Donald Trump welcomed an important international visitor to the White House this week, holding a bilateral meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday. But as it turns out, the Republican president wasn’t the only one to get some facetime with the Indian leader.
NBC News reported that Trump’s top campaign donor, Elon Musk, was also in the Oval Office during Trump and Modi’s comments to reporters. Soon after, the public learned about Musk having his own meeting with the prime minister. Modi said via social media that the two discussed “space, mobility, technology and innovation.”
The New Republic added, “Several parts of Musk’s businesses concern India. The tech mogul is trying to get access for his Starlink satellite internet service in the country, and is fighting with Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, who has competing interests. Musk also is trying to sell low-cost Tesla vehicles in India and get past the country’s tariffs on electric vehicles.”
Was the billionaire meeting with the Indian prime minister in his businessman capacity, or as the head of a quasi-governmental “department”? When the president was asked this question, he replied, “I don’t know.”
How reassuring.
Around the same time, the public learned about Musk’s DOGE surrogates arriving at, of all places, NASA. Given the fact that Musk has a rocket company called SpaceX, the conflicts of interest seem rather obvious.
Asked about the underlying problem last week, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “[I]f Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.”
Or put another way, Team Trump’s plan to address Musk’s potential conflicts of interest, as of last week, was to allow Musk to police himself. This week, as The Washington Post reported, the president apparently has a new plan. President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed that he is personally checking to ensure that billionaire Elon Musk, whom he has tasked with leading the U.S. DOGE Service, is not engaging in government matters that pose a conflict of interest for his companies. … The president also claimed that he was personally checking to ensure that Musk had no conflicts of interest and said Musk answers to him.
Ah. So the White House’s solution to Musk’s obvious conflict-of-interest problem is to have the sitting U.S. president — who, presumably, keeps pretty busy with his day job — personally familiarizing himself with the details of his megadonor’s business empire and government contracts, while simultaneously scrutinizing the individual decisions made by Musk and his many Department of Government Efficiency surrogates. I don’t mean to sound picky, but if this plan is intended to resolve the controversy, it’s badly flawed.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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