’s populist platform gives way to billionaires’ agenda
Inside President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, the populists and politicians are starting to take swings at the plutocrats — namely billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk.
In a tense Cabinet meeting Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy excoriated Musk for firing their employees without giving consideration to whether letting them go would improve or harm their agencies.
A day earlier, Republican senators, concerned about the human and political costs of Musk’s legally murky budget cuts, appeared to secure an on-the-spot commitment from the billionaire to let Congress vote on those cuts rather than having the White House try to implement them unilaterally.
Musk told the senators — nearly all of them former Rubio colleagues — that his Department of Government Efficiency was not responsible for the cuts, according to two people familiar with a discussion that occurred behind closed doors. Not only was his position at odds with his public posture — Musk wielded a toy chain saw at a conservative conference last month — but it implicitly laid blame at the feet of the Cabinet secretaries who would meet with him and Trump the following day.
After listening to the back-and-forth between his Cabinet secretaries and his biggest political benefactor, Trump publicly clipped Musk’s wings. The Senate-confirmed secretaries will have control over who is fired in their departments for now, the president said, with Musk playing a backup role if necessary.
On Friday, Trump played down the previous day’s episode, details of which were first reported by The New York Times.
“Elon gets along great with Marco, and they’re both doing a fantastic job,” Trump told reporters. “There is no clash.”
“As President Trump said, this was a great and productive meeting amongst members of his team to discuss cost cutting measures and staffing across the federal government,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to NBC News. “Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to the American people to make our government more efficient.”
Still, the flash point served to highlight a broader battle that has aligned old-guard Trump-world populists and veteran politicians against Musk and a gang of ultrawealthy Trump advisers. And it was the first real sign that Trump might have trepidation about the richest man in the world haphazardly discarding hundreds of thousands of low- and middle-income federal workers and programs that serve MAGA voters.
“In the fight of the populists versus the plutocrats, I feel pretty f—–g good right now,” said Steve Bannon, host of the “War Room” podcast and a White House official during Trump’s first term who is popular with the president’s base.
“I’m all for taking down the apparatus, but there’s a way you can do that and there’s a way you can’t,” Bannon said. “The way Elon is doing it is clearly being rejected.”
For a president who ran three times as a populist, Trump has surprised some of his supporters by surrounding himself with billionaires and pursuing an agenda favored by elites.
His inauguration featured VIP seating for Musk, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and he quickly moved to take action on artificial intelligence policy backed by the “broligarchs.” On Thursday, he signed an executive order giving the federal imprimatur to cryptocurrency.
In addition to Musk, the set of Trump’s closest advisers includes another pair of billionaires working for the administration: Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Trump’s immigration agenda has also created a divide between his wealthy advisers and his populist base. While many MAGA voters back the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and the abolition of birthright citizenship, Trump has sought to open the nation’s doors to certain immigrants. He has called for allowing foreigners to buy citizenship for $5 million and creating an expedited citizenship for white South Africans.
But in a sign of the tension between key segments of the president’s coalition, Semafor reported Friday that tech industry leaders have become less ardent supporters of the H-1B visa program, which brings in high-skilled workers, amid a populist backlash from Trump’s base.
In some cases, MAGA populists have pushed back against Republicans in Congress. Laura Loomer, a leading Trump supporter, railed against the GOP on X earlier this week over the Senate voting to repeal a rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the Trump administration is attempting to abolish.
In a strange-bedfellows moment, Trump’s base joined with liberals to try to protect the rule limiting “debanking” — the term for financial institutions refusing service to individuals, companies or other entities based on their political views. At the same time, cryptocurrency heavyweights and tech-industry leaders, who have been among the most vocal critics of debanking, quietly stood aside.
Loomer said her issue is not with Trump, but rather with Senate Republicans.
“It’s disgraceful that Republicans continue their charade of campaign fundraising off of their false claims of fighting to protect free speech and fighting to combat debanking when they just made it easier for payment processors to discriminate against American citizens and specifically Trump supporters,” Loomer said.
“It’s a violation by the Senate GOP of promises made by President Trump to prevent discriminatory debanking and deplatforming by the big tech companies,” Loomer said.
The silence of Silicon Valley power brokers, including Musk and Trump tech adviser David Sacks, may point to their antipathy toward the CFPB and their preference for a debanking bill introduced by Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., that has heavy backing from the cryptocurrency crowd.
The central role these men play in Trump’s life showed up Thursday when the president signed an executive order creating a strategic bitcoin reserve. Sacks was in the room with Trump for the moment, and before signing it, Trump turned to the billionaire to make sure he had his support.
“This is something you believe in?” Trump asked.
Sacks replied, “100%.”
At times, Trump has sounded cavalier about the impacts of his policies on average consumers. He paused new tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods this week, but also suggested in an address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday that he’s not worried about consumers paying more at the register.
“There will be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that,” Trump said. “It won’t be much.”
But no paradox has been as vivid for Trump backers as the president claiming to strike a blow for the people by giving Musk free rein to cancel grants, contracts and entire agencies. That decision has resulted in economic pain for some Trump voters, many of whom rely on those services or hold government jobs.
During his speech to Congress, Trump proclaimed that “the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over.”
Dave Portnoy, a co-founder of Barstool Sports and a big-time Trump supporter, wrote on X that the line was a little hard to take.
“Gotta admit this one didn’t quite land since Elon is basically Co-President,” wrote Portnoy, who has grown increasingly critical of Trump.
Trump adviser Alina Habba recently suggested that veterans who have been laid off from their jobs in the federal government may not have been “fit” to work, further saying she had no sympathy for the thousands of people who are now unemployed.
“I really don’t feel sorry for them,” Habba said.
She added that while the Trump administration would care for veterans “in the right way,” “perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment, or not willing to come to work.”
Trump will be judged most clearly by how voters see his decisions affecting their pocketbooks, said one Republican strategist outside of Washington who works with lawmakers. And that judgment will be felt first by House and Senate incumbents in the midterms next November.
In a recent CBS poll, 80% of respondents said addressing inflation should be a top priority — while just 29% said they believed Trump was prioritizing the issue “a lot.”
“Trump is having fun with Elon and the rest of the rich guys kissing his a– — it’s all fun and games with DOGE now — but if the economy doesn’t improve and inflation doesn’t come down, his voting base will pay the price and Republicans will get destroyed in 2026,” the strategist said. “He has to deliver on the economy — fast.”
