While making his official exit from the White House, Elon Musk has repeatedly griped that he and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had been made the administration’s “whipping boy,” absorbing blame and outrage for just about everything the president and his team has done that people don’t like. The twist is, this is one of the rare times the Tesla billionaire is actually right about something.
For the past five months, Musk has been a useful punching bag for Democrats, the broad left, the press, and just about anyone looking to politically wound the second Trump administration. And who can blame them? His bizarre behavior, flagrant corruption, and general unlikability was tailor-made for clicks and shares, not to mention made him an easy target for Trump critics looking to tie the president to a sinking rock, which had real political consequences for the administration.
So it’s not surprising that even as the media pumps out pieces taking stock of Musk’s time in government, that coverage is peppered with insistences that Musk isn’t really leaving, and that he’ll continue to exert influence on the Trump White House from outside and thus be responsible for whatever it ends up doing next. This will no doubt be at least a little true, and the public certainly seems to agree. But trying to keep the spotlight on a departed Musk may not be as politically effective as critics hope, and it risks failing to understand what is actually going on in the Trump White House.
The reality is that while Musk was and still is a convenient political foil, even when he was in the thick of things at the White House he was still only doing the dirty, hands-on work of someone else: Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director.
Anyone hoping to properly hold the Trump administration to account, not to mention understand what the people running it are trying to do, needs to…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
