Let us pause the various constitutional crises, geopolitical showdowns, and DOGE dramas to make a simple observation: Donald Trump seems kind of busy, no?

In recent days, he kicked off what the media have dubbed “Tariff Week” by declaring Sunday, February 9, Gulf of America Day. This occurred as he flew to New Orleans to become the first-ever sitting U.S. president to attend the Super Bowl and just before Fox News aired a Super Bowl Sunday/Gulf of America Day interview, a presidential news-making tradition that Joe Biden had blown off the past two years, in which Trump, among other things, (1) reiterated that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, (2) declined to endorse Vice President J. D. Vance as his successor (“but he’s very capable”), and (3) referred to Gaza as a “demolition site.”

Trump spent much of the afternoon and evening getting fussed over by billionaires, celebrities, and other dignitaries in front of 127.7 million viewers, during the most watched television broadcast in history. He received mostly cheers when his ubiquitous mug was shown on the Caesars Superdome big screen before the game, which he watched with his daughter Ivanka and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell from a 50-yard-line suite. He closed out his weekend by stirring up bad blood with Kamala Harris supporter Taylor Swift via Truth Social (“BOOED out of the Stadium”) and ordering his Treasury secretary to terminate the bipartisan menace of the penny.

[Read: A Super Bowl spectacle over the gulf]

After a brief overnight respite, the Trump-centric events kept hurtling forth in a flurry of perpetual motion—also known as Monday and Tuesday. Trump imposed 25 percent duties on all steel and aluminum imports; pardoned former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich; and threatened that “all hell is gonna break out” if Hamas does not release all Israeli hostages by Saturday at noon. He signed an executive order that calls for a halt to all federal purchases of those flaccid paper straws (which, let’s face it, are as annoying as pennies), and another directing all federal agencies to cooperate with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to “significantly” reduce the federal workforce. This came a few hours after he held an Oval Office meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in which the president reasserted, in reference to Gaza, “We’re going to take it, we’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it.”

In summation: Yes, Trump definitely does seem kind of busy.

Opinions, of course, vary about whether this is a good or a catastrophic kind of busy. And for what it’s worth, several federal judges have declared themselves hostile to Trump’s executive orders. Regardless, these rapid-fire feedings of attention-seizing fodder represent a fundamental ethic of Trump 2.0: Frenetic action—or at least the nonstop impression thereof—seems very much the point. And notwithstanding the whiplash, turbulence, and contradiction of it all, people seem to like it so far.

In a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday, 53 percent of the 2,175 U.S. adults surveyed said that they approved of the job Trump is doing, a higher share than at any point in his first go-round. Perhaps more revealing, the poll’s respondents described these first weeks of the 78-year-old president’s term as “energetic,” “focused,” and “effective.” They might not necessarily approve of what Trump has been energetic, focused, and effective about doing (pardoning the January 6 perpetrators, for example) or not doing (66 percent said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to lowering prices for goods and services). But Trump has created a sense of action, commotion, disruption, and maybe even destruction that many voters seem to welcome for now. At the very least, there is nothing sleepy about any of this.

“He said he was going to do something, and he’s doing it,” one woman told a Bulwark focus group of Biden-turned-Trump voters conducted in the days after Trump returned to the White House. At this point, the fact of this “something” seems to be trumping the substance of it. The woman said she works in clinical research at a hospital and interacts with people who might lose National Institutes of Health grants to Trump and Musk’s barrage of cuts; she described a work environment that has been thrown into chaos.

“Like, what do we do? We have no idea, the CEO has no idea. We’re confused a little bit,” the woman said. “I’m not saying it’s the right move, the wrong move,” she added. “But it’s definitely like, Something’s happening. He’s actually doing something.”

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Sarah Longwell, the Bulwark publisher who runs the focus groups, told me that Trump appears to be benefiting from “Joe Biden’s complete lack of communication” during his time in office. Longwell said she repeatedly heard from voters that they had no idea what Biden wanted to do in office, or what he was doing. “He created this huge vacuum of presidential communication that Trump is now filling,” Longwell said.

She added that Biden also presents a cautionary example of how a president’s initial popularity can be fleeting. Four years ago, at this same point, voters were sounding quite appreciative of having someone in office who was not constantly in their faces. Biden was seen as restoring “normalcy” after the tumultuous, COVID-dominated, and violent end of Trump’s first term. He polled in the low 60s in a March 2021 CBS survey, was still getting compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and enjoyed a popularity that would last until the summer of 2021, when Afghanistan went south and inflation headed north.

A hallmark of presidential honeymoons is that presidents tend to look better when they act in ways that contrast with their predecessor, especially when their predecessor was unpopular. Another hallmark of those honeymoon periods: They tend not to last. In other words, Trump should cherish this while he can—or until all hell breaks out and people start pining again for normalcy.

Donald Trump may be pleased enough with Elon Musk, but even as the Tesla CEO is exercising his newfound power to essentially undo whole functions of the federal government, he still has to reassure his investors. Lately, Musk has delivered for them in one way: The value of the company’s shares has skyrocketed since Trump was reelected to the presidency of the United States. But Musk had much to answer for on his recent fourth-quarter earnings call—not least that in 2024, Tesla’s car sales had sunk for the first time in a decade. Profits were down sharply too. Usually, when this happens at a car company, the CEO issues a mea culpa, vows to cut costs, and hypes vehicles coming to market soon.

Instead, Musk beamed about robotics, artificial intelligence, and Tesla’s path to being “worth more than the next top five companies combined.” This is the vision he has been selling investors for years: Making cars—a volatile, hypercompetitive business with infamously low profit margins—was only the start for Tesla. Its future business will be making fleets of self-driving taxis and humanoid robots trained for thankless manual labor. Whether his vision has any connection to reality is hotly debated by many AI and robotics experts, but most Wall Street analysts put their faith in Musk. And he has, at times, delivered on wildly ambitious goals. Shares jumped again after the call. (Tesla did respond to a request for comment; a DOGE official did not respond to an email seeking comment.)

Musk gets the benefit of the doubt from investors because—despite undelivered promises, half-baked ideas, and forgotten plans—he has made Tesla worth, on paper at least, more than essentially the rest of the auto industry combined. His funders are asked to buy Musk’s picture of the future, and the recent enthusiasm for Tesla stock suggests they believe that his political influence will help him get there.

Musk needs that belief to hold. Tesla’s stock price is the largest source of his enormous wealth and, by extension, his influence; if his plans succeed, that stock is also his clearest shot at achieving trillionaire status. Right now, though, Tesla’s primary business is still selling cars that people drive, and Musk himself may be the biggest reason that faith in Tesla could falter.

For all of Musk’s ire for the former president, Tesla did very well in the Joe Biden years. The Model Y is the world’s best-selling electric vehicle and its best-selling car, period. The company has comfortably been out of its “money-losing start-up” phase for years. Although the competition among EV makers is heating up, the only individual company close to eating into Tesla’s market share is China’s BYD, which for the first time last year produced more EVs than Tesla did.

Yet that competition can’t entirely account for Tesla’s latest, abysmal numbers. Last year, Tesla sales were down nearly 12 percent in the EV stronghold of California. And in Europe, where Musk is helping supercharge far-right politics, Tesla’s sales were down 63 percent last month in France and 59 percent in Germany. This is happening even as the rest of the worldwide electric market is growing fast; nearly every car company that makes EVs saw sales gains in 2024, some of them huge.

Musk’s activism does seem to be turning off the affluent or middle-income progressive crowd that was traditionally Tesla’s bread and butter. Look no further than how the company’s new, updated Model Y has been received. Musk’s army of fanboys on X was as effusive as ever, but outside the hard-core Tesla bubble, the SUV was met with a flood of Nazi jokes following Musk’s Sieg heil–ish arm gesture at Trump’s inauguration. This type of reaction goes beyond that one car; the Cybertruck has a unique penchant for being the target of vandalism, and people appear to be making a killing selling anti-Musk bumper stickers to disgusted Tesla owners. In covering the auto industry, I can’t go a week without fielding emails from people asking for advice on the best EV alternatives to Tesla—many from longtime Tesla owners who say they’re ready to move on.

In theory, Musk’s rightward turn could help him swap out traditionally liberal buyers for more conservative ones, who usually tend to be more skeptical of EVs. And it’s likely that EVs will become less polarizing along partisan lines over time as electrification becomes more common on new cars. Right now, however, even the deep-red-coded Cybertruck doesn’t seem to be changing many minds about the concept of battery-powered cars. Take a recent report from the EV Politics Project, a nonprofit group that studies the partisan divide over electric cars. Their study indicates that although Musk himself is now viewed much more favorably by Trump voters and Republicans, he’s not leading some seismic shift in how they view EVs.

Nor is he obviously trying to get MAGA voters to buy the new Model Y. In fact, those who follow the auto industry closely wonder if Musk is still interested in running a car company at all. On that January earnings call, he offered only a boilerplate response about “more affordable” new Teslas coming soon; the word Cybertruck was not uttered once. He is, however, clearly focused on the company’s “unsupervised” robotaxi service. (Imagine Uber, except with Model Ys and Model 3 sedans, and with no humans behind the wheel.) He claims that Tesla will launch the taxis in Austin in June, the first step toward turning the company into the AI powerhouse that Musk thinks will make it so valuable. Right now, his AI ventures are separate, but he’s started mingling them with his ambitions for Tesla. Ultimately, his thinking—which he’s articulated in earnings and public appearances over a number of years—is that his roving network of autonomous vehicles can use their cameras to capture huge quantities of data, and those data can be used to train AI networks.

In the immediate future, Musk wants Tesla robotaxis everywhere, as soon as possible, and sleeping next door to the White House could help advance that part of his vision. Critics have expressed concerns that his newfound influence could also help stymie federal investigations into Tesla, which are probing the crash record of the company’s “Full Self-Driving” technology and its claims about the technology’s safety. And his current political position could help eliminate one of his oldest foes: regulations.

Tesla has long clashed with environmental rules (last year, a California judge ordered Tesla to pay $1.5 million over allegations that it mishandled hazardous waste), labor laws (employees at a Tesla plant have said that the company failed to pay overtime, among other alleged violations), and safety ordinances (the company was recently fined for violating California’s workplace-heat-safety rules at one of their plants). But the greatest roadblock to Musk’s vision of robotaxis everywhere is arguably America’s current patchwork of state-by-state rules and regulations for autonomous vehicles, which may allow self-driving cars in some places but not others. No federal standards currently exist, but creating rules favorable to the industry would speed things up—especially if those rules were tailored to especially benefit Tesla.

Musk’s approach to Tesla’s future has more than a few problems that the rest of the self-driving-car industry does not face. Tesla relies solely on cameras and AI for its automated-driving systems, rather than lidar and other more advanced sensors used by competitors. Plenty of experts think Tesla’s strategy can never power true autonomous driving. And Tesla is already years behind robotaxi companies operating in many cities right now, most notably Google’s Waymo. Musk’s Tesla faces the rising threat of China’s advancements in AI too: Investors are noticing BYD’s autonomy-focused deal with tech upstart DeepSeek. And they’re noticing where Musk’s attention lies; as he holds court in the Oval Office, Tesla’s stock has begun losing all those postelection gains.

The most daunting problem, though, may be the same problem Musk has always had: people. Even if he does succeed in tearing down the regulatory state for the sake of his own companies, who’s to say anyone will buy what they’re selling. Any power Musk has in the future depends on turning millions of people into Tesla customers. If he can’t do that—or at least keep convincing investors that he’ll be able to—he’s just another guy screaming online.