These days, it seems wherever US President Donald Trump goes, the billionaire Elon Musk is rarely far behind. When Trump boarded Air Force One in early March to attend a wrestling championship in Pennsylvania, so did Musk. Last week, although he’s not in Trump’s cabinet, Musk sat in on a cabinet meeting wearing a red cap emblazoned with “Trump Was Right About Everything”. In February, he paid a now-infamous visit to the president’s Oval Office with his four-year-old son, who picked his nose (the child, not the president). Shortly after Trump’s election victory, Musk went so far as to move into a guest house at the president-elect’s Florida compound, Mar-a-Lago.

Overnight, the divisive CEO of electric car company Tesla, owner of rocket company SpaceX and satellite network Starlink, has become a close Trump confidant and, as head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE – a mysterious outfit charged with stripping costs and sacking public servants – something of a henchman. His actual status as a “special government employee” remains bewilderingly opaque.

Meanwhile, various others in Trump’s inner circle are becoming familiar faces to the rest of us: Karoline Leavitt, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio. And some office-holders have been spotlit in this past week’s “Signalgate”, in which high-level advisers inadvertently leaked highly sensitive war plans to a journalist.

What are the stories behind some of these names? How does a political outsider such as Musk find his way to the centre of the world’s most exclusive inner circle? Who else does Trump listen to?

Who has Trump surrounded himself with so far?

Unlike in Australia, where a prime minister fills their cabinet with other elected politicians, the US president can choose whoever they want to take up important roles in their administration. Some appointments have to be approved by Congress, but virtually all of Trump’s picks have been rubber-stamped so far.

More unusual hires have included vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a beef tallow enthusiast and nephew of former Democrat president John F. Kennedy, for health secretary. There’s Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, who just finished a four-month jail sentence for contempt after he refused to release documents related to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Then there’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon, co-founder of a professional wrestling organisation, who has embraced Trump’s election vow to dismantle her federal department by firing some 1300 staff.

A particularly contrarian pick is Tulsi Gabbard, widely scrutinised in the past for her apparent support for Russia and for visiting the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Says Prudence Flowers, a senior lecturer in US history at Flinders University: “She’s a highly disruptive, unusual candidate to pick for any role, let alone director of national intelligence. Her backstory does not gel with someone who would normally be … in any kind of security role.”

Karoline Leavitt, 27, is the youngest White House press secretary ever but, notes David Smith from Sydney University, “she is widely seen as a lot more competent than previous press secretaries that Trump has had”. “Her role has largely been to reshape Trump’s relationship with the press in order to, basically, just exclude as much of the mainstream media as possible and really promote far-right media outlets,” he says.

Other choices have seemed less radical. Susie Wiles is a long-time political operative who was rewarded with the post of White House chief of staff and who, says Flowers, has “so far managed to exert an admirable level of control”. Kristi Noem is a former congresswoman and governor of South Dakota who is now secretary of homeland security. Scott Bessent is a former hedge fund executive widely seen as well credentialed for the job of treasury secretary (Elon Musk archly called him a “business-as-usual choice”).

Marco Rubio, a former senator and presidential hopeful, now secretary of state, is “kind of a surprising choice in terms of how conventional he was,” says Smith, “in that, he was, by that point, a veteran senator – exactly the sort of person that you would expect to be appointed secretary of state in a normal administration. But what marks him out is his loyalty to Trump.”

Some of these people surround the president literally, in that they have offices in the West Wing. Those on the same floor as the president’s Oval Office include Vice President J.D. Vance; Taylor Budowich, the deputy chief of staff for communications and cabinet affairs; communications director Steven Cheung; and deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, who was Trump’s golf caddy in 1992 and became deputy White House chief of staff during the first Trump presidency.

They rub shoulders with Wiles, Leavitt and a coterie of aides-slash-helpmeets, including special assistant and communications adviser Margo Martin (who posts snaps with Trump on Air Force One). Natalie Harp, a former host of a right-wing cable show who sits directly outside the Oval Office, helps Trump with his social media and reportedly earned the unflattering nickname “the human printer” for following Trump around with a portable printer during the election campaign so he could receive documents in hard copy.

How do presidents usually choose their inner circles?

It’s not just Trump for whom personal bonds and perceived loyalty can play an outsize role. Indeed, in a 1996 analysis of the Richard Nixon administration, political scientists Betty Glad and Michael Link noted that even lowly aides might “perform psychological as well as instrumental functions for the president, with the psychological relationships having an impact on their access to and influence over the president”.

Nixon’s secretaries of state and health were both longtime friends; his attorney-general, John Mitchell, had been a partner at his old law firm. (Mitchell would ultimately go to jail for his part in the Watergate conspiracy.) Nixon, an introvert, disliked talking even in small groups and hated the way cabinet meetings dragged on. He tended to make decisions solo and preferred his information funnelled up to him through a close circle of confidantes, chief among them secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

Nor should we forget, notes Jared Mondschein at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, that John F. Kennedy hired his brother as attorney-general. George W. Bush lent heavily on vice president Dick Cheney. During her unsuccessful tilt for the presidency in 2016, Hillary Clinton reportedly sought the counsel of aide Huma Abedin. “Few major decisions in the campaign are made without Abedin’s input,” reported the Detroit News. (Abedin became better known the following year when she divorced congressman Anthony Weiner after a sexting scandal.)

‘There’s a real sense that Trump is the only game in town for the conservative side of politics ...’

Barack Obama had education secretary and former college basketball star Arne Duncan, who he liked to shoot hoops with, and the formidable Valerie Jarrett, who, as chief of staff to a Chicago mayor, had once given lawyer Michelle Obama a job, remaining close to the family ever after.

In his first term, Trump seemed to really trust only his family members, says Smith. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner were both advisers (this time around, they are staying put in Miami, although Kushner is reportedly still involved behind the scenes). “In his second term,” says Smith, “I think he feels he’s actually got a lot more widespread loyalty among his inner circle and in the Republican Party. There’s a real sense that Trump is the only game in town for the conservative side of politics, and anybody who wants to advance on that side of politics has to be a Trump loyalist.”

Zim Nwokora, a political scientist at Deakin University, notes that when he was new to the White House, Trump appointed more classically qualified office-bearers: “I think he was taking advice from people who said, ‘Oh, you’ll need an experienced network. You’ll need experienced hands around you because you’re new to this’.” This time, it’s different. “What he doesn’t need is a bunch of experts and experienced professionals, but people who will basically be his agents, physical, political extensions of himself, and who enable him in ways where he’s got weaknesses.” A case in point: FBI director Kash Patel, variously described as “passionately loyal” and “one of Trump’s most loyal allies”.

Amid a slew of appointments immediately after the election, Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s win was a mandate to “change the status quo in Washington”. “That’s why he has chosen brilliant and highly respected outsiders to serve in his administration”, she said, “and he will continue to stand behind them as they fight against all those who seek to derail the MAGA agenda”.

Which advisers were in the ‘Signalgate’ leak?

One of Trump’s more criticised picks for a major role in the administration has been Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary now at the heart of the leaked message scandal in which a journalist was inadvertently invited into a high-level group chat about plans to carry out strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.

‘He doesn’t come with a lot of management experience, but he is someone who is effective on TV.’

While Hegseth served in the military, he did not have exposure to high-level decision-making and is best known for his time as a host on Fox News, where he often espoused views echoing those of Trump. During his confirmation hearings in January, Hegseth refused to answer questions about his conduct raised in a report from The New Yorker – alleging financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct – except to characterise the allegations as “anonymous smears”.

Hegseth, says David Smith, “Is in many ways manifestly unqualified for that position. But he was certainly someone who presented himself as a real loyalist to Trump and whose message was something that Trump really liked, about how the military was being undermined by ‘wokeness’, and the way to make the military more equipped for warfighting was to get rid of diversity.” Jared Mondschein notes: “he’s not someone that many would have predicted would be a top option for secretary of defence. He doesn’t come with a lot of management experience, but he is someone who is effective on TV.”

Also in the spotlight is national security adviser Michael Waltz, who is believed to have made the error in adding The Atlantic editor-in-chief into the days-long conversation on messaging app Signal. “When the stakes are this high, incompetence is not an option,” Democrat senator Mark Warner posted on social media, calling for Hegseth and Waltz to resign. Other top officials in the chat appeared to include (some were identified by initials only) Trump’s new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Scott Bessent and senior adviser Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policies from his last term in office.

In the fallout, Hegseth released a statement claiming the texts contained: “No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.” Trump dismissed the episode as “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one”.

Historian Prudence Flowers says the episode brings to mind the Reagan era, in which “Reagan delegated immensely, and this became an increasing problem as often staff took it upon themselves to interpret what they thought he wanted or meant. And I wonder if a similar dynamic is happening now. It does seem as though Trump is outsourcing power to people like Musk, people like Stephen Miller. It’s hard to tell, but it does seem that he himself may be less involved.”

Who else should we be watching?

Another of Trump’s deeply left-field picks has been Steve Witkoff, also a golf buddy, who he tapped to become his Middle East envoy last November. Trump met Witkoff, then a lawyer, in 1986 during a property deal, and they bonded when Witkoff bought Trump a sandwich at 3am. (“I ordered him a ham and Swiss,” Witkoff recalled in 2023.)

Witkoff, a successful real estate developer, had served on an industry advisory group in Trump’s first presidency but had no other experience in public life. He immediately made a positive impression, inserting himself into negotiations conducted by the then-Biden government for a ceasefire and hostage exchange in Gaza. Apparently impressed, Trump more recently enlarged Witkoff’s portfolio to make him a special envoy to Russia, and he has been among the advisers negotiating a Ukraine ceasefire deal with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. He has raised eyebrows – and added to the notion that Trump has swung the US away from Ukraine and into Russia’s orbit – saying Putin is a smart guy whom he “liked”.

‘I can’t remember a VP that mattered so much so quickly.’

In both the Middle East and now Ukraine, Witkoff might be seen to be treading on the toes of other Trump appointees: Keith Kellogg, the official United States special envoy for Ukraine and Russia; Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel; and Rubio, Trump’s top representative overseas. Rubio recently lashed out at a report from CNN that claimed he was “frustrated”, posting to social media: “@CNN is an anti-Trump gossip tabloid that uses thinly sourced stories to generate clicks and try to make trouble. Witkoff is one of the people I work with the CLOSEST on our team. These people are pathetic.” (Incidentally, Trump reportedly also gave serious consideration to making his long-time informal advisor Boris Epshteyn the Putin envoy, even though, like Witkoff, the lawyer has had no experience in diplomacy.)

Also proving a surprise in the mix is Vance, a change of pace from the more considered Mike Pence, Trump’s last VP, with whom he had a famous falling-out during the Capitol riot in January 2021. “I can’t remember a VP that mattered so much so quickly,” says Tim Lynch, a professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne. Says Flowers: “Vance is being much more assertive than a vice president normally would be, particularly matters in foreign policy, where vice presidents normally don’t play a huge public role.” Once an outspoken critic of Trump, Vance reinvented himself in 2022 as one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, says David Smith. “He seems to have really remade himself as the intellectual force of Trumpism, as the person who is really going to carry Trump’s ideas forward and to really put them in an intellectually coherent form.”

Reportedly smoothing over Vance’s relationship with Trump is another figure worth noting, says Prudence Flowers: the billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who took Vance to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 to meet Trump and make nice. Thiel is an intriguing figure in his own right: an extreme libertarian who bankrolled Vance’s successful Senate run in 2022. “Elon Musk is quite connected to him through PayPal [which Thiel co-founded and later merged with a company co-owned by Musk] and things like that,” notes Flowers. “Thiel is often kind of considered to have invested in Trump and in MAGA. He didn’t attract attention in the inauguration, but he’s very influential for people within the administration, particularly J.D. Vance.” (Incidentally, Thiel also bankrolled the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s sex tape lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media in 2016.)

In February, Vance addressed the Munich Security Conference with a speech that attacked Germany, among other things, for losing control of mass immigration. “Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making,” he told a stunned audience. In March, Vance tag-teamed Trump in a now-infamous meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky (as Rubio sat by). As Trump told off Zelensky, Vance chimed in: “Have you said thank you once?” Vance has now travelled to Greenland – which Trump wants to annex – with his wife, Usha Vance, and a delegation that includes Mike Waltz, although the visit has been painted as a “private” trip. (Trump’s son Donald Jnr – another wildcard among the president’s advisers – put Greenlanders on high alert in January when he also made a “private” visit to Nuuk and hung out at a bar called Daddy’s.)

At home in the US, much of the focus right now is on immigration, with Attorney-General Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller and “border tsar” Tom Homan on the front line. One aim is to deport supposed “illegal aliens” even if they have valid visas. On March 15, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, previously used only in wartime, to expel 238 Venezuelan and 23 Salvadoran alleged gang members, who were promptly jailed in El Salvador. The administration is in a fight with the courts over the legality of its actions.

Meanwhile, as health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr is making waves in his bid to “Make America Healthy Again”, sometimes contrary to generally accepted science. He has downplayed the danger of measles (which is surging as fewer parents have their children vaccinated) and has said bird flu should be allowed to run rampant to eventually create natural immunity. He has encouraged restaurants to switch out vegetable oils for beef tallow in their deep-fryers, much to the dismay of nutritionists, and has reignited discussion around the long-debunked myth that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine can cause autism.

So what is Elon Musk up to with DOGE?

Trump did not, apparently, think much of Elon Musk when they met in the Oval Office in 2020 to discuss plans for a new factory to build electric cars. Trump later called Musk a “bullshit artist” and posted this on social media: “When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidised projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it…”

For his part, Musk tweeted it was time for Trump to “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset”, saying the way Trump had operated as president in his first term was chaotic: “Do we really want a bull in a china shop situation every single day!?”

By mid-2024, though, everything had changed.

“Musk was very important to Trump’s re-election,” says David Smith. “Not only because of his control of X [formerly Twitter] but also because of the sheer amount of money he put into the campaign”, reportedly around $440 million. Says Lynch: “I don’t think Trump hid Musk during the campaign. He didn’t suddenly appear as some evil Svengali, some Rasputin-like figure. Trump said, ‘I’m going to make this guy enforce efficiency on the federal government.’ And he’s gone ahead and tried to do that.”

Indeed, by the time Trump was elected, he and Musk had hatched a plan to help the president slash costs in public services through the “Department of Government Efficiency”, or DOGE (which is also the name of Musk’s preferred cryptocurrency, Dogecoin). Initially, Musk was to run DOGE alongside tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who soon quit, leaving Musk in charge alone.

‘I can’t really think of any historical parallel with Elon Musk. He officially doesn’t even have a government position.’

Exactly what DOGE does, and the extent of Musk’s influence over the administration, is still unclear. “There’s no modern-day analogy for what Elon Musk is doing or who he is in his role in this administration,” Jared Mondschein tells us. “But there is also no modern-day equivalent to Donald Trump … we’re seeing many, many things that are unprecedented in the modern era.”

Musk initially said he would work as an outside volunteer but now is apparently classed as an unpaid “special government employee”. DOGE itself can best be described as an unofficial cost-cutting group attached to another minor department – an actual new government department would have to be sanctioned by Congress. “I can’t really think of any historical parallel with Elon Musk,” agrees David Smith. “He officially doesn’t even have a government position. But Trump has made it very clear that he [Musk] is the second-most important person in the Trump administration behind Trump himself, and it’s very obvious that it is Musk who is directing all of the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency.”

Early actions initiated by DOGE have included stripping the aid agency USAID (a move a judge later found to be unconstitutional as Musk was neither appointed nor confirmed by the Senate), waging war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, forcing its way into government departments to monitor spending (where Trump, sans evidence, has claimed DOGE employees have identified “fraud and abuse”), and attempting to shut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau set up after the 2007-08 financial crisis. As well as sitting in on cabinet meetings, Musk was reportedly set to be given a briefing in the Pentagon about US war plans with China before word leaked out, and it was cancelled.

On the other side of the ledger, while Musk is apparently determined to cut costs across government, his own companies, including SpaceX and Starlink, stand to benefit from billions in government contracts, creating, say many observers, quite a potential conflict of interest. Not to mention that when Tesla stock plummeted, Trump stood with Musk outside the White House in front of a red Tesla and told reporters he would write a cheque for one of them for himself. Says Flowers: “You can debate whether or not Musk is acting like an employee or an administrator, but he hasn’t had to declare anything; he hasn’t had to sell anything off. We actually don’t know what the conflict of interests are in what they’re doing.”

Musk, adds Smith, is “quite a singular figure in the living memory of presidential circles, in terms of somebody that the president seems quite dependent on and somebody who has used this position to benefit enormously.” More broadly, says Flowers: “I think people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and many of the people who are clustered around Trump in this iteration are really actively opposed to government, and so I think that explains some of Trump’s really seemingly bizarre picks to fill key cabinet positions.” How long can the Musk-Trump love-in last? “I’m not sure that Musk has the commitment, the political commitment, to see this through,” says Lynch. “It’ll burn brightly for a year or two and then, like one of his rockets, crash into the sea.”

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