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“We’re going to start being smart, and we’re going to start being very wealthy again,” President Donald Trump announced today as he laid out a plan that risks derailing America’s economy. At his “Liberation Day” event, he unveiled a 10 percent–minimum tariff on all imports, with no change for Canada and Mexico but significantly higher rates for other countries, such as China and India, that far exceeded what many economists had expected.
With today’s announcement, Trump is tariffing essentially all foreign goods. The administration says that the levies will bring in some $6 trillion, which would amount to the biggest tax hike in U.S. history. Some of the most perplexing updates are in countries where the United States has existing free-trade agreements, such as South Korea, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy, told me. The Trump administration claims that South Korea has a 50 percent tariff on the U.S., but it is basing its tariff estimations in part on currency manipulation and trade barriers. It hasn’t yet provided evidence confirming that such factors, insofar as they exist, are equivalent to a 50 percent tariff.
Such all-encompassing tariffs will cost each American family thousands of dollars, economists predict. Americans will likely feel the effects of this while standing in a grocery-store aisle, purchasing auto insurance, or undertaking home renovations. These levies have the potential to increase inflation and slow down the economy in the longer term, and the uncertainty of what happens next will also contribute to the confidence of shoppers and businesses. “The way that Trump does tariffs is he often makes these really big announcements and then rolls them back,” perpetually modifying the rules, as in a game of Calvinball, Annie explained. “That’s really hard if you’re a business. Should we wait this out? Are they actually going to do it?”
Given the sweeping nature of the new tariffs, Trump may have just essentially encouraged other countries to consider banding together to impose further tit-for-tat levies on the United States. The best-case scenario, Annie told me, is that after some countries threaten reciprocal tariffs, a negotiation is reached that allows Trump to feel like he has won but also “gives some certainty” to businesses and people; shoppers absorb high costs at first, but then the uncertainty declines. If Republicans realize after this whole ordeal that this level of chaos could affect their chances at reelection and opt for fewer surprises going forward, the economy could bounce back, she argued.
America’s economy is full of mixed signals right now—or at least it was, before Trump’s announcement. “If you knew nothing about it and you came in and looked at the main figures, you would say this is not an economy in a recession or anything close to it,” Annie said. The unemployment rate is fairly low, at 4.1 percent; GDP numbers are strong. But things start looking worrisome when you consider that consumer confidence is the lowest it’s been since early 2021, and that Trump’s new tariff plan won’t quell those fears. The solution for the kind of post-tariff downturn the economy might face is simple: Remove the tariffs. But the Trump administration is not likely to let them go easily, Annie noted: “We could be getting ourselves into a bad situation where we’ve taken options for improving the situation off the table.”
Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: alfalfa126 / Getty; MirageC / Getty.
The New Singlehood Stigma
By Faith Hill
Just to be clear: Today is, in many ways, the best time in American history to be single.
In the 18th century, bachelors paid higher taxes and faced harsher punishments for crimes than their betrothed counterparts. (“A Man without a Wife,” Benjamin Franklin said, “is but half a Man.”) Single women—more likely, naturally, to be seduced by the devil—were disproportionately executed for witchcraft …
Forgive me, then, if I sound ungrateful when I say this: Americans are still extremely weird about single people. But now the problem isn’t just that singlehood is disparaged; sometimes, it’s that singlehood is celebrated. Relentlessly, annoyingly celebrated.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Last week, at an event in West Virginia, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fat-shamed the state’s governor, Patrick Morrisey. “The first time I saw him, I said you look like you ate Governor Morrisey,” Kennedy told a laughing crowd. Morrisey has apparently invited Kennedy to be his personal trainer. The health secretary plans to put Morrisey on a “really rigorous regimen” involving monthly public weigh-ins and the all-meat “carnivore diet.” Once Morrisey loses 30 pounds, Kennedy will return to West Virginia for a celebration and final weigh-in.
According to Kennedy, not so long ago, obesity was virtually unheard of. “When my uncle was president, 3 percent of Americans were obese, and today, 74 percent of Americans are obese or overweight,” Kennedy said during his confirmation hearing. This is wrong: In the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was president, an estimated 45 percent of Americans were overweight, including 13 percent of whom had obesity. (Such classifications are determined based on body mass index, a flawed but sometimes useful metric). Although RFK Jr. is correct in suggesting that rates of obesity have surged in recent decades, his nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. In fact, RFK Jr. might be surprised to learn that his own uncle once waged a campaign against what he perceived as America’s deteriorating physical fitness.
Anxiety over American obesity dates back to at least the mid-20th century. In 1948—six years before RFK Jr. was born—the founder of Harvard’s nutrition department wrote an essay in The Atlantic warning that obesity was a risk factor for several health conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure. Seven years later—when RFK Jr. was an infant—the renowned nutritionist Jean Mayer declared obesity “a national obsession.” Mayer was particularly frustrated by the barrage of “mercenary lures” that filled the media, advertising ineffective and sometimes harmful “‘health foods’ or ‘thinning foods.’” (RFK Jr.’s endorsement of the carnivore diet and uncorroborated claim that seed oils are “one of the driving causes” of the obesity epidemic come to mind.) Instead, Mayer wrote in The Atlantic, exercise was key to weight loss. We now know that although exercise is crucial for good health, it’s not a silver bullet for treating obesity.
RFK Jr. often refers to his childhood as a sort of golden age for American health. “When I was a kid,” RFK Jr. said at the West Virginia event, “we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world.” But by the time he was of school age, his uncle was leading a national fitness campaign. President Kennedy feared, in particular, that American youth lagged “far behind Europeans in physical fitness.” As evidence, he pointed to a series of strength tests given to children in America, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria: More than one-third of American kids failed at least one test, compared with only 1 percent of European children.
More generally, JFK was worried that an “increasingly large number of young Americans” were “neglecting their bodies” and “getting soft.” In 1961, JFK’s warnings about America’s poor physical well-being led to an Atlantic essay titled “We May Be Sitting Ourselves to Death,” in which a spokesperson for the American Dairy Association fretted over the health of men who spent their days withering away at desk jobs instead of hiking “the dusty trail to bring home the buffalo meat.” (The writer was less concerned about women, who he suggested got plenty of exercise from washing clothes, cooking meals, and picking up after their messy family.) At the time, JFK presented America’s deteriorating health as a matter of Cold War–era national-security concern. As one Atlantic writer explained, “The basic impetus behind this Spartan movement seems to be the fear that the Russians (a vast race of tawny, muscle-bound gymnasts) will someday descend upon our shores and thrash each of us flabby capitalists individually.” America’s growing “softness,” JFK suggested, threatened to “strip and destroy the vitality” of the nation.
Much like the “Make America healthy again” campaign, the JFK-era movement looked nostalgically upon a rustic, heartier past. But even earlier, during the buffalo-hunting 19th century, Americans were anxious about the nation’s declining health. Only four months after this magazine’s first issue, in 1857, one writer complained that the ancient Greek tradition of fitness “seems to us Americans as mythical.” He insisted that a 30-mile walk, five-mile run, or one-mile swim would cost most Americans “a fit of illness, and many their lives.” Even an hour in the gym, the writer worried, would leave any man’s “enfeebled muscular apparatus” groaning “with rheumatism for a week.” One year later, a surgeon argued that busy schedules and “sedentary life” were to blame for the “limited muscular development” of “professional” men. “We live so fast that we have no time to live,” he wrote.
Obesity rates remained relatively stable for 20 years after JFK’s 1960 campaign, before doubling from 1980 to 2000 to what the U.S. surgeon general in 2001 called “epidemic” proportions. Today, 40 percent of U.S. adults meet the clinical definition for obesity. The precise reason for this surge remains unclear, although changing diets and decreased activity levels are thought to play a role. In this particular regard, RFK Jr. is right about America’s declining health. But many other American health outcomes have improved over the decades. Around the time RFK Jr. was born, cardiovascular disease killed Americans at roughly double the rate it does today. Cancer deaths, too, have fallen significantly, thanks to breakthroughs in cancer treatment and a decline in smoking. And that’s not to say anything of the progress made fighting infectious disease earlier in the 20th century.
Yet RFK Jr.’s romanticization of the past has led him to develop an anachronistic approach to health care. He is skeptical of the many advances—GLP-1s, vaccination, milk pasteurization—that have helped improve America’s health over the years. If his intention is to wind back the clock on the American public-health apparatus, he’s off to a strong start. Just this week, he led sweeping cuts across federal health agencies, eliminating thousands of jobs, including the nation’s top tobacco regulator, prominent scientists, and even staffers who focus specifically on chronic-disease prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services was established less than a year before RFK Jr. was born; now he is inviting its destruction. But his efforts to turn back time are foolish. If the golden age of American health exists, it’s in the future, not the past.
The idea of politics as a sport is a familiar analogy. For a little more than 25 hours from Monday to Tuesday evening, politics left behind the metaphor and became a grueling, perhaps even dangerous, ultramarathon. Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech—an “oratorical marathon” and a “feat of political endurance,” according to reporters—was nearly an hour longer than Strom Thurmond’s 1957 attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act. The impact of Booker’s effort remains to be seen, but to judge it through a strictly political lens is to miss a grittier athletic drama—and overlook how sports science might help a future senator extend “filibusterthon” endurance even further.
Before he took to the lectern, clad in a dark suit and black sneakers, Booker announced his intention of pushing the limits of his 56-year-old body. “I’m going to go for as long as I’m physically able to go,” he said.
This is precisely the kind of challenge that animates amateur endurance athletes like me, as well as the professionals I write about as a journalist who specializes in the science of endurance. The open-ended nature of such boundary-pushing is particularly alluring. The current world record for “backyard ultras,” which involve running about four miles every hour until everyone else gives up, is 110 laps—that’s 458 miles over four and a half days. Research on these competitors has found that the physical demands of such a prolonged effort pale in comparison to the psychological toll.
Still, Booker’s speech presented some unique physiological challenges—most notably that he couldn’t yield the floor to go to the bathroom. That’s no trivial feat: In 2007, a woman died shortly after participating in an on-air “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest held by a radio station. Her problem was drinking too much. To forestall the call of nature, Booker stopped eating on Friday, and refrained from drinking on Sunday evening, a full 24 hours before he started speaking.
Scientists assess that, on average, humans can survive without water for about three days. Long before that, your kidneys will be stressed, your cognitive function will be impaired, and you may develop a headache as your brain—which is mostly water—shrinks. Just as well that Booker didn’t have to debate anyone.
Then there’s the effect on your muscles. “I’m a former athlete, so I know when you get dehydrated you get a lot cramps,” Booker, who played football for Stanford in the early 1990s, told reporters after his speech. “That was the biggest thing I was fighting, is that different muscles were really starting to cramp up, and every once in a while I’d have a spasm.” As a matter of scientific fact, the link between dehydration and muscle cramps is no longer as widely accepted as it was when Booker was in college. Instead of sipping water occasionally during his speech, he might have had better luck warding off cramps with pickle juice, which is thought to reset the nervous-system reflexes that go haywire when you cramp.
Fasting for more than four days also made Booker’s task considerably harder. Among Tour de France cyclists and other endurance athletes, the trend is to scarf down astonishingly large quantities of carbohydrates, as much as 120 grams—the equivalent of three plates of pasta—every hour while competing. Booker’s jaw muscles clearly didn’t need that much fuel, but letting blood-sugar levels drop is associated with mental fog, lightheadedness, and the risk of fainting. Strangely enough, you can counteract some of these symptoms simply by swishing sports drink in your mouth and then spitting the drink out. Just a whiff of glucose will trigger calorie sensors in your brain and make you feel better. It’s the perfect solution for future filibusterers, because it won’t make you need to pee.
Missing a night’s sleep is one element of Booker’s feat that most of us have replicated at some point in our life. That’s nothing compared with what those backyard-ultra competitors endure, but it has an effect: Researchers have famously found that staying awake for 24 hours makes you a worse driver than drinking alcohol to the legal limit. The standard advice among ultrarunners, backed by scientific findings, is that getting extra sleep in the week prior to your ordeal can help buffer some of the effects of sleep deprivation.
Even if the distance Booker covered during his event was zero miles, he still faced the considerable physical challenge of standing for more than 24 hours. Just a few hours into his speech, he had a Senate page remove his chair—to eliminate the temptation to sit down.
Although the evils of sitting all day are well known, standing all day is no picnic either. Research has found that people whose jobs require standing all day are twice as likely to develop heart disease as those who sit, and are vulnerable to a host of other ills, ranging from varicose veins to “spontaneous abortions.” And yes, muscle cramps: the most likely culprit for Booker’s spasms was muscle fatigue rather than dehydration. There’s no easy fix, but marching in place might help engage different muscles to spread the strain, along with a pair of highly cushioned supershoes.
The shoes of Senator Cory Booker, photographed while he spoke to reporters on Tuesday after surpassing the record for the longest Senate speech (Eric Lee / The New York Times / Redux)
Even if another senator optimized all of these details, could they break Booker’s new record? For an answer on that, I am persuaded by the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi. “Mind is everything: muscles—pieces of rubber,” he said. “All that I am, I am because of my mind.”
When he emerged from the Senate Chamber after his oratorical marathon, Booker pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. It was a passage from the Book of Isaiah: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Anyone who wants to beat Booker will need to draw from a similar wellspring of belief and commitment. But they should probably also bring some pickle juice.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is finally getting his wish of sucker punching the federal health agencies. This week, Kennedy began the process of firing some 10,000 employees working under the Health and Human Services umbrella. Even before he took office, Kennedy warned health officials that they should pack their bags, and on Tuesday, he defended the cuts: “What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” Kennedy posted on X. He is focused on “realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.” But instead of improving how the federal health bureaucracy works, RFK Jr. is throwing his agencies into chaos.
The Trump administration hasn’t released details about which offices specifically were targeted, but the cuts seem to be so deep and indiscriminate that they are going to hamstring Kennedy’s own stated priorities. Kennedy has made clear that he’s singularly focused on reducing rates of chronic disease in America, but the health secretary has reportedly laid off officials in the CDC’s office tasked with that same goal. While cigarette smoking remains a leading cause of chronic disease, the top FDA official in charge of regulating tobacco is now on administrative leave, and everyone working for the CDC office that monitors tobacco use has been fired, according to the former CDC director Tom Frieden. Despite Kennedy’s promises to establish a culture of “radical transparency” at the federal agencies, he also appears to have fired the employees whom journalists and the greater public rely on to provide essential updates about the government’s actions. (In a statement, a spokesperson for HHS said that the personnel cuts were focused on “redundant or unnecessary administrative positions.”)
No plan—not his MAHA agenda, not efficiency, nothing—can realistically explain cuts like these. Instead, the mass firings don’t seem to be a means to an end on the way to overhauling American health. They are an end in themselves.
It’ll take months, if not years, to fully appreciate the effect that the cuts will have on America’s scientific enterprise. The decimation at the FDA is particularly galling. Several of the agency’s top leaders charged with reviewing and approving innovative new treatments have been ushered to the exit. This is likely to lead to slower development of advancements in biomedical science; although the FDA doesn’t fund biomedical research, its leaders play a crucial role in advising pharmaceutical companies on how to conduct research and ultimately get their breakthroughs approved. America was just beginning to reap the benefits of these efforts. There are now gene therapies that can treat genetic blindness. Young children who previously would have been condemned to certain death at the hands of a rare disease, such as severe spinal muscular atrophy, now have a chance at life. The government invested in mRNA technology for decades before it was leveraged to create vaccines that saved us from a once-in-century pandemic.
One particularly dispiriting departure is that of Peter Marks, the longtime leader of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. I’d guess that, unlike me, you didn’t spend the early pandemic binge-watching scientific meetings where vaccine policy was debated. Marks was impossible to miss—a bespectacled man speaking from a bunkerlike basement, a painting of a polar bear serving tea behind him. He gets a hefty portion of credit for Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, the effort to turbocharge the development of COVID vaccines, and he came up with the moniker. His center also regulates gene therapies, stem cells, and the U.S. blood supply.
Marks reportedly resigned under pressure from Kennedy on Friday, just before mass firings hit the FDA. The two men—one, America’s top vaccine regulator and the other, its top vaccine-conspiracy theorist—have a long history. In 2021, when Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization formerly chaired by Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke authorization for COVID shots, Marks is the one who signed the letter denying the request. It’s reasonable to assume that Kennedy and Marks were never going to see eye to eye on vaccines. But Marks publicly insisted that he wanted to stay in his role, and that he was willing to work with Kennedy. In a resignation letter, Marks wrote that Kennedy demanded nothing short of “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” (Marks declined to comment for this story.)
Of course, not all 10,000 people who were fired had this type of history with their new boss. But the cuts, in many ways, appear to be rooted in a similar antagonism. In his welcome address to HHS staff in February, Kennedy offered reassurance that he was not coming in with biases, and said that people should give him a chance. “Let’s start a relationship by letting go of any preconceptions that you may have about me, and let’s start from square one,” Kennedy told the crowd. “Let’s establish a mutual intention to work toward what we all care about, the health of the American people.” In firing a huge swath of his staff, Kennedy has made clear what he believes: Anyone with an HHS badge is complicit in the current system, whether or not they have anything to do with the country’s health problems. As Calley Means, a top adviser to Kennedy, said during a Politico health-care summit earlier today, the scientists who were laid off “have overseen, just demonstrably, a record of utter failure.”
Kennedy can argue all he wants that the focus of federal health agencies needs to shift more toward chronic disease. Means and other MAHA acolytes are right that, in some ways, America has gotten less healthy and federal bureaucrats haven’t done enough to solve the problem. But decimating the entire health bureaucracy in this country is not proving his point. Kennedy doesn’t look like he is setting the agencies on a productive new course. He looks like he’s just out for revenge.
Last night, X’s “For You” algorithm offered me up what felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. It was a post from Elon Musk, originally published hours earlier. “This is the first time humans have been in orbit around the poles of the Earth!” he wrote. Underneath his post was a video shared by SpaceX—footage of craggy ice caps, taken by the company’s Dragon spacecraft during a private mission. Taken on its own, the video is genuinely captivating. Coming from Musk at that moment, it was also somewhat depressing.
X fed me that video just moments after it became clear that Susan Crawford, the Democratic judge Musk spent $25 million campaigning against, would handily win election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Given Musk’s heavy involvement—the centibillionaire not only campaigned in the state but also brazenly attempted to buy the election by offering to pay voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges”—the election was billed as a referendum of sorts on Musk’s own popularity. In that sense, it was a resounding defeat. Musk, normally a frenetic poster, had very little to say about politics last night, pecking out just a handful of terse messages to his 218.5 million followers. “The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary,” he posted at 1:23 a.m. eastern time.
In the light of defeat, the SpaceX post feels like a glimpse into what could have been for Musk—a timeline where the world’s richest man wasn’t algorithmically radicalized by his own social-media platform. It’s possible that Musk’s temperament and personal politics would have always led him down this path. But it’s also easy to imagine a version where he mostly stayed out of politics, instead leaning into his companies and continuing to bolster his carefully cultivated brand of Elon Musk, King of Nerd Geniuses.
Unfortunately, he surrendered fully to grievance politics. Like so many other prolific posters, he became the person his most vocal followers wanted him to be and, in the process, appears to have committed reputational suicide. Since joining President Donald Trump’s administration as DOGE’s figurehead—presiding over the quasi-legal gutting of the federal government—Musk has become not just polarizing but also genuinely unpopular in America. Now his political influence is waning, Tesla is the object of mass protest, and sales of his vehicles are cratering. This morning, only hours after his candidate lost, Trump reportedly told his inner circle and Cabinet members that Musk will be “stepping back” from his perch in the administration for a more “supporting role.” In Trumpworld, nothing’s over until it’s over, but Elon Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the White House referred me to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post calling the report that Musk is stepping back “garbage”; Musk posted on X that the reporting is “fake news.”)
Musk’s appeal to Trump has always been about two things: money and optics. As the richest man in the world, Musk is both a cash cow and a kind of enforcer: His checkbook and closeness to Trump remind Republicans in Congress that they can and will be primaried if they break from the administration. But Musk’s reputation is just as important to Trump, who respects great wealth and clearly enjoys being shadowed and adored by a man of Musk’s perceived stature and technological acumen (although Trump is easily impressed—take, for example, “Everything’s Computer!”) Musk’s image in Silicon Valley was useful to the Trump campaign, bringing in new fanboy voters and sending a message that the administration would transform the government and run it like a lean start-up.
But although his money is still good, the Wisconsin election suggests that Musk himself is an electoral liability. A poll released today, conducted in Wisconsin by Marquette University Law School, showed that 60 percent of respondents view Musk unfavorably, and a recent Harvard/Harris poll shows that his national favorability dropped 10 points from February to March. (He now has a net favorability rating of –10 percent.) An aggregation of national polls shows that the approval rating of his DOGE efforts has also dipped dramatically: Just 39 percent of Americans approve of his work, nearly 10 points lower than in mid-February.
To many observers, it seemed inevitable from the outset that, over time, Musk would clash with, and alienate himself from, Trump, a man who does not like to share the spotlight. But behind Musk’s low favorability rating is a simple notion: Americans (including Trump supporters) are uncomfortable and resentful of an unelected mega-billionaire rooting through the government, dismantling programs and blithely musing about cutting benefit programs such as Social Security. Musk has long behaved in business as though laws and regulations don’t apply to him—a tactic that seems to backfire more easily when applied to politics. His posts, which use captions such as “Easy money in Wisconsin” to offer thinly veiled bribes to state residents for posing outside polling locations, aren’t just questionably legal; they’re blatant reminders that the world’s richest man was attempting to purchase an election.
There is also, perhaps, a creeping sensation that Musk’s efficiency hunt into the government has not yielded the examples of corruption that Trump supporters crave. During a Q&A at Musk’s rally in Wisconsin on Sunday, one attendee asked if DOGE had found any evidence that “radical left” Democrats have received money from USAID, and if so, whether Musk planned to share the evidence. Musk stammered, explaining only that USAID’s money flowed circuitously and that it was suspicious that members of Congress were so wealthy. Throughout the rally, Musk seemed more interested in role-playing as a politician, delivering “extended monologues about immigration policy, alleged fraud in the Social Security system and the future of artificial intelligence,” as TheNew York Times reported.
Trump may be realizing that though tech products and services may be quite popular, their creators are often less appealing. (Two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, even as billions of people around the world use his platforms.) To those outside of the techno-optimist bubble, plenty of the obsessions of the tech elite (artificial general intelligence, cryptocurrency) can come off as weird or inscrutable. “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” Musk posted on X in the wee hours today, as if to prove the point.
Musk seems, at least outwardly, unable to reckon with his current position. Just days after framing this race as a hinge point for “the entire destiny of humanity,” Musk said on X that “I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for positional gain.” From the outside, though, it’s difficult to see what he’s gained. Last week, protesters demonstrated outside hundreds of Tesla locations; Musk has long been erratic, but his dalliance with DOGE has alienated environmentally conscious liberals, a major demographic for electric vehicles. And by seeming so focused on DOGE, he’s frustrated investors who worry that Tesla is losing its first-mover advantage in the United States. Foreign rivals, such as China’s BYD, are quickly gaining steam. Tesla’s stock price instantly rose 15 points on the reports that Musk would soon leave the administration.
There is a case to be made that Musk’s cozying up to Trump will ultimately benefit Musk’s empire—avoiding regulations that may help with Tesla’s self-driving plans or SpaceX and Starlink contracts, for example. But so many of the signs point to a less desirable outcome. Musk’s outsize support of Trump was always a political risk, but his decision to come aboard the administration and, at one time, position himself as a kind of shadow president is arguably the biggest bet of his career. In the short term, it does not appear to be paying off.
Musk woke up this morning less popular than he’s been in recent memory. He’s alienated himself from an American public that used to widely revere him, and his political capital seems to be fading rapidly. The only question now is whether, after getting a taste of the political spotlight, he’ll be able to give it up without a fight.
