FRANKLIN FOER: Just like elections, actions also have consequences.

And President Trump's haphazard methods may have caught up with him this week.

Tonight, the far-reaching repercussions of Trump's erratic managerial style, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

I'm Franklin Foer.

Jeffrey Goldberg is away.

President Trump's move fast and break things approach to running the country may need some finessing, as evidenced this week by the trade war he started and just as abruptly ended, and by the reported confrontation at the White House between members of his own cabinet and Elon Musk.

Here to help us sort through Trump's week of whiplash are Dan Balz, the chief correspondent at The Washington Post, Eugene Daniels is the newly named senior Washington correspondent and co-host of The Weekend on MSNBC, Michelle Price is a White House reporter at the Associated Press, and Kayla Tausche is a senior White House correspondent for CNN.

So, Kayla, the big narrative of the first bit of the Trump administration, I think, has been the unimpeded power of Elon Musk.

And this time, for the first time, we have some evidence that there was this confrontation in the cabinet room between Musk and other members of the cabinet.

Take us into the room.

What happened?

KAYLA TAUSCHE, Senior White House Correspondent, CNN: Well, this had been something that was brewing for quite a long time when Elon Musk and his DOGE team went to shutter USAID, or as Elon said, feed it into the wood chipper, it really angered Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was supposed to have purview over USAID.

And conservatives had long wanted to make changes to the agency and to remake it in their image.

But many of them did not believe that the way to do it was to have to build it from the ground up and to end every single contract that the agency had under its belt.

So, that was one of the first straws that began to break the camel's back.

And then there was this heated confrontation, as reported by The New York Times, but I've learned in my own reporting that there are many cabinet officials who have been frustrated and who have been bristling at the way that Elon Musk has been operating and are taking some pleasure in the fact that he is only a special governmental employee, that he only does have 130 days to do this.

And they believe that he's trying to get in there and he's trying to move fast.

But I know of at least one who has a countdown app on their phone with the end of May because that's when his term as an SGE will end.

And so there is a view that he's coming in, he's trying to do this very quickly, but that their belief is that Trump will need to manage his relations with his cabinet far longer than he'll have to manage Elon Musk.

FRANKLIN FOER: But do you have a sense of why now?

Was there some sort of tipping point that caused this to kind of burst out in the way that it burst out?

KAYLA TAUSCHE: Well, I just think that these people have not really had an audience with each other in that way.

The first cabinet meeting was mostly on camera and was more about formalities and pleasantries.

This was really rolling up your sleeves, getting down to business, figuring out what each agency was cutting.

And I think that there's a belief that there are going to be many unintended consequences and that many of these secretaries are going to have to find out the hard way and live with those consequences and then potentially have to undo a lot of that work.

And that's what they were trying to get to the bottom of.

EUGENE DANIELS, Senior Washington Correspondent, MSNBC: And Musk has kind of been at the center of everything over the last, what, two and a half months.

FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.

EUGENE DANIELS: And so I think there's some frustration by the cabinet secretaries who are like, wait a second, I got sworn in, I came here, I'm in charge of an entire department of the government.

And when we're looking at that cabinet, when they're all standing around, Elon Musk is standing in front of us taking questions from the press.

He's taking questions from the press in the Oval Office.

So, there's some frustration there, because the questions that they have for Elon Musk is, why are you moving so fast?

As you said, they wanted to do a lot of these things already.

It's the speed and the chaos, and it's creating bad narratives around all of these agencies, and most importantly to these department heads.

It is creating bad feelings and morale within the agencies.

FRANKLIN FOER: So, according to Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, who broke the story in the Times, Elon Musk responded to the confrontation this way.

Elon aggressively defended himself, reminding the cabinet secretaries that he built multibillion dollar companies from ground up and knew something about hiring good people.

Michelle, based on everything you know about the dynamics in that room, how do you think that went down?

MICHELLE PRICE, White House Reporter, The Associated Press: I mean, this is an attitude that's dismissive of government.

These are -- a lot of these folks who are coming into these cabinet positions, some of them have served and they are taking it seriously, that they have these agencies under their control.

Some of them have real crises they are dealing with and trying to take on.

You know, we saw the reporting that Secretary Duffy was talking about we've had plane crashes and there's concerns about do we have enough air traffic controllers.

So, when you have these young people who have no government experience coming in and telling you to wholesale axe part of your team, it's going to ruffle some feathers.

But, you know, it's an extraordinary development.

Two weeks ago tonight, we had Elon on stage wielding a chainsaw and now we've got Trump saying we're going to go with a scalpel, FRANKLIN FOER: Right.

I want to read from that quote because just after that cabinet meeting Trump took to show Truth Social to kind of in somewhat sanitized form addresses.

He wrote, I've instructed the secretaries and leadership to work with DOGE on cost cutting measures and staffing.

They can be very precise to who will remain and who will go.

We say the scalpel rather than the hatchet.

Dan, so, is Trump just trying to bury some sort of territorial fight when he addresses this way, or does -- do you have a sense that Trump himself might believe that Musk is overreaching?

DAN BALZ, Chief Correspondent, The Washington Post: I suspect he thinks that he is overreaching a bit.

I mean, this is, you know, this isn't even a midcourse correction.

This is a very early course correction.

How significant it is, we'll have to wait and see.

I think he has to respond to the people he recruited in to run these agencies.

If they are that upset, he has to give them something.

But we'll see whether it really does rein in Musk or whether Musk will continue to carry it out.

I mean, Musk is a disruptor in the way that the president has wanted to be a disruptor.

And has he gone very, very fast and disrupted more than I think a lot of people thought?

Yes.

I mean, a Republican said to me this week, you know, that the American people did not vote for Elon Musk with a chainsaw.

They voted for some measure of disruption.

They think that government is too big and can be cut.

They think there is waste in government.

But the speed with which he's done it and kind of the recklessness with which he's done it, they've had to pull down things that they put up.

They've had to -- you know, people have been fired and then hired back in certain positions.

It's been sloppy in that way.

And I think that for Trump, if it begins to blow back on him, he's going to push back, and that's what he did this week.

MICHELLE PRICE: Well, what also was telling about what the president said in that message was that they're going to continue to have these meetings every two weeks.

This wasn't a one-off for him to appear before the cabinet.

They want a check-in.

That is some accounting that we just haven't had before.

We didn't even get to hear from Elon until a few weeks in.

You know, there was no public address of what he was actually doing with DOGE.

FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.

Do you have any sense of how Musk, who, you know, in previous instances in his career hasn't been known to countenance dissent in a kindly sort of way?

Do you have a sense of how he's responded to the outbursts against him?

KAYLA TAUSCHE: Well, certainly, defensively.

I mean, we've seen that in his own public responses to officials.

I mean, he has been effectively trolling some of these secretaries and some of these government officials on his own social media platform.

And so they're afraid of being on his bad side and then essentially getting ratioed by conservative media if he decides that he doesn't like them.

So, that's really been his bully pulpit and he has been no stranger to using it.

But one thing I think is really interesting is that there's accountability for these agencies but there so far has not really been any accountability for Elon Musk.

The White House has said that he would be his own cop on the beat, he would police his own conflicts.

We were also told that we would find out who had been financing the transition.

We still haven't learned any of that information.

And so there have been promises of accountability for Elon and his own team that have not been met so far, that I think there will be growing calls for.

FRANKLIN FOER: Dan?

DAN BALZ: The absence of transparency, I think, is a big factor in this.

They've been so reluctant to really reveal what they're doing.

I mean, they have tried to put some stuff up on the websites, but not to the degree that we all would like to know what it actually is.

They've thrown out, you know, snippets of things, anecdotal things.

But what it adds up to at this point still seems way short of kind of what they had promised that they would do.

FRANKLIN FOER: And fascinating, The New York Times, when they did their tally of all this, what we know based on what we can see, that it was federal employees and not contractors, like Musk, who've primarily been the targets of the cuts.

DAN BALZ: Yes.

FRANKLIN FOER: So, Eugene, moving forward, will it be the chainsaw or the scalpel?

EUGENE DANIELS: I think, unclear, maybe a hatchet, maybe right in the middle between the two of those.

I mean, I think what we're probably going to see, Elon being defensive, he is going to probably tinker with some of this a little bit faster and you're going to have it's going to the question is whether or not Donald Trump himself is going to start getting more and more frustrated.

We have said as reporters for weeks and weeks that there was going to -- this relationship was going to come to a head.

You have two alphas, two billionaires who see themselves as the center of attention, that TIME Magazine cover where you had Elon Musk sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, and then all of a sudden Donald Trump was pulling him in and saying, making it clear, like, I'm in charge here.

So, that part of the relationship is going to make it to whether we see a scalpel, a hatchet, a chainsaw moving forward.

FRANKLIN FOER: But we're not there yet.

EUGENE DANIELS: We're not there yet.

But it seems like we're getting there faster than the White House wanted us to think, right?

We kept getting pushback from the podium where they said, you know, all of you guys think that this is going to -- the relationship is going to -- they're going to have a breakup here.

And it seems like that's happening.

And it's not happening just because of two of them are having issues.

It's because the cabinet secretaries are having issues.

And also, and probably more importantly, Republican lawmakers have been calling the president themselves and saying, this is going too fast.

It's too messy.

And more importantly, the American people are starting to be really confused about what's going on.

FRANKLIN FOER: So, Michelle, the other big reversal this week was the president's pulling back the tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

So, what happened?

MICHELLE PRICE: I mean, this is a whipsaw of a week when it comes to tariffs.

You know, we started Monday morning with the president announcing that these tariffs would be imposed after he'd already announced a one-month delay, and then he had delayed them again by the end of the week.

You know, I think the biggest thing is that the reasons for why he's imposing these tariffs keeps shifting.

So, even if you're trying as a business or as a consumer trying to react to these and plan your business, your life, your expenses around this, you can't even read the tea leaves about whether it's going to come back because it was a first about immigration, then the president said that he posted the night before he announced the tariffs that the border crossing numbers are low, the next morning it was all about fentanyl coming over the border.

So, I think you know, at some point, the confusion for businesses is going to be worse than the tariffs themselves because it's just upending everything they're trying to plan for.

FRANKLIN FOER: But one thing he's done is he's denied that his reversal had anything to do with the fact that his policy crashed markets this week.

Let's listen to him.

REPORTER: Some of these exemptions that have been announced and some of these temporary delays, have you been influenced in those decisions because of the market reaction?

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: Well, there were no delays at all.

No, nothing to do with the market.

I'm not even looking at the market.

FRANKLIN FOER: Kayla, did the White House not expect markets to react so negatively to tariffs?

KAYLA TAUSCHE: I think they thought that when there was a reprieve that the markets would have the same type of response in a positive direction as it had in the negative direction, and then everything would come out in the wash. And that's not what happened because I think the market rightly believed that these threats are going to continue and this is not the end of it.

But for Donald Trump to say that is laughable to me because during his first term, when I was working at a business network, he was constantly frustrated about the fact that the market would fall on certain policies and he would send out his top economic officials to try to jawbone the market and to try to move it up and they would stay plugged in to watch the air after their interview to see if they had successfully moved the market upward so that they knew if they were going to go back in whether the boss would be happy.

That is a -- I mean, that is a core function of the Trump White House and of his economic team and that's one of the reasons why you've seen Howard Lutnick on every single network this week trying to put the genie back in the bottle to any extent that he can.

FRANKLIN FOER: Let me just stick with you on this because of your experience working for that financial network that you just referenced.

So, is the White House worried that they're edging closer to a recession?

And just as a matter of economic reality, how close are we to a recession?

KAYLA TAUSCHE: Well, I think it's very possible.

A recession is by definition two quarters of negative economic growth in its simplest definition.

And most economists believe that we will have negative economic growth in the first quarter, which goes until the end of March.

And that's inevitable based on some of the actions that the Trump administration has already taken.

Now, can they change course so that April, May, June, that that quarter has better economic numbers?

Perhaps.

But it's also expected that some of those federal job cuts are going to show up in the April and May jobs numbers.

We've already seen manufacturers say that they're not investing as much because of the uncertainty over tariffs.

And then there's the cost of things, and costs for businesses and consumers are going up, and interest rates are not going down.

So, there are a lot of pain points, and I think that's why you saw the treasury secretary say that the economy is going to go through a period of readjustment, in his words, as it moves away from relying on so much government spending.

FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.

And Trump hinted at some of that in his speech to the joint session earlier in the week.

So, Eugene, just stepping back and looking at everything that we're talking about, the whiplash on tariffs, the way that some of our closest allies have responded to us, the fact that we're on potentially a brink of a recession, this rift with Musk, you know, is this the end of, to use like the worst cliche, the honeymoon period?

EUGENE DANIELS: I know we used that in playbook today, where I apologize on our behalf.

FRANKLIN FOER: Sorry.

FRANKLIN FOER: I will flog you and you can flog me afterwards.

EUGENE DANIELS: It's our fault, we'll take it.

Possibly, right?

I think at the end of the day, there was a period of time where it just seemed like Donald Trump was able to just power through, right, everything.

And you had Democrats not knowing what to do.

They still kind of don't know how to react, as we saw this week.

You had Republicans just bowing down and really not even letting him know they were frustrated with certain things.

You had our partners around the world staying quiet and kind of talking behind closed doors and not being as aggressive as they have been publicly.

That's all changing.

So, what that tells you is that at some point, Donald Trump is going to have to figure out what his pain threshold is, right?

And it's not particularly high based on the past and what we've seen.

So, he wants everyone to see him as this powerful man who can do everything.

But as we all know, the economy is not -- the president of the United States doesn't have that much power over the economy.

It's a lot of other factors.

And so you're seeing him make changes, whether it's because of the markets, despite him saying no, or it's because of polling, or it's because of you have his own voters who are worried about the price of eggs, and saying, I thought it was going to be fixed on day one, even though we all knew that wasn't going to happen.

So it tells you that he is going to, at some point, have to figure out, is his pain, is his threshold here, and does he change anything from that?

And also, more importantly, with Donald Trump, who does he blame?

MICHELLE PRICE: And he's also losing the ability to blame it on President Biden.

EUGENE DANIELS: Right.

MICHELLE PRICE: Like he's -- every day he loses some of that ability.

FRANKLIN FOER: Not stopping him from trying.

MICHELLE PRICE: No, he's not stopping him from trying.

But you're also -- I mean, the way he's having Elon Musk come in and make deep cuts, he's making these shockwaves with these tariff announcements.

It's kind of like you break it, you buy it.

It's not like he's coming in and making little tweaks.

But if you send these big shockwaves, some of the consequences of that is going to end up on your plate.

EUGENE DANIELS: And Donald Trump is someone who says like, I alone can fix it.

So, that tells the American people that they can actually move up their expectations of when it's his economy, right?

Because, typically, it's around ten months is what experts say that that's the president's economy.

But for Donald Trump, because he says, I'm the most powerful person, I can do it all, maybe that's four months, maybe that's six months.

And so the American people are going to be watching that.

FRANKLIN FOER: I want to just talk about a few events which may have slipped under the radar this week but seem pretty darn significant to me.

So, Donald Trump signed an executive order stripping lawyers at the firm Perkins Coie, which had represented Hillary Clinton in 2016 of their security clearances and other privileges, which follows a similar executive order which he signed stripping those same privileges of Covington Burling, who'd worked pro bono with Jack Smith.

Then earlier today the administration stopped a huge number of grants and funds that were going to Columbia University to punish them.

Dan, I just want -- just what's the pattern?

What are we seeing when we see all these things lined up together?

DAN BALZ: Well, I mean, we're seeing what he promised, which is retribution and some measure of revenge against the people that he thinks did him wrong over the last four years.

They've been quite systematic about that.

They've done it through the whole Justice Department in a variety of ways.

And now they've broadened it out into the private sector, if you will, and into the universities.

I don't think there's any doubt that Columbia is not the last university that's going to see funds stripped from them.

I think many, particularly elite universities, feel that they are on notice.

You know, he's done things to try to rein in the press, or to, you know, to target the press, as we know, particularly the things that have gone on with the press pool.

And all of this, you know, is part of his effort to dominate everything about the federal government and to accrue as much power.

In his hands as he can.

I mean, you know, Musk has gotten all of the attention and for a lot of good reasons because it's been - - you know, it's been so, you know, out front.

But another aspect of what this administration came in with the intention of doing is, as they've said, you know, deconstruct the administrative state.

So, there is a part of what Musk is doing, which is to, you know, cut government.

But there's another aspect of this, which is to bring government in all its forms under his control, whether it's to disregard Congress in terms of how the money was spent, whether it is to take power from independent agencies, a court case that, you know, that could go either way, you know, as this plays out.

So, there's just a lot that's happening.

And I think that it was quite notable what he did to the two law firms this week in particular.

FRANKLIN FOER: I think it's maybe fair to ask in the face of this retribution tour.

Where are the congressional Democrats?

Well, they are trying.

They unveiled this video after Trump's address to the joint session of Congress this week.

Seriously?

EUGENE DANIELS: I mean, I think the at its basis, they're way behind.

That trend is old.

It's like -- so it already is they're behind.

It just doesn't show a seriousness, right?

It shows that they are trying to do the viral thing, but you also do that by just being yourselves and none of them look like they were being themselves in those moments.

And I think what you're hearing from Democratic voters, and we've heard from them for a long time, is that they want them to be fighters.

I don't know if they wanted them to look like fighters like that, but they wanted them to be tussling with Donald Trump and doing something.

And I think the idea that you're going to do that by kind of making little short videos, there's something wrong.

KAYLA TAUSCHE: There's not agreement over that.

I mean, there's also a sect of the Democratic Party who believes that some pain needs to be felt for the voters to want to choose something different in the midterms.

And they think that things need to get bad enough and they don't need to be softening some of these blows and that the voters need to understand what they voted for to a visceral point where then they need to choose change.

And that's something that even James Carville has said, go into a strategic retreat and then go for the jugular when it -- FRANKLIN FOER: It begs the question, is there a counterfactual, is there an alternative strategy that they're just, you know, sitting on or avoiding?

I mean, It's easy for us to take shots at the cringe -- MICHELLE PRICE: But, I mean, you saw Senator Elissa Slotkin's response this week to President Trump's address to Congress.

That was well received by Democrats in the party saying, this is how we should be speaking.

This is how we should be talking about what Donald Trump is doing.

She tried to reach out to Donald Trump's voters, not by trying to reach the viral voters who are like the trolling internet parts, but people are concerned about costs.

People are seeing what's going on with the government and they think -- and she said in her remarks, yes, let's make it more efficient, but let's not do it so haphazardly.

She's speaking to the confusion that's out there in the American people.

And that was a message that you see some Democrats starting to cue in.

FRANKLIN FOER: Unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.

Thanks to our panelists and our viewers for joining us.

You can read more about President Elon Musk at theatlantic.com.

I'm Frank Foer good night from Washington.