Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk
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 not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
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.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.
You hate to see it.
Interesting how there's no mention of this cabinet meeting over at NewsMax, Fox News, or most of the other conservative news sites.
Maybe the Times just got a scoop, but maybe the right-wing media doesn't want to cover this squabbling. Which do you think is more likely?
I was talking with a friend recently — a very intelligent, thoughtful, skeptical friend — and when I mentioned the Times, their response was to laugh. "Too left-wing — I don't trust what they say."
I don't disagree that the Times is pretty darn Liberal, but does that mean we can't trust anything they print?
I had a similar encounter with an adult man enrolled in a creative writing MFA program not that long ago. I sent him a link to an episode of Honestly with Bari Weiss and his response was, "I don't listen to that right-wing intellectual dark web stuff."
Huh. So here I have two people, each on opposite ends of the political spectrum, neither of whom are willing to engage with the ideas presented in media they don't like. Wouldn't so much as read or listen and engage with the ideas contained therein.
Now, let's be generous: maybe they just didn't want to read or listen to what I sent them. To be honest, I read or listen to things people send me maybe half the time. But now let's take them at their word: they don't want to engage with the ideas contained in the piece because it wasn't being delivered to them from a person or organization they liked.
Why does it seem we've given up on the pursuit of truth? Why does is seem that no one cares about facts or objective reality if they happen to conflict with their worldview? I posit that this is the reason people are resistant to media from outside their bubbles: they don't want to believe that maybe, just maybe, they don't know everything — or gods forbid, they might be wrong.
How do we have a society when people start willingly closing their eyes to reality — and that goes for Democrats and Republicans alike?
The answer: we don't.