Democrats, Let Trump and Elon Fight

On Thursday afternoon, Elon Musk called President Trump a pedophile.

There are many layers to the extremely online (and extremely entertaining) feud between the president and a man who, until a few days ago, was one of his most loyal backers, but I don’t want that to get lost, so I’ll say it again: Elon Musk called Donald Trump a pedophile. (He did this while simultaneously taking credit for making him president. Like I said: There are layers.)

Democrats are understandably giddy about the battle royale happening between Trump and Musk, who may be even more addicted to posting than he is to ketamine. Ostensibly, this rift started because Musk decided that the “big, beautiful bill”—which would give rich people like Trump and Musk a huge tax cut paid for by kicking millions off of their health care—currently being considered by the Senate was a betrayal of his ideological project. That bill balloons the deficit (thanks to the aforementioned tax cut, which Musk is in favor of—again, this is a very stupid fight), and Musk has stated his goal is to balance the books and cut spending.

Trump, meanwhile, has suggested that Musk really only hates the bill because it guts an electric vehicle mandate that is crucial to his companies. Musk more or less confirmed this theory by posting the pedophile allegations—specifically, he said that Trump is named in FBI files relating to the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein (which would not be surprising since the two were friends for decades) and has been blocking their release for that reason—shortly after Trump threatened to pull government subsidies for all of his companies.

Less than a week ago, the two were palling around together in the Oval Office. I still remember a time when Trump staged a Tesla commercial outside the White House! Now we’re here. With Elon Musk calling Donald Trump a pedophile.

Musk is very wealthy and well connected, which has led to rumblings that the Democrats should exploit the end of this friendship by wooing the mogul to their side. Writing in Politico, Debra Kahn argued that bringing Musk—who had backed the party until his recent embrace of racism, transphobia, Hitler salutes, and all of Grover Norquist’s economic ideas—back into the Democratic fold could be useful in the fight against climate change. That electric vehicle mandate is important to him, after all.

Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley in Congress, was quoted in that piece and has spoken up about starting a “dialogue” with the billionaire. “We should ultimately be trying to convince him that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with,” Khanna told Politico, in a separate piece. “A commitment to science funding, a commitment to clean technology, a commitment to seeing international students like him.”

At Wednesday’s WelcomeFest—a kind of Coachella for centrist politicians and consultants, if Coachella was more annoying and significantly less popular—the festival’s co-founder Liam Kerr pushed the idea that Musk returning to the party could be good. “You don’t want anyone wildly distorting your politics, which he has a unique capability to do. But it’s a zero-sum game,” he said. “Anything that he does that moves more toward Democrats hurts Republicans.”

Embracing Musk is, even for this iteration of the Democratic Party, a phenomenally stupid and self-defeating thing to do. Yes, the feud between him and Trump is good for them. Democrats should help it continue—not by embracing Musk but by … letting it continue. “Let them fight” is a well-worn political strategy because it works. Musk and Trump’s feud causes division within the Republican Party, imperils one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern history, and makes everyone involved in it look like a childish idiot. It is literally drawing attention to Trump’s ties to Epstein, which have been well known for years but have never really landed with his base. Every second that the two of them are fighting is good for Democrats. But it’s especially good because they are fighting over the direction of the Republican Party.

The big problem with welcoming Musk into the fold is that the political ideology Musk is deploying in his fight against Trump is odious. It is as bad as, if not worse than, Trumpism. It is an agenda that basically amounts to a feudal state: Billionaires like him would have immense power; the federal government would all but cease to exist. Musk wants to slash all entitlement spending and decimate the federal government’s effectiveness. If anything, he wants a government that is even more extreme than the extremist, authoritarian one we have now. Backing him now would also mean providing a life preserver to a small-government ethos that is antithetical to where the Democratic Party should be. It is also a bad idea because Musk is a vile bigot and a loser. He is the billionaire who took away thousands of jobs at home and killed thousands of innocent people abroad. He really, really sucks.

As it currently stands, Democrats are getting everything they want. Musk is sowing chaos and imperiling the administration and its reprehensible agenda. He is, most likely, going to wake up in a week or two in unprecedented territory for someone who hasn’t been accused of a serious crime (like, say, being a pedophile): He will be loathed by both Democrats and Republicans and have only a small constituency of fellow losers as his admirers. This is good. This is what we should want. He doesn’t deserve to have a place in public life. Let him cause as much damage to Trump as possible, and then stay as far away from him as possible, forever.