Credit: Fox News Channel’s Hannity
Donald Trump and Elon Musk appeared to put on a brotherly display in their first joint televised interview together.
The US President and Mr Musk, the government’s efficiency tsar, put on a united front despite concerns the tech billionaire is amassing unmeasured power in the White House.
Seated on two chairs less than a metre apart, the pair joked and laughed for the duration of the one-hour, prime time Fox News interview, as they repeated frequent talking points in an otherwise newsless interview with Sean Hannity.
The president raved about the intellect of Mr Musk, who is now said to be one of his senior advisors and insisted their relationship was thriving as they worked to reshape government together.
“Well, I respect him,” Mr Trump said. “I’ve always respected him. I never knew that he was right on certain things, and I’m usually pretty good at this stuff.”
“This is going to be hard, I feel like I’m interviewing two brothers here,” Hanity added.
When asked about his role as an unelected advisor, Mr Musk said those worried about his power to the president should be more concerned about thousands of unelected federal employees in the government’s workforce.
Wearing a blazer over a t-shirt that said “tech support”, he said: “The president is the elected representative of the people, so it’s representing the will of the people.
“And if the bureaucracy is fighting the one of the people, and preventing the president from implementing what the people want. Then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.”
Credit: Fox News Channel’s Hannity
His comments came after the White house scrambled to clarify Mr Musk’s role in Washington, insisting that he was not in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but instead advising the president.
Mr Musk’s exact role could be key in the legal fight over DOGE’s access to government data as the Trump administration moves to lay off thousands of federal workers.
Defining him as an adviser rather than the administrator in charge of day-to-day operations could help the administration as it pushes back against a lawsuit arguing that Mr Musk has too much power for someone who isn’t elected or Senate-confirmed.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined Tuesday to tell reporters at the White House who the DOGE administrator is, though minutes before she said in an interview with Fox News Channel that Mr Musk had been tasked with overseeing the effort on behalf of the president.
Layoffs, she told reporters, are up to individual agency heads. “Elon Musk, just like everybody else across the federal government, works at the direction of President Trump,” Ms Leavitt said.
Last week, Mr Musk called for the US to “delete entire agencies” from the federal government as part of the push to radically cut spending and restructure its priorities.
