Only one person understands the attention war better than President Donald Trump and that’s Elon Musk.
But is the attention good or bad? Does it redound to his benefit or hurt his reputation? Does it embolden or embarrass him?
Yes, yes and yes.
Thursday was a particularly bruising day for Musk. He got into a public spat with the former commander of the International Space Station; posted so many falsehoods that it was hard to keep up; and after some of his posts attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky came under scrutiny through X’s Community Notes system, he lashed out at his own tech and claimed it’s “increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.”
Meanwhile, multiple new polls indicated that Musk is a drag on Trump. CNN’s new polling found that only 28% of Americans say Trump giving Musk a prominent role in the administration is a good thing. Fully 54% said it’s a bad thing. Washington Post polling showed similar disapproval. News accounts suggested that some Republican lawmakers are growing concerned about Musk’s role as bureaucracy’s butcher.
And on a terribly sad personal note, one of his former partners, Grimes, publicly begged him to respond “about our child’s medical crisis,” saying she was pushed to tweet about it because he was ignoring her private pleas. Dozens of news sites wrote about her messages, with some linking the situation to Ashley St. Clair’s recent posts saying she secretly gave birth to another Musk child.
So that was Musk’s Thursday.
Yet the iconic image from Thursday was Musk giddily wielding embattled Argentine President Javier Milei’s chainsaw on stage at CPAC. Musk loved it so much that he made the image his X profile picture and retweeted an anonymous fan account that said “he looks super cool with glasses and a gold chain around his neck!”
During the CPAC chat with Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt, Musk was barely articulate at times, and much of what he said reflected his newly radicalized, Dark MAGA worldview. “I cannot describe how strange Elon Musk’s CPAC appearance was,” The Verge’s Sarah Jeong wrote, so she published a transcript of it instead. Some X commenters who watched his appearance said they were worried about his health.
The pressure on Musk must be overwhelming. A New York Times headline about Tesla yesterday asked, “Does Elon Musk Still Care About Selling Cars?” His companies, nonprofits and ex-partners all demand attention while he (at least publicly) prioritizes DOGE and pushes retribution for Trump’s enemies.
At CPAC, “you could hear people yelling, ‘We love you,’ and him saying, ‘I love you’ back,” Washington Post reporter Sabrina Rodriguez told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday night. Rodriguez likened the performance to “WrestleMania” and said Musk was “basking in the power and influence that he has.”
So is all the attention good or bad? The answer is… yes.
Maybe Musk simply understands that when working with a showman president, you have to show the work. (Even if the math doesn’t add up.) “Trump and his MAGA allies are treating their firings inside the government like a game, a show, even,” CNN’s Abby Phillip said last night. “They are creating memes, throwing celebrations, and the man in charge is using props to dance on professional graves.”
The theatricality is what excites and energizes Trump and Musk’s shared MAGA base. Even if Musk’s specific actions are unpopular, government itself is unpopular — especially bureaucracies that many Americans believe are wasteful and inefficient. So the theater shows someone is “taking action,” advancing the deep story that Trump is telling, a story of Trump “saving the country” from the do-nothing Joe Biden and dastardly Democrats.
