The Memo: Tariffs pause, Musk exit hold silver linings for Trump

President Trump could have his political fortunes buoyed by two developments that are not of his own choosing.

Within hours on Wednesday night, Elon Musk announced he was departing from his political role, and the Court of International Trade blocked many of the tariffs that Trump had sought to impose in early April.

On the face of it, those look like big setbacks for Trump. To be sure, the incandescent reaction from his allies to the court ruling, in particular, suggested they saw it that way too. The court’s block was also temporarily put on hold late Thursday afternoon by an appeals court, pending further legal arguments.

Still, the political reality is that Trump has been provided with a pair of off-ramps, one from an unpopular person and one from an unpopular policy.

Whether he takes them, of course, is a very different question.

Musk was at one point regarded as a major asset for the president. He spent more than $250 million helping Trump get elected last year. He also used his megaphone on social platform X on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis to blast Democrats and liberals, stoking the culture wars as he did so.

But the minuses of Musk have become at least as significant as the pluses.

His quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set out to remake government, theoretically helping to deliver on Musk’s stratospheric estimates of how much wasteful spending could be stripped from the federal budget.

But the businessman’s big talk there kept getting smaller, as he shifted his estimate of possible savings from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $500 billion to $150 billion. A BBC fact-check last month found that around $60 billion in savings had actually been documented related to DOGE’s work.

Meanwhile the DOGE website had to make embarrassing corrections after media organizations exposed errors. In late February, The New York Times noted that DOGE had to delete the five biggest savings it had claimed just the week before. Infamously, one claimed cut of $8 billion pertaining to Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned out to really be worth just $8 million.

Yet even as Musk’s lieutenants failed to deliver savings on the scale that he had promised, the disruptions that went along with their work often grabbed the wrong kinds of headlines. There were concerns about data security when DOGE got access to sensitive details pertaining to taxpayers. There were complaints that the sweeping cuts to the United States Agency for International Development had hurt some of the world’s poorest people.

The incoming fire on Musk didn’t only come from the media or from Democrats.

There were reports of the fractious Musk clashing with other senior members of Trump’s administration including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

Steve Bannon, the chief strategist at the start of Trump’s first term who remains an influential voice with the MAGA base, blasted Musk in February as a “parasitic illegal immigrant.”

All of that took its toll, with Musk’s approval ratings in opinion polls running at mediocre levels and his unpopularity among women especially glaring.

A Marquette University poll earlier this month found him 20 points underwater, with 59 percent of Americans viewing him unfavorably and 39 percent viewing him favorably. A Quinnipiac University poll earlier this year showed his deficit among women twice as large, with 66 percent viewing him unfavorably and 26 percent favorably.

All of that made Musk an inviting target for Democrats. And even some Republicans had begun to question his political value. Groups allied with Musk spent heavily to back a conservative candidate in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April. Despite that, liberal Susan Crawford comfortably defeated the Musk-backed Brad Schimel.

There is a counterargument on Musk, rooted in two factors: One is that Musk’s disruption was aimed at a federal government that many Americans agree is swollen and flabby. The other is that he acted as a kind of heat shield for Trump, drawing negative attention that that might otherwise have been focused on the president himself.

But the bottom line remains that most Washington Republicans, including those very loyal to Trump, won’t be shedding too many tears at his departure.

The tariff question is a more complicated one, to be sure.

Trump’s base has applauded his desire to flex American economic muscle against international competitors, especially the most powerful and adversarial nations, notably China.

But the strategy has been undermined by confusion as to what exactly Trump is trying to accomplish.

At times, he has suggested that his aim is to spark a resurgence in American manufacturing — a project that would take years of high tariffs before it could come to fruition on a large scale. At other times, he has presented his tariff approach as a shorter-term gambit to wrangle new trade deals that will be more beneficial to the U.S.

Whatever the underlying strategy, the fact remains that the height of Trump’s tariff fervor brought him to the lowest points to date of his second term.

Markets went into a downward spiral immediately after Trump had announced his most wide-ranging tariffs on April 2, or “Liberation Day” as he called it. Trump’s approval ratings fell along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500, as it became clear that the small sliver of voters who remain movable in their opinions of Trump were shifting against him.

But Trump did eventually step back significantly, postponing most of the tariffs and acknowledging his own concerns about the financial markets getting “yippy.”

Since then, the financial markets and his popularity have both rebounded, though the latter remains tepid at best. In the polling average maintained by The Hill’s partner Decision Desk HQ, Trump is 5 points underwater, with roughly 51 percent of Americans disapproving of his job performance and 46 percent approving.

Trump remains as unpredictable as always. Earlier this week, he reacted furiously after a reporter asked him about a Wall Street strategy termed “the TACO trade.” The acronym stands for “Trump always chickens out.”

But for now, on both Musk and tariffs, the silver lining looks more important than the cloud.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.