As Trump imposed tariffs, Musk scored his biggest power-grab yet
WASHINGTON DC – Washington DC is a Monday-to-Friday kind of town. But this weekend, while Washingtonians relaxed, President Donald Trump and his empowered acolytes moved to steamroller the city with a frenzy of activity that has left it reeling.
Trump’s decision to declare a trade war was telegraphed ahead of time. But on Friday morning, most here chose to believe reports that the imposition of tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China would be delayed until 1 March. Only when Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, briefed reporters on Friday afternoon, did it become apparent that the President was determined to apply the financial penalties immediately.
Later on Friday, asked in the Oval Office to clarify the demands that he was making of Mexico City, Ottawa and Beijing, Trump insisted he had none, and that there was nothing they could now do to save their skins.
In Mexico City, President Claudia Sheinbaum poured scorn on Trump’s claim that the tariffs would punish Mexico for failing to prevent large amounts of the synthetic opioid fentanyl from flooding into the United States. She icily observed that America should instead “combat the sale of narcotics on the streets of their major cities, which they do not do”.
The outgoing Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, imposing retaliatory tariffs of his own against the US on Saturday, urged Trump to walk back from the brink. “If President Trump wants… a new golden age for the United States,” he observed, “the better path is to partner with Canada, not to punish us.”

Addressing Americans directly, Trudeau argued that the tariffs would “put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities. They will raise costs for you, including food at the grocery stores and gas at the pump.” These arguments were all echoed by the Columbia University economics professor Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner, who warned that “virtually all economists think that the impact of tariffs will be very bad for America” by stoking inflation.
Trudeau challenged Trump’s claim that nothing could prevent the trade war from commencing. He indicated that fevered, behind-the-scenes negotiations were under way to try and talk everybody off the ledge. When Wall Street opens on Monday, US traders are likely to apply fresh pressure on the White House by engaging in a sell-off that is likely, at least at the opening bell, to send the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashing.
Trump’s tariffs were not the only act of weekend vandalism by his new administration. Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman whose power over people’s daily lives now seems entirely unrestrained, successfully secured control of the main payment system at the US Treasury, a development that is entirely unprecedented in the modern history of the nation.
Multiple media outlets report that after days of confrontation, Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (which, despite its name, is not an actual government department) forced the sudden retirement of David Lebryk, a top official who had spent more than three decades in non-political roles at the Treasury.

Lebryk reportedly spent several days attempting to block efforts by Musk’s colleagues to grab the Treasury’s steering wheel. But following his departure from the building, Musk’s self-appointed team were made Treasury employees and granted the security clearance necessary to control a process that disburses more than $5trn (£4trn) in government expenditure. The system also contains personal information about millions of Americans who receive Social Security, government assistance payments or even tax refunds.
No guardrails appear to be preventing Musk – a private businessman – from claiming the right to review the totality of US government spending, including federal contracts held by his own companies. The move represents the first example of “state capture” by private business leaders here, a phrase coined by the World Bank in 2000 to describe the efforts by oligarchs in post-Soviet states to strengthen their own economic positions by seizing control of entire governments.
On Saturday, Musk’s power-grab went even further: the National Transportation Safety Board, in the nascent stages of investigating last Wednesday night’s deadly mid-air collision in the capital, changed its posture for disseminating information to the public.
In a posting on Musk’s social media site “X”, the NTSB announced that going forward, it will provide updates only via “X” itself. “We will not be distributing information via email,” announced an agency that – until now – has routinely pushed updates on its activities to reporters, rather than requiring them to maintain their own account on “X”.
Other agencies are expected to follow suit, suggesting that basic information about many of the US government’s daily activities may soon be only available to Americans over Musk’s commercial, for-profit platform.
The wealthiest man in the world crowed about his achievements on Saturday. “Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for two days,” he proclaimed on X. “Working the weekend is a superpower,” he observed.
It is not coincidental that the World Bank’s very first report defining “state capture” a quarter of a century ago is titled: “Seize the State, Seize the Day”.