The Trump-Musk Feud Heard Round the World

What happens when two of the largest egos on the planet have a falling out? We are about to find out.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are sparring over the administration’s massive legislative package that Trump and his team are trying to strong-arm through Congress, with the president saying on Thursday that he was “very disappointed” in his former adviser. On Tuesday, Musk took to X to declare the legislation to be a “disgusting abomination.” Well, from out of the mouths of babes…

Musk railed against members of Congress who voted for the bill, and announced that America would, come the next election cycle, fire these dullards. The subtext was that the world’s richest man would likely unleash his social media muscle and open his vast wallet to facilitate challenges to those feckless enough to vote for a bill that they well knew would swell the deficit (and obliterate tax credits for buyers of Teslas and other electric vehicles).

Trump isn’t exactly overjoyed by this. After all, the big, beautiful bill that is currently wending its way through Congress contains pretty much every heinous idea that Trump and his inner circle could come up with: multiplying, by orders of magnitude, the already obscene amounts the US spends on locking down its borders and harassing asylum seekers, refugees, and others fleeing poverty and violence; ending pretty much all subsidies and tax credits for sustainable energy infrastructure; slashing health and nutritional spending for the poor; and boosting tax cuts for the über-wealthy.

It’s basically one-stop shopping for mean, nasty people. It’s like a hot pot soup where every ingredient plus the kitchen sink is thrown into one, big, boiling, concoction—in this case of undiluted horribleness.

And now, here comes Musk—the ungrateful, ketamine-addled, Sieg Heil saluting brat—who, despite Trump’s having essentially given his raiding parties free rein to sabotage every aspect of government they chose, and Musk himself carte balance to ignore every conflict-of-interest regulation in existence, is daring to throw a tantrum over the national debt.

For the first day, Trump maintained his composure over Musk’s attacks. But that couldn’t last long; it’s simply not in the gangster-president’s DNA to passively accept a betrayal of this order of magnitude. And, true to form, by Thursday the two megalomaniacs were at each other’s throatswith Trump floating the idea of ending all government contracts and subsidies to Musk-owned firms, and Musk floating the idea of creating a new political party.

In his fury, Musk claimed credit for Trump’s election victory, and live-posted his responses to Trump’s criticisms of him; and in his petulant anger, Trump took to social media to declare that he would have carried the swing states even without his sidekick’s intervention. Musk responded by taking to X to announce that Trump’s name was in the notorious Epstein files, and then endorsing a call for Trump’s impeachment. I’m sure by the time this column is published, Trump will have hit back at this latest allegation with his own brew of bile.

This has the potential to make Game of Thrones look like child’s play. And, quite frankly, I’m rooting for each of them to destroy the other.

But, it’s not only Musk whom Trump was feuding with this week. MAGA-man and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett—whose accession Trump celebrated in a raucous White House event barely a week before the 2020 elections—are on the outs, reputedly because she isn’t quite the rubber stamp that he assumed she would be when he nominated her during his first go-round in the White House. Sure, she was instrumental in the push to overturn Roe v. Wadebut more recently she hasn’t been quite as monolithically unpleasant as have Alito, Thomas, and, for the most part Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. In a series of rulings over the past several months, Barrett has sided with the more liberal judges, as well as, at times, Chief Justice Roberts, stymieing some of the more flagrantly unconstitutional of Trump’s power grabs, especially around immigration.