Three weeks into this administration, hardly a day seems to go by that does not produce a norm-busting moment at the White House. But the scene that played out in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon was among the wildest yet.
President Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk while Elon Musk stood at his side and attempted to explain, for the first time in public since Inauguration Day, what it is he came to Washington to do.
For weeks, he and his Dorito-dusted minions have burrowed deep inside the federal government, tearing the thing apart from within by sending workers packing and shutting down programs and entire agencies, testing if not exceeding the bounds of the law and the Constitution in the process.
So far, the only explanations to be had about what they are doing or where they are going next have come in the form of brief or sometimes trolling messages on the social media platform Mr. Musk owns or in opaque statements from administration officials.
Dressed all in black, with a dark MAGA hat on his head and his young son fidgeting by his side or on his shoulders, Mr. Musk, seeming quite jolly about finding himself at the very pinnacle of power, sought on Tuesday to justify pushing tens of thousands of federal employees out the door by casting them as a collection of unelected and unaccountable managers of a wasteful and corrupt bureaucracy.
Workers overseeing contracts were mysteriously getting rich, he asserted without any backing details or evidence. Social Security was paying benefits to 150-year-olds. Taxpayers were being gouged.
Mr. Trump crossed his arms and listened while the mogul he’d turned loose told what he’d discovered.
“If the bureaucracy is in charge,” said Mr. Musk, “then what meaning does democracy actually have?”
He told tales of a “racket” being perpetrated by an army of bureaucrats, some “corrupt,” others merely “incompetent.” He talked about sketchy payments he’d found and “a massive number of blank checks just flying out the building,” and generally gave the impression that he had turned over a rock to find all sorts of old, rotten things squirming beneath it.
“The fraudsters complain the loudest,” he said about the outrage he has created, as Mr. Trump nodded appreciatively.
Mr. Musk asserted that he had the right to meddle because “the people voted for major government reform” and “that’s what the people are going to get.”
The world’s richest man waved off any suggestion that he stands to benefit from the dismantling of the regulatory agencies leading investigations and lawsuits against his companies. His mandate to audit the Pentagon’s spending is not a conflict of interest even though he has billions of dollars in military contracts, he maintained, because he always provides the best value to the government, and anyway, those contracts are not with him but with his companies.
He called himself “maximally transparent,” even though this was his first time taking questions from the news media since his slash-and-burn campaign commenced and the White House is not releasing his financial disclosure statement.
But also in the air was this fact: Mr. Trump has generally healthy job approval numbers, suggesting that many Americans are so far supportive or at least open-minded about what Mr. Musk has been empowered to do. Taxpayers have always typically had strong suspicions about how their money is used — a reality Mr. Trump made sure to mention. “The public gets it,” he emphasized at one point.
Occasionally, the president would chime in to echo Mr. Musk about the corruption of various unnamed bureaucrats or to otherwise offer vague pronouncements supporting his theory of the case. But for roughly half an hour, he did something highly unusual for Donald J. Trump: He largely ceded the floor.
It was an interesting moment for the president to summon his buddy into the Oval Office before the cameras.
Just four days earlier, Mr. Trump was asked whether he had any reaction to a new cover of Time magazine depicting Mr. Musk sitting behind the Resolute Desk. “No,” Mr. Trump had answered, before cracking: “Is Time magazine still in business? I didn’t even know that.” (Unlikely, considering the magazine put him on the cover of its “Person of the Year” issue in December, copies of which are displayed on a rack hanging on the wall of the press office down the hall.)
Now a revised version of the cover had been willed into existence, with Mr. Trump firmly planted in the chair and Mr. Musk playing the supporting role at his side.
Mr. Trump tolerated the presence of Mr. Musk’s (mostly well behaved) toddler and laughed at Mr. Musk’s jokes. They presented a unified front and cast themselves as two white knights taking on a whole city of time servers. Mr. Musk pretty much admitted that he was taking the same approach to the government as he does to his companies — cut first, ask questions later. “We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes,” he said, “but we will also fix the mistakes very quickly.”
He said that his team had restarted funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development for H.I.V. prevention plans, for example. And at one point he acknowledged that some of the eye-popping claims made about government spending were not quite right, such as an assertion that the government spent $50 million on condoms for people living in Gaza.
“Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect,” he said, “and should be corrected.”
And, apparently, still repeated if modified. Mr. Trump listened closely as Mr. Musk then suggested that the United States should not be spending as much as it does on family planning around the world, saying, “I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere.” He added, “That’s really an enormous amount of condoms, if you think about it.”
Mr. Trump began to laugh.
