Musk said Trump will bring “temporary difficulties” to Americans

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former President Donald Trump’s biggest financial backer and a top campaign surrogate, says he and Trump plan to create “temporary hardship” for American citizens if the Republican nominee wins the White House in November.

Trump said Musk would lead a commission to cut government spending, and Musk said he would outline trillions of dollars in cuts.

“We have to cut costs to live within our means. This will necessarily involve some temporary difficulties, but it will ensure long-term prosperity,” Musk said last week during a “Telephone Town Hall” hosted on his social media site.

Musk, a tech billionaire who has spent more than $130 million supporting Trump and regularly peddles racist conspiracy theories about immigration and voting, acknowledged the drastic cuts would spark political opposition but said Trump would support the idea of ​​everyone getting a haircut. An informal financial term for a situation where an asset loses value.

“President Trump supports everyone getting their hair cut here because America needs to live within its means and we can’t be wasteful,” Musk said.

On Tuesday, Musk expressed a similar sentiment. On X, the website officially known as Twitter until Musk bought it, a user wrote Trump’s plan for mass deportations, “combined with Elon hacking the government, firing people, and cutting the deficit,” could cause “a major overreaction in the economy ” “with markets falling followed by a “rapid recovery to a healthier and more resilient economy.”

“Sounds right,” Musk replied.

Economists of both parties say abruptly kicking millions of people out of the country and imposing tariffs would quickly send prices soaring and reignite inflation. Combined with Trump’s plans to further cut taxes on the rich and corporations, his economic policies will effectively raise taxes on low- and middle-income Americans so they can pay for the tax cuts on high incomes.

However, any tax changes or spending cuts must be approved by Congress, and cuts on the scale Musk is proposing are unlikely to win approval from lawmakers.

Presidential campaigns typically don’t tell voters that their candidate’s policies will increase financial hardship. Trump himself routinely describes the prospect of another term in the White House as something that would bring unprecedented prosperity to the American people.

“We will end inflation. We will stop the criminal invasion of our country and bring back the American dream,” Trump said at a rally on Monday in Atlanta, Georgia. “Our country will be better, bolder, richer, safer and stronger than ever before. This election is a choice between whether we have four more years of incompetence and failure or whether or not we begin four of the greatest years in the history of our country.”

Trump campaign officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump said he would appoint Musk to a commission on “government efficiency” that would look for wasteful spending. On Sunday, Musk suggested he could easily cut annual federal government spending by more than $2 trillion.

In the past, Trump has often ridiculed fellow Republicans for being too focused on balancing the budget, and especially for proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare, two of the government’s largest and most popular programs. Musk’s budget-cutting plans will leave Congress with a politically impossible choice: cut them or make far steeper cuts to other programs to leave them alone.

“I will never do anything that would jeopardize or harm Social Security or Medicare,” Trump insisted in an interview with right-wing news site Breitbart in March. “We’ll have to do it somewhere else. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.”

(Trump has repeatedly proposed cutting Social Security disability insurance programs while he was in office.)

Musk did not say where he would start cutting spending if Trump wins and he is put in charge of government efficiency, but he expressed confidence that the task would not be difficult.

“The reality is that there is so much government waste that it’s like being in a room full of targets. You can’t miss it. If you shoot in any direction, you will hit the target,” he said.

Musk also compared government finances to private finances, a formulation that economists overwhelmingly reject. Countries, unlike individuals, are not designed to have a limited life expectancy. The global economy does not rely on privately issued currencies but depends on the US dollar as the common means of trade, a status that has given the US economy unique advantages.

“If you’re an individual and you’re in crazy debt, obviously you need to cut some expenses and start paying off that debt. The same applies to the country. That’s what I would like to do,” Musk said, adding that if it were possible, he would like to balance the budget “immediately.”

“Obviously a lot of people who use government services will be upset about this. I’ll probably need more security. But it needs to be done.”