Welcome back to The Red Letter.

The tolerance for Elon Musk inside of the White House is wearing thin, as they deal with the fallout of his calamitous interview with Larry Kudlow when he touched the third rail – entitlements. Even though Trump’s staffers are terrified of Musk, they know that if you try to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, you die, politically speaking.

“It’s no longer simmering resistance, people are fucking furious,” said a source with knowledge of the situation.

“Medicaid is not just for Black people in the ghetto, these are our voters,” said a Republican operative close to the White House.

Even before the interview, I’m told that the White House communications team was adamantly against letting Musk do the interview with Kudlow, even though he’s a former administration official and ally. They know that FOX News is a network that their older, white working-class voters watch closely and this was a rare televised interview for Musk, not the same as getting high with Joe Rogan.

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Now they’re playing cleanup. Sure, they sent out a “Fact Check” memo from the White House highlighting that his words were garbled when he said he’s looking at the “waste and fraud in entitlement spending,” not entitlements all together. But then Musk went further, falsely claiming in the interview that Democrats use entitlement programs to attract illegal immigrants into the country so that they can add them to their voter rolls. It doesn’t help that earlier this month, Musk referred to Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

You can even see Kudlow shifting around uncomfortably during the interview.

Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung denied that there was an issue. “We love [Musk] doing media,” he said, pointing to his joint interview with Trump on Sean Hannity.

As promised, I want to share the ins and outs of my reporting process with you, so I first reached out to Trump’s personal pollster John McLaughlin after I learned about the meltdown over Musk’s interview to ask if he’s been polling Musk’s response in the interview. And I was shocked to learn that McLaughlin has not polled Musk at all, even though he’s clearly a political liability to the President. McLaughlin has been polling Trump for decades and was one of the main pollsters alongside Tony Fabrizio on the campaign. He said the last poll that he conducted that even remotely touched on Musk was about DOGE in November 2024 and it did not mention Musk by name.

“No one has asked us to do that poll,” McLaughlin told me.

Well, the public polling shows that the numbers for Musk – what some would call Trump’s heat shield – have been in free fall since Trump took office, with more than 53 percent of people having an unfavorable opinion of Musk, according to a new CNN poll. But surely Trump’s political operation, which to be fair is an impressive one, would want to know if Musk was starting to become a liability. No political consultant in Washington trusts public polling. They’d probably trust the opposition party’s polling over public polling. So that leaves me to believe that they are afraid of Trump’s appendage or it’s because Musk just donated $100 million to Trump’s political arm, which just so happens to be run by Trump’s other pollster Fabrizio. When I asked Fabrizio if he’s conducting polls on Musk favorables, he didn’t get back to me.

Regardless, I’ve heard that the White House is aware that Musk’s numbers are “dog shit,” according to a source.

“He’s demonstrably dismissive of people who have incredibly important jobs because he doesn’t understand the government,” said the source with knowledge of the matter.

I’ve been reporting for months that Musk has been disrespectful to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. As Axios’s Marc Caputo said in the video above, she’s survived because she knows when to push back and when to just show up. She knows the “MAGA serenity prayer,” as he calls it.

“He treats [Wiles] like a secretary in front of people,” the source with knowledge of the matter said. “The second most powerful person in Washington, the first woman and someone who has done a good job of keeping the trains running on time.”

But I’ve heard that it’s even become too much for Wiles, who for the most part has been delivering on what matters most to Trump—producing the Presidency with a daily event featuring co-star Musk and a cast of cabinet members for the press. She’s a professional and a survivor, but she’s being bombarded with calls from cabinet secretaries furious over cuts and members worried about state programs.

Administration officials have a myriad of feelings toward Musk: they hate him, they’re afraid of him and they think he’s creepy for doing things like sleeping on a cot in his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where five guards stand outside of his door.

“The [staff] hates him,” said the source with knowledge of the matter. “Part of it is policy and part is that he’s not human. He treats Susie like a fucking secretary. But they’re petrified of him.”

Wiles’s deputies are extremely loyal to her, and the cabinet secretaries and their deputies are still getting their sea legs while they attempt to wrangle control of the agencies.

“They’re like ‘Fuck this guy, he’s not communicating what he’s going to cut, he’s just cutting,’” said a well-placed source. “Whenever they get a call, everything goes to shit. They’re trying to run their agencies, and then they have this guy who thinks he’s trimming the fat, but it isn’t fat.”

“He treats cabinet secretaries like they’re messenger boys,” the source with knowledge of the matter said.

For now, Trump likes having Musk around, even though Musk is extremely clingy and Trump likes his space. (It’s clearly a quality he appreciates in his wife Melania.) So their love affair seems to be lasting. Perhaps the only thing that might break them up is Musk’s clinginess.

That’s all for now. Check out the video above for my latest show with two of the best political reporters on the White House beat, Teddy Schleifer of The New York Times and Marc Caputo of Axios.