The Blowup We’ve All Been Waiting For

The first public breakup of Trump II unfolded before our eyes this afternoon — a pinch-me ❤️ moment for those of us long awaiting this exact estrangement.

By now you’ve seen the reports of the very public ego clash between the world’s richest man and a man who is president but, until recently, barely a billionaire. The Donald Trump-Elon Musk imbroglio began earlier this week and culminated this afternoon with Trump threatening to rip up Musk’s government contracts and with Musk suggesting that the reason the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files was so dissatisfying for MAGA conspiracy theorists is because those files were not released in their entirety, because they mention a certain someone.

While there could still be something to the initial impression that the whole feud is fake — to help Elon’s plummeting Tesla stocks — the Epstein allegations aren’t exactly the kind of public accusation that can be neatly tucked back into a box. Since the day Elon first did his gross leap in the air behind Trump on stage at that October rally, all of us masochists who keep up with this stuff have known this day would soon find us. Its a kind of law of nature, or at least of MAGA world. If you’ve missed any of the bickering, here’s a sampling of key public remarks from each over the course of the last few hours.

Trump’s Backhanded Compliments And Threats

• “Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore,” Trump said from the Oval Office.
• “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
• “I’ll be honest, I think he missed the place,” Trump said, again from the Oval Office. “He got out there, and all of a sudden he wasn’t in this beautiful Oval Office.”
• Commenting on Elon’s curious black eye last week, Trump said: “I said, ‘Do you want a little makeup? We’ll get you a little makeup.’ Which is interesting.”

Elon’s Remarks (all posted on X, the platform that used to be enjoyable before Elon ruined it)

• “Not even those in Congress who had to vote on the Big Ugly Spending Bill had time to read it!”
• “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate. Such ingratitude”
• “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
• “In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately”
• “Yes” (tweeted in response to a post suggesting Trump should be impeached and replaced by Vice President JD Vance.
• He rounded out the afternoon by posting a poll about creating a third party: “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”

Trump Loses A Weapon

This implosion began mere moments after Musk left the Trump administration, which was announced with great theatrics and involved a mysterious key, the black eye and Trump insisting that Musk wasn’t actually leaving. Musk soon began criticizing the spending package that just passed the House and the Senate picked up for consideration this week. The bill, of course, includes devastating and deadly cuts to Medicaid, makes Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and ultimately will add trillions to the deficit.

But there’s a meatier issue at the heart of the Breakup We All Saw Coming. A few months back, Trump was working as a pseudo House Majority Whip, attempting to convince those House Republicans upset that the budget blueprint bill didn’t go far enough in slashing what they deemed to be wasteful federal spending. At the time, Trump asked members of the Republican conference to not get too caught up in the details. He promised that just because certain things are funded at certain levels in the blueprint or in the eventual bill, it does not guarantee that Elon won’t come in with his DOGE sledgehammer and shut down congressionally-authorized spending in the future. Worry not, we won’t be respecting the legislative branch’s authority in the first place, essentially.

Trump used the same line of Impoundment Control Act violation-esque rhetoric when talking House Freedom Caucus members off a ledge last month, before they ultimately voted for the bill that now sits with the Senate.

Implicit in this was the fact that with Musk comes Musk’s heaps of money, and his willingness to wage scorched-earth political combat by dumping that money, in various questionably legal ways, into key races — and threatening to back primary challengers for those who don’t get in line with the Trump agenda. But the Musk-backed candidate’s momentous loss in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year dented that impression of invincibility, and it now appears Musk’s political firepower will certainly not be coming to Trump’s aid anytime soon.

What that means for intra-Republican political dynamics as the party attempts to negotiate its massive spending package and greenlight DOGE’s cuts through a rescissions package remains to be seen.

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