The first two weeks of President Donald Trump’s return tour of the White House have been a whirling dervish of executive orders, governmental reform and thermonuclear transparency, leaving his biggest fans in unmitigated ecstasy. But is he risking going too far, too fast?
On February 3, three issues dominated the news, all of which pitted the MAGA base’s impulse to burn it all down against the more independent Trump voters who want change, but in less radical doses.
The fight over the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was a perfect example of the fundamental tensions Trump is dealing with, and his approach to easing them.
At around midnight on February 2, Elon Musk, head of the still somewhat murky Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), announced during a conversation on his social media platform X that Trump had agreed that USAID must be ended.
Musk asserted that the agency wasn’t an apple with a worm in it, but just a ball of worms that could not be salvaged.
By morning, MAGA world was on fire, boasting about the latest alphabet agency scalp that DOGE had secured, but this was also likely around the time Secretary of State Marco Rubio was waking up, as the very real and senate confirmed Secretary of State, and realizing this whole situation is actually his problem.
Rubio spent much of the day giving interviews in which he said he had personally taken over administering USAID, that it would be folded into the State Department, and all programs reviewed, but stopped short of saying the agency would cease to exist, or that its core function, foreign aid, would be abandoned.
These are not mixed messages; they are different messages for different parts of the Trump coalition. It is a kind of good cop/bad cop routine in which Musk threatens to fire the entire federal government and Rubio says something like, ‘Wouldn’t you rather deal with me? I’m nice.’
