WASHINGTON—President Trump recently posed an evocative question to his advisers about billionaire Elon Musk’s promise to slash $1 trillion in government spending.“Was it all bullshit?” Trump asked, according to administration officials,

But in terms of the access he had been given, the amount of time he was spending at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate planning for his return to the Oval Office, and Inauguration Day itself, when Musk and other tech leaders,