President Trump could have his political fortunes buoyed by two developments that are not of his own choosing.

Within hours on Wednesday night, Elon Musk announced he was departing from his political role, and the Court of International Trade blocked many of the tariffs that Trump had sought to impose in early April.

On the face of it, those look like big setbacks for Trump. To be sure, the incandescent reaction from his allies to the court ruling, in particular, suggested they saw it that way too. The court’s block was also temporarily put on hold late on Thursday afternoon by an appeals court, pending further legal arguments.

Still, the political reality is that Trump has been provided with a pair of off-ramps, one from an unpopular person and one from an unpopular policy.

Whether he takes them, of course, is a very different question.

Musk was at one point regarded as a major asset for the president. He spent more than $250 million helping Trump get elected last year. He also used his megaphone on X on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis to blast Democrats and liberals, stoking the culture wars as he did so.

But the minuses of Musk have become at least as significant as the pluses.

His quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set out to remake government, theoretically helping to deliver on Musk’s stratospheric estimates of how much wasteful spending could be stripped from the federal budget.

But the businessman’s big talk there kept getting smaller, as he shifted his estimate of possible savings from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $500 billion........

© The Hill