Column | Trump wants Elon Musk to do to the government what he did to Twitter

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

44% : Trump had already flipped his view of electric vehicles in a nod to the Tesla CEO; why not acquiesce here, too?Speaking to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Trump indicated that this whole commission idea wasn't simply one of dozens of similar riffs during his chat with Musk.
43% : "Inflation comes from government overspending because the checks never bounce when it's written by the government.
40% : And, later, when Musk again insisted that spending was the cause of inflation, Trump agreed to the executive's proposal for the creation of "a government efficiency commission that tries to make the spending sensible.
39% : We should not assume that, if reelected, Trump will actually create any such commission nor that it would work as constituted.
38% : "A lot of people just don't understand where inflation comes from," Musk said -- after Trump had offered his assessment of where inflation comes from.
32% : (Trump would not balk at that latter idea.)
28% : "Trump didn't cede the point but he didn't debate it.
27% : Luckily for the government (and for Trump), taxpayers wouldn't have an opportunity to voluntarily stop paying their income taxes.
23% : And "as the first order of business," Trump said, "this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months.
21% : (Trump tried something like this, too, which went over about as you would expect.)
8% : This is a reiteration of a point Trump makes regularly on the campaign trail, one suggesting that higher oil prices a few years ago were fundamentally President Joe Biden's fault to suggest that the country needs more oil production.

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