Trump & Musk are moving fast because they know their time is limited

Mar 22, 2025; Philadelphia, PA, USA; Elon Musk and President Donald Trump during the Division I Men’s Wrestling Championship held at Wells Fargo Center. Mandatory Credit: Eric Hartline-Imagn Images

Anyone who was following the Trump campaign closely last year knew that the candidate’s denials about Project 2025 were baloney. So many people in Trump’s orbit were connected to the plan to destroy the federal government and restrict rights that it defied reality to believe that Trump wouldn’t roll out the plan once he was back in office.

Which is exactly what he has done, starting with putting federal workers “in trauma,” as Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought put it.

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The “shock and awe” effort has succeeded in large part because of the sheer ineptitude of the Democratic leadership. The administration has seen losses in the courts, but the courts take a while to render opinions. Meantime, the damage to people’s lives has been done.

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Right now, it seems as if the chaos will never end. But it may be that the administration is intentionally moving as rapidly as possible now because they know they don’t have unlimited time to do all the damage they want to do.

There are already some warning signs that Trump is going to start running into problems with popular opinion. Trump was elected because of widespread dissatisfaction with the economy, which Trump, in his typically hyperbolic, detail-free way, promised to fix on “day one.” Instead, Trump has created more economic uncertainty, leading to a falling stock market and worries about continued inflation. Consumer sentiment is at a two-year low.

Voters have started to notice. A recent CBS poll found that more than half of Americans think Trump is too focused on tariffs. Nearly two-thirds say he isn’t focused enough on lowering inflation. And that’s before tariffs have really kicked in. For example, the tariffs that Trump has planned on automobiles will add thousands to the cost of new cars and drive up the cost of used ones as well.

Not that Trump cares. He said yesterday, “I couldn’t care less” if automobile makers raised the price of their cars. Indeed, Trump said, “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are going to buy American-made cars. We have plenty.”

We don’t, of course. Almost half the cars sold in the U.S. are imported, and 60 percent of auto parts, which are subject to tariffs, are from outside the U.S.

Adding to the worsening economic outlook are concerns about the impact of the wholesale destruction of parts of the federal government. As with so much else, people love the idea of chopping government, but when it impacts them, not so much. Now, they are seeing that it impacts them. More than half of voters in a recent poll say that Elon Musk’s cuts are harmful, and Republican town halls are flooded with people complaining about them, leading GOP representatives to largely stop holding town halls at all.

Trump—or, more properly, the people who are advising him—has three goals. One is to solidify presidential power. The other is to do as much damage to the government now as possible, recognizing that most of the damage can never be undone. The third goal is to pass tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of safety-net programs like Medicaid.

That last one is going to be very unpopular when next year’s midterms roll around. The DOGE people know that, and that’s why they are acting so recklessly.

“There’s a strong instinct here that this is our one shot,” Santi Ruiz, a senior editor at a conservative think tank, told The New York Times. “So if we’re going to err on one side, we have to err on the side of cutting too much.”

At some point, the toll of “shock and awe” will hurt Trump. That’s the good news. Republicans stand a good chance of losing widely in the mid-term elections.

The bad news is that the first goal – consolidating presidential power – will have already succeeded. That means that Trump can still continue to carry out the other extremist parts of Project 2025. That includes the ongoing attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, which most people sadly won’t care about nearly as much as economic issues.

Moreover, an emboldened Trump will believe himself above the law. His administration is already refusing to answer judges’ questions in court cases. Just yesterday, Trump said he could run for a third term as president, even though that is clearly prohibited by the Constitution.

It’s possible that Trump causes so much destruction to the country that even his consolidation of power won’t save him from a huge political backlash. But Trump will never accept rebuke. He will lash out instead. Time may be limited for the current phase of Trump’s administration, but there are more—and perhaps darker—phases still to come.

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