Trump Mocked for Fully Ceding Oval Office to President Elon Musk

More and more, the president appears to be a puppet of the world’s richest man.

During an Oval Office press conference on Monday, Donald Trump remained hunched over the Resolute Desk while Elon Musk took the reins, spending more time answering reporters’ questions than the president himself.

Trump had called journalists into his office to observe the signing of a new executive order, which effectively green-lighted Musk’s work to cull large swaths of the federal workforce through DOGE. But the jarring visual of a multibillionaire hovering over a U.S. president and answering questions for him stayed with and rattled political commentators.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell called Trump’s “presidential subservience” to Musk the “most powerless image of a president of the United States ever created by a camera.”

Musk—who was not elected by anyone to systematically dismantle the federal government—did “everything he possibly can to tell the world, without saying a word, that ‘Donald Trump is not the boss of me,’” according to O’Donnell.

The Tesla CEO also violated Oval Office norms by appearing at the press conference in casual garb and with his son. By O’Donnell’s measure, Musk spoke 3,666 words at the executive order signing, whereas Trump spoke 2,487 words.

Compare that to the role that Trump’s vice presidents play in his political realm: Former Vice President Mike Pence never spoke more than Trump did at a Trump-centric event during his first term, and Vice President JD Vance likely never will, either. That discrepancy calls into question what power Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign, really has in the administration.

And Americans at home were equally unnerved by the visual.

“The optics are wild with Trump hunched over the [desk] and [Musk] looming above him. Trump looks cowed and subservient, Elon triumphant. Incredible imagery,” posted one user on X.

“The least someone could have done was give Trump a coloring book and some crayons to keep busy while President Musk answered questions,” wrote Campaign for New York Health executive director Melanie D’Arrigo.

Donald Trump secured the transfer of Marc Fogel, an American detainee in Russia, back to the United States. A U.S. official confirmed to ABC News Wednesday that the president had made a deal to swap a Russian crypto-criminal to do it—even though Trump has railed against prisoner exchanges in the past.

Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz released a statement saying that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and other advisers had “negotiated an exchange that serves as a show of good faith from the Russians and a sign we are moving in the right direction to end the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine.”

But the statement didn’t immediately say what the U.S. gave up in the “exchange.”

Trump has regularly bragged about how he doesn’t need to agree to prisoner swaps to free Americans detained overseas. In August, when Joe Biden secured the release of three American citizens who were wrongfully imprisoned in Russia, Trump demanded to know the details and threw a massive fit about how prisoner swaps were extortion.

“So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia?” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August—the first of his many questions. 

“How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash? Are they giving us cash (Please withdraw that question, because I’m sure the answer is NO)? Are we releasing murderers, killers, or thugs?”

“Just curious because never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps. Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us! I got back many hostages, and gave the opposing Country NOTHING—and never any cash. To do so is bad precedent for the future,” Trump wrote.

“That’s the way it should be, or this situation will get worse and worse. They are extorting the United States of America. They’re calling the trade ‘complex’—That’s so nobody can figure out how bad it is,” he added. 

At the time, it seemed like Trump was throwing a tantrum that he couldn’t claim to have rescued the American detainees he’d promised to free on the campaign trail. Now, that seems even more correct, because Trump may have struck the exact kind of deal he railed against six months ago. 

Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein wrote on X that it’s possible Trump had arranged to trade Fogel for Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national.  

Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering in May, for his involvement in operating BTC-e, a cryptocurrency exchange that allowed cybercriminals to launder and store the proceeds of their crimes, according to the Department of Justice. From 2011 to 2017, BTC-e processed more than $9 billion, and serviced one million users. The Justice Department has alleged that Vinnik himself is personally responsible for more than $120 million in losses. He  had yet to be sentenced. 

By comparison, in 2022, Fogel was sentenced to 14 years in Russian prison for carrying a small amount of marijuana that had been prescribed to him by his doctor in the U.S. 

Gerstein wrote on X that a federal judge “abruptly and hastily” scheduled a status conference for Vinnik’s case Tuesday. The conference was supposedly open to the public, but when Gerstein tried to join remotely, he said he was not able to access the meeting, and it did not appear on the judge’s schedule for the day. 

“I called the Alameda County Jail, where Vinnik has been held, and was told he was ‘picked up yesterday,’” Gerstein wrote in another post on X. 

Vinnik’s lawyer had previously requested that he be released from a protective order, so that he might be included in a prisoner swap. His lawyers did not respond to Gerstein’s request for comment, though a U.S. official revealed Wednesday that Vinnik was the prisoner involved in the exchange. 

Trump called the exchange “very fair, very reasonable,” and said that Russia got “not much” in return. It seems his administration may have been intending to keep up the farce that the trade hadn’t cost them anything: Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed Tuesday that Fogel’s freedom was “not in return for anything,” which is clearly not true. 

This story has been updated.

After American Marc Fogel was released Tuesday after more than three years in a Russian prison, Secretary of State Marco Rubio bragged that his freedom was “not in return for anything.”

“There wasn’t some deal here where we had to release, like, 10 spies. And I think it shows President Trump’s commitment to bringing home Americans,” Rubio told NewsNation Tuesday.

But Russia threw cold water on that assertion Wednesday, saying that Fogel’s release definitely was part of an exchange, with a Russian citizen being freed from a U.S. prison. Even Trump told reporters late Tuesday that Russia got “not much” in return for Fogel.

“We were treated very nicely by Russia,” Trump said. “Actually, I hope that’s the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war and millions of people can stop being killed.”

According to Trump, the deal with Russia was “very fair, very reasonable,” and that “somebody else is being released” Wednesday “that you will know of.”

Conservatives are keen to show a difference between how Biden and Trump negotiated for Americans to be released from overseas, with the right trashing American basketball player Brittney Griner’s release from Russia in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in 2022.

Trump continued to bash the Griner deal as recently as October on the campaign trail, and had an unhinged response to the release of four American citizens, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, from Russian captivity last year. It seems as though Trump wants his administration to reap praise for securing the release of Americans held captive overseas, while putting down Biden for the very same thing.

Employees at the Small Business Administration started getting fired before the ink on President Trump’s most recent executive order was dry.

On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order formally forcing federal agencies to cooperate with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency takeover of the federal government. Just hours later, a few hundred SBA employees received emails with formal termination notices. People involved with the SBA told Politico that employees had actually received similar notices on Friday, then were told the notices were a mistake on Monday, before being officially cut on Tuesday.

“They seemingly jerked people around like this for the sake of EO choreography,” a source familiar with the matter said.

Musk stood by the firings on Tuesday, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office while standing behind Trump like the slimy adviser to some medieval lord. “If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” Musk said. “It does not match the will of the people, so it’s just something we’ve got to fix.”

But is firing hundreds of federal employees really the “will of the people?”

“Firing huge numbers of federal employees won’t decrease the need for government services,” American Federation of Government Employees president Everett Kelley said in a statement. “It will just make those services harder or impossible to access for everyday Americans, veterans, and seniors who depend on them.”

Donald Trump’s MAGA makeover of the federal government extended to judges on Tuesday, with the commander in chief telling a crowd of reporters in the Oval Office that the judiciary would be the next branch of government to receive a massive reimagining under his stewardship.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth, much more than that, in just a short period of time. We want to weed out the corruption. It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that,’ so, maybe we have to look at the judges,” Trump said. “I think it’s a very serious violation.”

Trump had called press into his office to observe the signing of a new executive order, which effectively greenlights Elon Musk’s work to cull large swaths of the federal workforce through DOGE. But the president’s comments were made in specific reference to attempts that his administration made on Friday to cut funding to biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. The slashed spending was intended to affect $4 billion in “indirect funding” for research, a category that encompasses administrative overhead, facilities, and operations.

Those efforts were waylaid by a federal judge Monday, who temporarily blocked the spending cuts. A coalition of attorneys general from 22 states across the nation sued to block Trump’s order, arguing that the initiative violated a 79-year-old law intended to dictate how agencies administer regulations.

“Without relief from N.I.H.’s action, these institutions’ cutting-edge work to cure and treat human disease will grind to a halt,” the lawsuit read.

The Association of American Medical Colleges impressed in a statement that losing the indirect funds would “mean less research.”

“Make no mistake,” the AAMC wrote. “Lights in labs nationwide will literally go out. Researchers and staff will lose their jobs.”

But Musk was, apparently, not aware of the impact his cuts would have, by the end of the weekend. In a concerning exchange with Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast, the world’s richest man appeared totally oblivious to the disastrous results of his recommended cuts.

Several of Trump’s other pet projects, including freezing all funding for government grants and loans and letting Musk root around in Treasury Department data, have also been blocked in the courts.

“If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their elected representatives, in the form of the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy,” said Musk—who was not elected by anyone to systematically dismantle the federal government—following Trump’s remarks.