Why Trump Is Toying With the Market, With Marc Caputo and Teddy Schleifer
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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri, and this is Summer.

Somebody's got to win. I'm back, the newly independent me. I'm a journalist out there on my own with a new Substack newsletter, The Red Letter, that I hope you will all subscribe to to support my journey. I am now an independent journalist, and of course, to do that, I will need your support, and I hope you'll follow me and consider buying a paid subscription to my newsletter that will be filled with lots of scoops, insights, reporting, interviews, and

all of that and more. You can also follow me on YouTube at Tara Palmieri. That's at T-A-R-A-P-A-L-M-E-R-I. That's just one I. And really, you can follow me everywhere at Tara Palmieri on Instagram, TikTok.

blue sky, X, you name it, that's where I am. I have been working around the clock this first week as a newly independent journalist, and it's extremely exciting, but it is not easy, I can tell you that. But already I've learned, dovetailing off of the last episode that we had with Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado, who said that one of the biggest challenges his party, the Democratic Party, faces is authenticity, is that Democratic leadership has started hiring influencers. That's

That's right. Like the comedian Suzanne Lambert, who became famous for mocking MAGA women for the way they do their makeup online, to help them talk like real people. Yeah, they're having a hard time keeping it real. And so now they're turning to influencers to help them connect with working class people and just create interesting content that goes viral. And I know it sounds really silly to even be talking about this. It seems like a parody, an episode of Veep.

But that is the inside conversation that is happening right now in Washington, because if the Democrats are going to be a viable opposition party to Donald Trump, they need to get into the culture. You know, politics is just downstream of culture, and they have clearly missed the boat on that. And you saw that in the last election where they played it very safe, even defensively.

Tim Walz, who was Kamala Harris's running mate, if you've already forgotten him, he admitted in an interview with Politico earlier this week that they played it way too safe. But on this episode, we're going to talk about something that is affecting us all right now, the stock market. It has been all over the place.

On Monday, the Dow was down nearly 900 points. Yesterday, it was down 450 points. And this is all around President Trump's tariff threats. I will say, though, that today, as of recording this interview on Wednesday afternoon, it seems to have settled a bit since there is a new report out that shows that inflation seems to be cooling. But

President Trump's tariffs are certainly causing a lot of jitters in the economy. There are a lot of market reactions. There's also the questions around the job market.

I'm just trying to figure out the endgame for President Donald Trump, who for so long seemed to want to take credit for the stock market, even claiming credit when he didn't really deserve it, especially during his first term, saying that the strong economy was because of him and his policies. And now he doesn't seem to mind that his policies are causing a lot of turbulence in the markets.

In fact, in an interview with Fox Business News over the weekend, he didn't rule out the possibility of a recession. He said that we were going through a period of transition. And this does not seem like the President Trump before. Like, he was always projecting confidence, even when he really didn't have a right to be. So what exactly is he doing? I really want to get inside of his head and try to figure out what the endgame is. So I brought in two of the most plugged-in reporters in Washington, D.C., two of my former colleagues,

Mark Caputo of Axios and Teddy Schleifer of the New York Times. When they write something, I believe every single word they write. I have worked with them. I know they are legit. So I brought them on the show to try to decipher what is going on with President Trump right now. We also get into the Elon Musk of it all. Teddy just reported that Elon donated another $100 million to President Trump's political efforts after donating $300 million during the campaign.

And that was a record amount already. Of course, this comes after a blowout between Musk and Trump's cabinet, specifically Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. We get into that in the episode as well. Is this Musk's way of kiss and make up? I'll just donate $100 million to get into everyone's good graces. Of course, what everyone's asking is, will this be a lasting love? And my guests have a take that might surprise you.

Well, first of all, I want to invite Teddy Schleifer back to his homecoming, coming back on the pod. He's now at the New York Times. He's my former colleague, and he has been at the forefront of the story of the billionaire Silicon Valley class.

courting Trump and coming his way after many years for the Democratic Party. And of course, Mark Caputo, the shitster that we know and love and brilliant reporter. You know, talent is often. Also a former colleague. Former colleague, yeah. I guess I worked with both of you. Yeah. I forgot about that. Wow.

It's been a while. Okay, guys, we got to get down to it because we don't have a lot of time. I see Teddy just like touching his hair a lot. Don't pull it out, Teddy. You'd only have it for so long. Beautiful hair. Beautiful hair, though. Beautiful set of hair. So I want to talk about the economy because I think that's what everyone is really concerned about right now and what the hell Trump is doing with the tariffs, the tariff threats, the

this and that. I mean, during his first administration, he constantly tweeted about the stock market and he took credit for it, right? Even when he had no, really he had no claim to some of it. I mean, you could say that like consumer confidence or stock market confidence had something to do with the leadership, but right now it has been so shaky. I think on Monday it dropped by 900 points. Like it's just been, it's

And I would think that Trump would be more concerned about it, but instead he seems to still be pushing forward with the tariffs, their job market instability. He is the center of the instability of the stock market. What is he thinking right now? Is he just fine with messing with the markets? I'll let Mark take that one because I feel like he's- Yeah. I was going to defer to Teddy. Yeah.

Good question. I don't think we know. What we do know is that you're right. Compared to Trump 1, Trump 2 is not as concerned. That's because Trump 2 is not running for re-election. And I'd like to apologize to a lot of the liberal fever dream pushers who are saying he's going to try to run unconstitutionally for a third term and become a dictator. But all indications are he doesn't intend to do that. And

This is not as much a concern of his. It is surprising to see sort of the more blasé attitude he has toward it, considering what he said in the past. And it's not just in his first term that Trump had said,

hey, the stock market is doing great because of me. Even at the end of Biden's term, when the stock market did well, he said, look, it's doing well because the stock market, the guys with all the money, the investors think I'm going to win and everyone's happy. And then now that it's crashed, he's like, oh, well, it happens. The most interesting thing, which I'm trying to understand is--

And there are a few stories that have been written about it, one in Politico, one in the Wall Street Journal about the sort of the disconnect in messaging between Howard Letnick, the Commerce Secretary, and the President, both asked on Sunday, is a recession going to happen? And Trump kind of

shifted around, didn't quite answer it on two occasions, both sitting down with Maria Bartiromo at Fox and then on the plane coming back on Air Force One. Howard Lutnick was like, hell no, no recession is going to happen. The disconnect in that messaging, that belief, I think is notable. I've got a lot of different theories. I don't want to say what they are,

But there's certainly a disturbance in the force. What are your theories? I'm curious. I mean, listen, I know that for a long time people around Trump have been sort of annoyed by Howard Lutnick and his style and who he is. And they say that he kind of just shoots from the hip when he goes on TV. He doesn't consult with them on the messaging. But really, are we talking about the idea that people would stick to messaging when Trump's your leader? But yeah, what's your theory? I'm just curious. Yeah.

I don't really know, but I think it's clear that Trump thinks a recession is possible. And he doesn't quite know how to answer that question. Does he think it's good? Does he think it's like an opportunity for wealthy people to buy stocks? And he said it would be a period of transition, essentially, over the weekend. There's been a notable shift in messaging, sure. Before the election, it was like, elect me. Stock market is going to roar. Economy is going to be great. Prices are going to come down. Now-

If you were to sort of change some of the circumstances, you would think you'd be listening to a Marxist. You know, the Marxist idea of heightening the contradictions. The proof that things are getting better is that they're getting worse, right? It's like, we're now going to have to administer this sort of pain or this uncomfortable medicine, this bitter medicine to improve things. It's quite a shift from what we had heard before, but that shift is undeniable. Sticking with the medical metaphor,

Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, did, what, 45 minutes on Squawk Box? Very rare for any secretary of any cabinet agency to sit down for that long on television. And he notably said that they're blaming the predecessor, which is what you do when you're in office, right, whether right or wrong, that the economy needs to, quote, detox from Biden. So something's up.

What do you make of it, Teddy? Is there some Elon influence? Does he benefit from these tariffs? Does he benefit from this instability in the market? Yeah. Tesla is at its lowest share price since pre-election when it went on this big roar, motivated in part by Elon's proximity to Trump. Now, suddenly,

You know, he's feeling the pain that every other shareholder of the S&P is feeling right now, which is the company is not doing well. And that's why we saw that event on Tuesday at the White House where Trump was sort of hawking, you know, these Tesla vehicles, like a car salesman. Crazy. Just like paid promotion. Is that even legal? I mean, can you do that? Yeah.

You can. I don't see why it's not legal. You can basically give someone millions, billions of dollars in free advertisement on the White House lawn. I guess you can do that with initiatives, essentially, right? By the way, is it positive advertising? I mean, did it work? What's the stock market doing from Tesla today? Did he see an appreciable amount of sales? I mean, he's clearly kind of allying with the right, not only politically, but as a business, which is obviously extraordinarily...

ironic given that these were cars that were coded as latte liberal. Green cars. Only a couple years ago, right. And I was watching Trump talk about how, yeah, Elon's coming out with some self-driving vehicles anytime soon, but I won't get behind those. And obviously Trump is against mandates for EVs. So to some extent, Trump is very much

Yeah. A business liability for Elon. But if the concern is that you're allying yourself too much with a particular part of your base and why sort of alienate liberals, the argument by Elon might be, well, this is a way for me to pick up market share with conservatives, right? And you sort of see this –

segmentation of consumer preferences around politics across America, right? Where, you know, if you eat this product or watch this television show, it says this about you. Or if you, you know, buy this car, it says this about you. So maybe Elon doesn't really care about-

Can't necessarily afford a $60,000 car. People that can't afford a Tesla, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's part of the debate. That's true. That is the Trump base, yes. But there are lots of people in the Trump coalition who could be upper income earners or even middle income earners who with some binary tax credit are going to start buying an EV and then maybe they'll buy a Tesla. Well, it's a very interesting story because just as a company, there seem to be

some creative destruction here with the type of person that they think buys a Tesla. Now, whether Musk wants it or not, he has been coded as this right-wing figure. If liberals are going to burn their Teslas, maybe conservatives will make up the losses. David Schawel : Think about how just weird that is, that not only was this the darling of the new green movement, the Tesla,

Now, not only are they being coded good word more for conservatives or right wingers, but the latte liberals are burning them. I think Charles Cook from the National Review had said on Twitter that if you had told me five years ago that you would suddenly see

these liberals come out and like try to burn or attack Tesla's, it would be just kind of inconceivable. Just a good example of sort of the instability. Things are changing though with EVs though. There are these, what are those big trucks? Those, those, um, those electric vehicles are like Mac. They're like, uh, pickup trucks or Matt. I'm,

I'm blanking on the name of them. They're also like $100,000. Yeah, Rivian. That's like a masculine male truck that is EV. I think the EV sort of shifted from just- Sure. Not that they're making the trucks, but back to the, to wed the two issues of Trump's response to the economy, economic messaging and Tesla, things had been more expensive for a while and-

A lot of people are feeling the pinch in different places. And Trump's first response is like, buy a Tesla. Yeah. Which is different. Yeah. I mean, Trump was, you know, I mean, this is an obvious point, but-

The amount of time that Trump was spending hawking a Tesla when there's a thousand other things he could be doing with that half hour, hour just shows the strength of the relationship. Maybe there's 3D chess here and Trump is seeing this as a way to revive the economy. Obviously, Tesla is a huge company that has tons of public market shareholders and mutual funds and

blah, blah, blah. But I just thought as part of the economic confidence message that Trump was putting out there to decide the next day to spend this hour with Elon sitting in the car, maybe is a way for Trump to rev up the engine of the economy. But it struck me just as an Elon creation. And I'm sure obviously it was Elon's idea. Well, the talking points have also gone out if you see on social media, gas prices are down, egg prices are down.

And all these other things are down, and the unemployment rate is down. But yeah, the stock market is really down compared to what it was before. Yeah.

It's interesting because Trump went to some sort of like business-to-business event. It was the Business Roundtable in D.C., and he pretty much admitted, I know most of you are angry at me. And that was the thing. Trump was like, business leaders love me. I'm great for business. I'm big, you know, I help people get jobs. I'm a business creator. I mean, he was elected because he had, you know, alleged business prowess, right, from The Apprentice, whether that was real or just a video. I mean, just a reality show, you know, is to be said. But like-

It's interesting that he would now not seem to care anymore. I'm baffled by it too, Mark. Yeah. At the same time, you're starting to see some of the kind of smarter people

quarters of social media, the brighter MAGA minds are starting to say, this is Trump versus Wall Street. This is America first versus the globalists. When Donald Trump, yeah, and this is what they say, like when Donald Trump is finally trying to bring back jobs,

their view, bring back jobs to America and restart manufacturing here and stop this free trade madness and this borderless madness. What do the globalists do? They punish him by wrecking the stock market. There's a built-in messaging here as well. There's also some built-in messaging you're seeing creep up that there is the Biden sugar high. This is the detox argument that Besant was making.

But what you're not seeing out of Trump really is a consistent, cohesive message for him to land on. And maybe he doesn't feel like he needs to. But again, things are crappy. Stock market's down. His response, hey, buy Tesla. But then again-

Trump, up until Monday, up until Sunday, roughly, Monday especially, every day since the election, he had won. Like if you just said, did he do better or do worse today? He did better. He had controlled the media narrative, the narrative every day. The first day he really didn't do that was Monday when the stock market went down. And he didn't have any executive orders to counter message on. And he didn't really have much to say about it.

And it's hard to counter message on a falling stock market. It's not like a bad poll where you say, oh, that's a bunch of pollsters or they didn't conduct it properly. And now the stock market's like a real gauge of people's belief and they stop believing as much. Yeah, I think there's a new poll out that shows that 56% of people disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy right now. But he's still above water in terms of like his overall polling. He's at 47%.

So, yeah, it's interesting that people can sort of separate the two a little bit, especially when that was one of the things that he was elected on, right? Fixing the economy.

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I want to go into the Elon of it all a little bit more because you are, you know, such an Elon expert, Teddy. You have a new story out, an exclusive, that Elon Musk is going to spend, how much is it? $300 million? Another $300 million? Or $100 million? Another $100 million. Another $100 million. He said he's going to, right. Yeah, so he spent $300 million in his own PAC, America PAC, to get Donald Trump elected. Mostly, yeah. And now he's going to spend another $100 million, but he's not going to just spend

spend it on his own America PAC. He's going to spread the love around. And I had sort of been hearing that he was talking to people about partnerships and all of these PACs obviously support Donald Trump's, um, you know, initiatives and support his, you know, reelecting Republicans and getting his agenda passed. Um, and also primarying anyone who gets in his way, including probably Congressman Thomas Massey. I don't know if that's on the hit list, but it sounds like it is from everything they've communicated online. He's the one Republican who didn't vote for the, um,

continuing resolution budget, whatever you could call it. So Elon Musk is going to spread the love around. Is he going to work with Chris LaCivita, Trump's former campaign manager on this? Yeah. I mean, I think the most notable thing here is where the money's going because it says about something broadly about Trump's kind of relationship with Musk and how Musk sort of sees his political positioning in the Trump orbit. Yes. I mean, this money is expected to go to groups run by Trump aides.

not groups run by Musk's aides. Elon spent all this money last cycle on his own entity that at first the Trump people didn't even know what it was. They were trying to understand what is America PAC, the relationship between kind of America PAC, which was focused on the field game,

And kind of these television and advertising-focused super PACs was not close. And the Trump people, they weren't like miffed about it because it's not as if they were expected to get Elon, so much money from Elon in the first place. But, you know, Trump, Musk is now planning on giving this money to Trump groups, not to Elon groups. And that obviously will buy him some goodwill, you know, and will make Trump people think even more highly of him.

There was a little bit of friction because he hired DeSantis' former people to run his Save America PAC, right? And there obviously is a lot of DeSantis' bad blood within Trump's core inner circle. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was fired by Ron DeSantis. So were a lot of other people who are now deputy chiefs of staff and very high up. Yeah, there was some tension. I feel like, you know, LaCivita in particular was actually pro the America PAC leadership of Trump.

of the DeSantis people. I just think that the message here that Elon is sending is that I'm a team player. There's been obviously all this reporting suggesting that some cabinet officials are not gung-ho about Elon Musk and concerns about how long is Elon going to be lasting. I feel like Elon has...

just made this decision to give a hundred million dollars to, to the Trump orbit because he wants to be part of the team. And that's sort of is, is the message that I think is sent by this, by this. Basically last week, Elon Musk had a blowout fight with the cabinet secretaries. Okay. Uh, they're tired of him. You had, uh,

Marco Rubio saying, don't try to fire my staffers. And then Elon shot back at him over this. And then Sean Duffy, who is the transportation secretary, said, don't try to fire my air traffic controllers. We're already understaffed. You tried to do that. I stopped it. And so they kind of ganged up on Elon and then Marco Rubio and, you know,

Elon Musk had a dinner on Saturday night to kiss and make up. But I guess Elon felt that he had to go even above and beyond and give $100 million to make it better. I'm not directly reporting that those things are related, but they did happen. That is the timing. That is correct. Yes.

What do you think happened in between? Mark, what do you think? I mean, my understanding of that meeting, this is one of these cases where I have to have a podcast where I feel like I'm spitting on myself because two stories that I was chasing behind the New York Times on, and we get to discuss that. One was the Marco story. One was the $100 million story stuff that we were behind the eight ball on.

The Rubio story, from what I gather, is that cabinet meeting was called on Wednesday night. Cabinet meeting was Thursday. And it was called suddenly. Among the more conspiracy-minded people, there are some people who think that Elon was wound up by some internal...

enemies of some people in the White House to kind of start coming at the cabinet secretaries. I thought he was wound up on some sort of drugs, like ketamine or something. I'm not going to say that because he's got billions of dollars. But what's clear is that what you would see from the previous weekend or the weekend before last, where Elon Musk caused an email to be sent out

to all these employees of all of the federal agencies, hey, what are the five things you did? That finally got to the cabinet secretaries like, look, we're the guys and gals who got confirmed by the Senate. We're in charge of our agencies. There was no coordination. One of the things you don't do in Washington is not give a heads up. No heads up was given. And so there's just been this sort of simmering tension over some of that and who fires whom and who's in control. So this meeting was called to just kind of make it clear

which in any other administration wouldn't even have to have this conversation, which is cabinet secretaries, you're in charge of your departments and the departments are in charge of the agencies. And so-

Musk apparently wound up and went after Rubio. Rubio clapped back. I understand there were raised voices, but no yelling. At the end, it was rather amicable. The two had been working well together. There is some reporting to the contrary, but that's just not what I picked up. And the Saturday dinner was Trump making sure like, look, you guys make sure to be cool. And it was kind of cool. And then you saw that with the two working together with the story that Rubio was

Rubio had placed, or better said, the Rubio effort or program, the catch and revoke program, where they're going to start just deporting people, violating them with student visas, and now it appears green cards. And him and Musk are certainly sort of simpatico. So I think that's kind of, by and large, been quashed. But it speaks to the fact that there's more, this was a White House that was far more stable than Trump won.

Until now. The thing what makes this White House different from the way this White House had expected was A, the economy is shittier than they had sort of realized and they got to deal with that. And then B-

This was a campaign team that moved into the White House. They're like, we've got the MAGA serenity prayer. We don't try to manage Donald Trump. He's the thing we cannot change. We have to accept him with the serenity prayer. We'll change all these other things. And so they were used to Donald Trump's sort of chaotic nature. All of a sudden, you've got Elon Musk has moved in, right? And it's like, oh my god, it's a new-

sort of chaotic figure who has his own sort of ideas. And this White House's ability to sort of adapt to that has had some growing pains. And you saw those pains on Thursday. And I think you're going to see more of them just because that's just the nature of human beings. So you feel like if Elon was not in the mix, this White House would be sort of boring and kind of conventional like the campaign? Right.

No, no, no, no. I think, I mean, it would be- No, but in terms of the internal kind of bureaucracy that it would- I think it would be more, I would think it would be more normal, right? But, you know, that's grading on a curve. However-

You saw on the Wall Street Journal, you saw on Politico, these stories, and as I've mentioned, the messaging and how they're handling the economy. You are seeing signs of some leakage within sort of the federal government, where some people, they have their knives out for Howard Lutnick. And some of the tensions from the transition between Howard Lutnick and Scott Besant, Howard

Apparently, he was just too much of, these are other people's words, too much of a pompous ass who was annoying and didn't get it. And that brand, charitably speaking, has stuck with Lutnik, and it's not making many friends now.

It did feel like there was a tighter grasp on the whole campaign, like the leaks were much more contained. And for the most part, it hasn't really been a leaky White House. I always thought that Trump was one of the biggest leakers because he spent a lot of his time on the phone talking to his friends outside of the White House. And there were so many feuding factions. And I do think that from what I sense from the people who are close to Trump, it's like they don't want to fuck with Elon either.

Like, they're kind of afraid of him a little bit. I think they want to protect their relationships with Elon. They don't want to seem like they're leaking on Elon because they know that he has something that they don't have, and that's money. And so as much as he's annoying...

They're kind of just like, this is just something we're going to have to deal with. And the president loves the guy. Like, what are you going to do? Right. For now. I mean, that's another question. Like, is this a lasting love? I mean, Trump has had three marriages. Is the fourth one going to last? It's lasted a lot longer than the doubters thought it would. It's been three months now. I guess four. How long has it been? That's an eternity in Trump world, man. That's like dog years. Yeah.

What do you think, Daddy? Oh, I'm just going to say it's interesting how it's become contrarian to think that Elon is going to stay and that he'll navigate Trump world just fine. I mean, I do think that Mark is correct that a lot of Trump aides like Elon. I understand cabinet officials might not, but I'm saying the right to file White House efforts like Musk. Trump obviously likes Musk. He's not doing badly at...

at internal politics. I know that sort of is like the reductive stereotype of the whole thing. It's like, oh, he's going to come in and like, you know, you know, bowl in the China shop, mess the whole thing up. But like, he's not doing that, at least with... I can't imagine it's easy to be Susie Wiles, who's the chief of staff, and every time Musk fires something off or makes something, you know, and

a new mandate, like five things you did last week. And that goes to, you know, department heads that include national security, that they're not calling Susie immediately and finding out what's happening. And she's playing catch up. I mean, it can't make it easy for her to do her job or really anyone to do their job when you've got two people tweeting off things and everyone's playing catch up. But I guess maybe Susie's just used to that. You know her well, Mark. What do you think? Yeah.

Yes, she is. When I say the Maga Serenity Prayer, I think I'd coined that term during the campaign with her in mind. She has a great quote that her daughter told me, a great piece of advice that Susie Liza told her daughter, no one to be indispensable and when to be invisible. And she is expert at that. And it has been a secret to her success. I think to Teddy's point, just to be clear,

everyone in Trump's cabinet is a Republican. Now, maybe we could say RFK as in let's just put him aside. But except for RFK, everyone there is a Republican. Everyone in the administration, except for one or two people, is a Republican. And since Reagan's time,

Republicans have campaigned like, let's get rid of the Department of Education. Let's cut the budget. Let's fire these lazy federal workers. Now you got a guy doing it. So they're all on board with that. It's just some of the techniques and some of the lack of coordination, the lack of heads up,

from Musk has been annoying to some of them. But just because they got annoyed him at different points, doesn't mean they hate him. By and large, as Teddy said, they like him, they like what he's doing. - I actually, I'm gonna say one thing though. Mark, when you take a job though, as a department head, as a cabinet secretary, you are taking on thousands and thousands of people who work for you

And you need to gain some loyalty among them. You need to get the troops in line. You need to get them to do the things that you want them to do. And, like, I heard that Kash Patel actually called Trump about the five things, CC, your boss, because, like, he needs to get the agents in the field, you know,

you know, the FBI agents in the field to follow him. And he needs their loyalty. Cash was one of the first ones who came out. Cash was one of the first people who came out and actually said, you know what? You don't have to follow this. Yeah, exactly. Because they actually, it's like a corporation. Like you can't, you're coming in there and you need to have the loyalty of your staff. Even if they are civil servants, you can't fire everyone. I guess unless you're the Department of Education, which...

You know, it's still unclear what they really do, but that's something that someone can explain to me one day. Oh, man. RIP, Tara. I know. Well, I know there are things they do in terms of like giving out grants and scholarships and whatever. That kind of work I understand, but the other stuff. But...

Yeah, I just think it's difficult for them to lead their departments when there's somebody else sending out messaging. And obviously, morale is really low. And you can't fire all the civil servants. You need some of them. They know how to work the copying machine, for example. They know how to do the jobs that are being done. And like,

That's why Sean Duffy had to be like, do not fire any of these air traffic controllers, right? And they had to rehire the guys working on the bird flu virus. And they had to rehire, I don't know. You know, I could keep going on and on about people who were- The nuclear guys. Yeah, hire then refire. I do notice that Trump is, Elon is interested in a lot of things that fly, like what's going on at NASA, FAA. You know, it's that-

is interesting what he's digging into. What do you think, Teddy? Where do you see this progressing? I mean, I think it's going to be more of the same for the next year and a half. I mean, I think it's going to be Musk at, you know, Musk kisses off person X today and then, you know, fires person Y. Y's doing thing Z. Like, I think this is not really going to materially change it that much. We'll see a lot of the same

parts of the movie again and again and again. And, you know, like, it's interesting as reporters because people are sort of, like, understanding the way, the rhythms of kind of the Musk news cycle, right? Where it's like, ah, yes, this aide has showed up at place Y. Like, now there's a ton of reporting around the Social Security Administration. Like, in the past, it's been USAID and, you know, NIH and...

blah, blah, blah. We'll do this again and again and again. I don't think the story's going to change a ton in terms of kind of the way it all works, at least in through next summer. And Trump wouldn't fire someone because Elon Musk said to. Like, Marco Rubio, he's safe. Like, do we think... Or does Marco Rubio just quit on its own? You mean at the cabinet level? Yeah. Like, if Elon said, you know what, I'm kind of tired of Marco Rubio. Or I'm really, you know, he, you know, RFK's getting in my way right now. Like, do you think...

Trump would ultimately side with Elon and fire that person? This could be a Mark question. You would probably know this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if Trump felt that way, sure. But I would imagine that would become apparent to the cabinet secretary ahead of time. Yeah. Yeah. I think Teddy has a good way of viewing this, which I had always cautioned people. And

And this is particularly prevalent in cable. Like, when is there going to be a breakup between Elon Musk and Trump? And then just it kept, yeah, it kept not happening. In many respects, this is, I don't know, you see this in history. This is like the tech bro version of the Khmer Rouge.

They've come in and now it's like it's year zero for these guys and they're just restructuring everything. The body politic is just slowly absorbing it, but there's going to be these tension points, these flashpoints throughout. I do wonder if a lot more of these big stories about, oh my God, they popped up here and they popped up here and the gorillas are in this village and that village.

is going to decrease because the major big entities where there are sort of a lot of sort of known liberals, so to speak, the Department of State is a great example, have already been hit. USAID has already been hit, the Department of Education. So I think you might see somewhat of a reduction of that.

But don't underestimate the number of flashpoints that could still crop up throughout sort of the different cabinet agencies. And maybe in another cabinet meeting. I just wouldn't rule it out. Yeah. We shall see. I think as long as Elon Musk keeps writing checks, Trump is going to keep, you know, making his, making him happy, keeping him around. We got a little, got a little dog. There's Peanut, by the way. What kind of dog is that? Is that a dachshund? I know dogs help drive. It's a dachshund. So cute. Yeah, they're, they're, they're.

They're adorable, but really, really bad little dogs. Where's Panchetta? By the way, how many animals do you have now? Panchetta, where are you? I got two cats and a dog. But the dog is like... But you have like a snake too, right? And an alligator? Are we still recording? I hope so. Hold on. It suddenly got interesting. Panchetta says hi. Isn't she beautiful? Come on, Teddy, what you got, man? I have a dog and a cat. They're both...

I know Teddy's dog. Very cute. Yeah, Jackson. Jackson, yeah, super cute. Both adopted. All right, guys, this was really interesting. I should have kept Pete on. I feel done. Yeah, thanks for being on the show, and I'll check in with you later. You bet. Cheers. Bye. Bye.

That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Olivia Creary, Christopher Sutton, and Connor Nevins. If you like my reporting, go to my new sub stack, The Red Letter, and please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can also find me on YouTube at Tara Palmieri. That's at T-A-R-A-P-A-L-M-E-R-I.

I am now an independent journalist, so your paid subscriptions go a long way, and I would really appreciate your support on my journey. I'll be back again next Tuesday.