The two are seen as instrumental in shaping the administration’s trade policy and cost-cutting efforts.

West Palm Beach, Fla. — President Trump deplaned Air Force One here on Friday evening, joined on the trip by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) czar Elon Musk — two high-profile advisers who have emerged in recent weeks as key players in the administration’s trade and cost-cutting efforts a little more than a month into the president’s second term.

This weekend’s trip to Florida comes on the heels of Trump’s celebratory address to Congress earlier this week, where the president chided disruptive congressional Democrats and lauded his administration’s flurry of executive actions on border security, on tariffs, and on identifying waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal bureaucracy.

Also on the flight Friday evening were White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and White House Staff Secretary and Assistant to the President Will Scharf — key members of the president’s inner circle who have emerged as trusted advisers in his second administration.

Friday’s flight took off a few hours after the president spoke at length with reporters in the White House about his administration’s trade relations with the United States’ northern neighbor, which may soon include reciprocal dairy and lumber tariffs on Canada unless the nation scales back its own 250 percent tariff on U.S. imports of those goods. “They’ll be met with the exact same tariff unless they drop it, and that’s what reciprocal means,” the president said. “And we may do it as early as today, or we’ll wait till Monday or Tuesday, but that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to charge the same thing. It’s not fair.”

Also on Friday, Trump spoke with reporters in the Oval Office about his threat of “large-scale” sanctions and tariffs on the Kremlin amid the war, while characterizing his administration’s continuing negotiations with Ukraine as “difficult” ahead of next week’s scheduled meeting with Ukrainian officials and members of the president’s national security team in Saudi Arabia.

Hours after that Oval Office gaggle, the president greeted reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews with a wave before climbing the red-carpeted stairs into the presidential aircraft.

Lutnick is already playing a major role in shaping the president’s trade agenda alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and senior White House counselor on trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro, all of whom have characterized the administration’s evolving tariffs on Mexico, China, and Canada as policies that are aimed at stemming the flow of fentanyl into the country and boosting domestic manufacturing.

“He met Canada and he met Mexico in the middle,” Lutnick told Fox News on Friday of the administration’s decision to halt recently announced 25 percent tariffs on U.S. imports from Canada and Mexico that fall under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. “But let me tell you something, if they don’t break fentanyl, then this tariff continues. So this is about drugs. This is not trade. April 2, we begin our reciprocal tariff policy, and that we’ve been telling you about all along.”

The commerce secretary also played down a New York Times report on emerging tensions between Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reportedly traded barbs during Thursday’s White House cabinet meeting over Musk’s alleged frustrations that the Floridian is not making enough staffing cuts at the State Department.

“Donald Trump came into the room and he said: ‘Look, I want to support Elon. We want to cut, but we want to cut like a scalpel,’” Lutnick recalled during his Friday interview with Laura Ingraham. “The president was there saying: ‘Let’s make sure when we make our cuts, we only cut fat and waste.’ We make sure we support and keep really, really good people we have in government.”