Trump Is Going to Blow a Fuse Over This New Time Cover With Elon Musk

The new cover of Time is sure to infuriate President Trump. 

The February 24 issue of the magazine depicts Elon Musk as president of the United States, sitting on the Resolute Desk, which is used by U.S. presidents in the Oval Office of the White House. 

Trump has long coveted being named “Man of the Year” by the magazine, complaining when he didn’t receive the honor in 2015 and rejoicing when he did in 2016 and 2024. Trump reportedly had a fake cover of himself on the magazine hanging in five of his golf clubs, The Washington Post reported in 2017. 

Seeing Musk stealing the limelight on the next cover will surely get under Trump’s skin, especially since a similar feud contributed to the undoing of the president’s former adviser Steve Bannon during his first term. In February 2017, exactly eight years ago, Bannon was also on the cover of Time and referred to as “The Great Manipulator,” adding to Trump’s reported annoyance with his chief strategist at the time. 

By the summer of that year, Bannon had left the White House, and Trump publicly disowned him in January 2018 after the book Fire and Fury revealed that Bannon had criticized Trump’s children. Is Time hoping that something similar will happen to Musk? The tech mogul was already irritating White House aides in the first week of Trump’s presidency, and now is reportedly driving Trump’s inner circle and Republicans in Congress crazy with his takeover of the federal government. 

The tech mogul and fascism enthusiast is rapidly losing popularity with Americans, even Republicans. Trump also hates to share the spotlight with anyone. A Trump-Musk split isn’t out of the realm of possibility. 

In a wild scene, federal officers are blocking Democratic members of Congress from entering the Department of Education.

Members of Congress gathered at the department headquarters on Friday but were denied entry. A man can be seen on video asking the crowd, “What business do you have here?” He was swiftly met by a chorus of “Who are you?” and “We are members of Congress!”

Democrats had met to protest Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s plans to abolish the entire Education Department and were looking to demand a meeting with the department’s senior leadership. This also comes as Musk’s DOGE lackeys have begun to use AI to audit the department.

“I’m here with multiple members of Congress. We’re here to go to the Department of Education to fight for education, and they have locked the doors,” said Congressman Maxwell Frost in a video he posted on X. “They’re not letting us in; it says ‘All Access Entrance’; there’s a random guy out here who’s refusing to let us in—”

“His name is Jim Hairfield!” said Congresswoman Maxine Waters as Frost panned the camera to her, arms clutched to her chest as she braved the chilly D.C. morning.

“And right here they have armed officers, as well, acting like we’re dangerous,” Frost continued. “A year ago I’d be able to walk into this building and not be locked out.… Elon is allowed in, but not you, not your elected representatives, not parents, not students. Elon can go in, his goons can go in, but not the representatives of the people.”

While they may have been denied entry, this is a promising sign of life from a party that just a week ago was getting its phones blown up by distressed voters begging the party to do something other than shake their heads while MAGA runs rampant.

Donald Trump has slammed USAID as a corrupt agency whose “fraudulently” distributed funds are “totally unexplainable.” But it wasn’t clear on Friday if that statement included Starlink—the international internet project founded by one of Trump’s closest advisers, Elon Musk—which pocketed $1 million from USAID.

“USAID IS DRIVING THE RADICAL LEFT CRAZY, AND THERE IS NOTHING THEY CAN DO ABOUT IT BECAUSE THE WAY IN WHICH THE MONEY HAS BEEN SPENT, SO MUCH OF IT FRAUDULENTLY, IS TOTALLY UNEXPLAINABLE,” Trump posted on Truth Social Friday morning. “THE CORRUPTION IS AT LEVELS RARELY SEEN BEFORE. CLOSE IT DOWN!”

Over the last four years, USAID has spent $1 million in SpaceX’s Starlink terminals, according to federal contract records obtained by Forbes. That money helped bring Starlink to Zimbabwe and South Africa, where Musk is from.

Musk also took sole credit for another USAID-Starlink partnership, which saw the company send about 5,000 Starlink terminals, “worth some $3 million” per Forbes, to aid Ukraine’s military in its war against Russia.

“A major factor for why Ukraine was NOT overrun by Russia is the Starlink support I provided, at great risk to SpaceX cyber & physical attack by Russian military forces,” Musk posted on X in November. “Starlink is the BACKBONE of Ukrainian military communications at the front lines, because everything else has been blown up or jammed by Russia.”

Earlier in 2024, USAID announced an “inspection” of Ukraine’s use of the terminals.

Meanwhile, Musk has made it a personal mission to dismantle USAID, which provides humanitarian assistance and funding for infrastructure and developmental tech in developing nations. In a string of recent tweets, Musk has slammed USAID—which distributed more than $40 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid in 2023 and has closed $86 billion in private-sector deals—as a “criminal organization” that is an “arm of the radical-left globalists.”

Andrew Natsios, the former head of USAID under President George W. Bush and a lifelong conservative, told Politico Tuesday that Musk’s snubs of the agency were a “bold-faced lie” and that the Trump administration’s idea to fold USAID’s priorities into the State Department was the “worst idea [he] could possibly imagine.”

USAID’s mission is, per Natsios, in the “national interest.” Data aggregated from aid missions around the world inform U.S. policy, on issues ranging from public health to diplomacy. News on Monday that there was an Ebola outbreak in Kampala, Uganda, was reported via a USAID mission, for example. Choosing to nix the agency would force the U.S. into an information dark age that could see the country caught off guard in future health crises.

Senator Tommy Tuberville seems delighted that President Donald Trump is acting as a dictator who targets transgender people.

Following Trump’s executive order Thursday banning transgender women from women’s sports, Tuberville appeared on Newsmax, where he said that there should be no dictatorship, except for that of the U.S. president.

“I’m sick and tired of, you know, the NCAA, and some of these organizations playing dictator,” Tuberville said. “And there is no dictatorship here except for Donald Trump saying, ‘This is not going to happen.’”

“So the NCAA needs to come back out and say, ‘Listen, we’re done with transgenders in women’s sports, whether it’s practice, whether it’s game, whether it’s dressing in dressing rooms at practice or after practice or after a game.’ What do they not understand about ‘no’? I don’t understand that.”

NCAA president Charlie Baker told a Senate panel in December that there were fewer than 10 transgender athletes playing sports in his organization. There are roughly 530,000 student athletes in the organization.

Following Trump’s executive order, the NCAA announced Thursday that it would comply and changed its policy limiting competition in women’s sports to “student-athletes assigned female at birth only.” In a statement, Baker said that Trump had provided a “clear, national standard.”

Tuberville, arguably the dumbest member of the U.S. Senate, seems particularly eager to inflate Trump’s power instead of actually doing his job. Last year he declared that there was no need to continue vetting Trump’s Cabinet nominees because the president had already done such a bang-up job.

A lack of communication between Donald Trump’s White House and Republicans in Congress is confusing the MAGA agenda, and making some lawmakers downright angry, NOTUS reported Friday.

Trump’s whirlwind reentry into the executive branch has seen the president pen dozens of executive orders. In just three weeks, Trump has frozen tens of billions in congressionally appropriated funds to the Pentagon, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, FEMA, and thousands of other accounts.

His administration has started gutting entire agencies, from USAID to the Environmental Protection Agency. He has inserted the language of fetal personhood into executive memos, elevating the anti-abortion rhetoric to the national stage. He issued a wildly unpopular blanket pardon for some 1,500 rioters who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.

But many of Trump’s changes have come without warning or discussion for vulnerable Republicans, who’ve been left holding the bag as thousands of their constituents call in with pressing questions regarding the seismic changes. And lawmakers have no answers.

More than half a dozen Republican members and their staffers expressed frustration to NOTUS that Trump’s erratic decisions were breaking down voter relationships with Capitol Hill. One member noted that, despite a “never-ending stream of press releases” from the White House, the Oval Office had failed to release documents or memos legitimately “laying out the facts.”

Another GOP member told NOTUS that the budget freeze had constituents “shitting Twinkies,” while lawmakers were left with zero clarity on what to tell them.

“Hard to defend controversial executive orders when there’s no heads-up nor rationale,” a third GOP politician said.

And Trump’s candid rhetoric has also set Congress aflame: The president’s spontaneous decision to say the U.S. will “take over” the Gaza Strip left Republicans scrambling to respond.

“They need to get their shit together,” one aide, speaking of the White House, told NOTUS.