Trump’s overall political project is heavily dependent on an enormous network of propagandists and other pliant institutional players to sustain itself. Take Musk’s DOGE: Again and again, DOGE’s revelations of “waste” and “fraud” have themselves proven fraudulent to the point of buffoonery. It requires an immense roar of propaganda from right-wing media and dozens of GOP lawmakers, all declaring falsely that DOGE really is finding all kinds of smoking guns, to keep alive the fiction that it’s producing dramatic results.
This is why Fox turning on Trump’s economy could be so debilitating over time. Perceptions of Trump’s economic prowess are the scaffolding that holds up the rest of the edifice. If the public continues to sour on his economic performance, the deep cuts to government will look less about efficiency and instead appear maliciously, dangerously incompetent. The mass deportations will look less like the protecting of U.S. workers from unskilled foreign labor competition and more like unchecked ethnonationalist cruelty. And Trump’s celebrations of his own impunity won’t come across as the mere rhetorical trash-talking of the strongman who was needed to whip the economy into line. Instead, they’ll sound like what they truly are—the rantings of a genuine wannabe dictator.
It’s no accident that Trump is reining in Musk’s DOGE right at this moment. Trump declared Thursday that cuts will be done with a “scalpel,” not a “hatchet,” and claimed agency heads, not Musk, will have the final say. This isn’t just Trump realizing that decimating government services like Social Security will be unpopular. He also grasps that with economic sentiment turning against him, the idea that Musk is magically removing mere “waste,” liberating the economy to roar forth, becomes a much tougher sell.
