The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
As you’ve surely heard by now, the feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has erupted, with the two men trading attacks on each other for hours. As of this recording, the last big things to happen are that Trump threatened to cut off all government contracts to Musk’s companies, and Musk then dropped what he called a “big bomb,” which is that Trump is “in the Epstein files.” Musk also called for Trump to be impeached. What strikes us about this feud, though, is that each one accidentally revealed just how corrupt they really are. And this also provided a weirdly revealing glimpse into the soul of MAGA—into how fundamentally empty and hollow it all is. There’s nothing there. Nothing is ever real. Today we’re lucky to be digging through this muck with someone who dissects the pathologies of MAGA like no one else alive, former GOP strategist turned Never Trumper Rick Wilson. Thanks for coming on, Rick.
Rick Wilson: Hey, thanks, Greg. Thanks for having me. It’s been a hell of a day.
Sargent: Sure has. Well, let’s quickly do the background here. Elon Musk criticized the “big, beautiful bill” that has passed the House and that Trump now wants the Senate to pass. Musk called it a “disgusting abomination” that will explode the deficit. Musk kept it up, and then Trump finally unloaded. Let’s start with this. Listen.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): People leave my administration, and they love us. And then at some point, they miss it so badly, and some of them embrace it and some of them actually become hostile. I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I guess they call it. But we have it with others too. They leave, and they wake up in the morning and the glamour is gone. The whole world is different, and they become hostile. I don’t know what it is.
Sargent: Musk counted that by saying without him, Trump wouldn’t have won the election, adding, “Such ingratitude.” What strikes me, Rick, is that Trump accusing Musk of Trump Derangement Syndrome is basically treating Musk, who spent $250 million to elect Trump, like just some common troll. What do you make of that?
Wilson: Look, when I shuffle off this mortal coil at some point, I will be remembered for one rule: Everything Trump touches dies. And for as smart as Elon is supposedly, the idea that he never heard this rule—or didn’t understand that Trump is a man with no loyalty to anyone ever, that no vow, obligation, oath, promise, relationship, contract, deal is ever anything but fungible and ephemeral with Trump—was insane. So look, Elon is not going to be in a happy place here for a lot of reasons. The Trump people are going to try to screw him on his contracts and things like that. But it’s really hard for me to mount a whole big pity party for this guy who jumped into bed with Trump. Was he living in a cave before this? Was he in orbit somewhere? No, he was a human being on the planet Earth. He had to know who Donald Trump was.
Sargent: Talk about getting fleas. So Rick, you do think that they’re going to really go after Musk’s contracts? What does that look like?
Wilson: They’re going to try to go after SpaceX. They’re going to try to go after Starlink. And this is the kind of thing that Trump will do because he thinks it’s like a power move against Elon. And the problem for Trump—and I say this advisedly … Elon Musk may be a freak and a weird white supremacist and a neo-Nazi and a ketamine junkie and all that other crap, but his company made this rocket called the Falcon. And the Falcon is the backbone of the American space program, the backbone of the American military space program. It’s a fucking great rocket, and we use them every day, and there is no substitute. There is no other thing out there in the market. Trump will say, Oh, we’ve got to do this. And Department of Defense and NASA are going to have to go to him and go, We can’t, boss. We’re stuck.
Now, it’s still going to cause Elon a lot of trouble. NASA is going to start holding his launch license—just all the bullshit that they play at the low-level, static crappy way that they’ll do things off the radar screen. But as my friend Mario Nicolais just said, At this point, Elon’s like three tweets away from DHS kicking his door down and deporting him.
Sargent: Yes, I think that’s right. I want to play some more audio of Trump. This time Trump accuses Musk of turning against the bill only because it cuts tax credits and subsidies for green energy. Listen to this.
Trump (audio voiceover): But I’m very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here, better than you people. He knew everything about it. He had no problem with it. All of a sudden he had a problem. And he only developed the problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the E.V. mandate because that’s billions and billions of dollars.
Sargent: Rick, what’s funny to me about this is that Trump simply assumes that everyone has thoroughly corrupt motives for everything they do simply because he does. I actually don’t think this is why Musk attacked the bill. I think his reasons are really terrible, but they weren’t that. But still, this is pretty damn revealing on Trump’s part. Your thoughts?
Wilson: It does show that Trump’s betrayals are always this craven combination of corruption and ego. When his ego is being stroked, he’s fine with the most Byzantine lavish corruption under the sun. When he gets in a disagreement with somebody, things go crazy and he attacks. But it all comes down to, again … Trump—when Elon is spending $300 million, he’s his best friend. When they part company on something, he becomes the target of the MAGA machine.
Now, I got to tell you, I just put this thing out a little while ago, giving Elon a piece of advice. Trump’s base—the loyalty of Trump’s base and the fear that base puts into Congress—all comes from Twitter. It’s the power of Twitter to be a normative force inside of MAGA—that is the one unified group in our country at all times behind Trump. Elon can turn that switch off. He can turn that dial down. I think that Trump hasn’t thought this through because he rarely thinks anything through, but there’s a lot to be said here. We’ve got two guys with a lot of weapons, but Elon probably has more guns right now.
Sargent: That’s amazing considering that Trump controls the federal government and the law enforcement bureaucracy.
Wilson: Right? Yes.
Sargent: Yeah. And what’s interesting about that point, I think, is that that is why Elon Musk bought Twitter, right? It was—
Wilson: A hundred percent.
Sargent: —to get Donald Trump elected president. That’s why he bought it, and it worked.
Wilson: It will end up, if Elon reshapes this battlefield.… Well, he could turn ... again, on the back end of Twitter, we know that he boosts and deboosts accounts all the time. We know that he elevates certain content and knocks certain content below the threshold of visibility all the time. He could easily turn Twitter into a machine right now that bashed the tax bill—endlessly bashed the tax bill—and killed it. You want to take revenge on Trump, that’s a good way to kill the bill. You want to show Trump that you’ve got the power, take away his signature piece of legislation.
Sargent: Right. He could use Twitter to absolutely slaughter these Republicans in Congress is what I think you’re saying, right?
Wilson: Yes, exactly.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s right.
Wilson: And they won’t have the protection of Trump to back them up.
Sargent: Can you explain that? What would that look like? In other words, you really think he should tweak the algorithm so that Trump loses his clout on there?
Wilson: Sure. He already tweaked it. When he bought the platform, he tweaked it so that Trump and MAGA content and alt-right content got boosted dramatically. This isn’t debatable. We know this happened.
Sargent: Yes, absolutely.
Wilson: When he wants to befriend somebody, they get a big boost. When he wants to knock somebody out, they get deboosted. I just know there’s probably another technical word for it, but I don’t know what it is. This idea that he should use his platform—it’s the classic question of power. Power exists when you use the power that you have. It doesn’t exist if you don’t. And what’s he going to do? Say, No, no, I’m going to stay fair and balanced and keep this platform weighted so Trump and his people get boosted? He can also … and this is something I heard from an actual Twitter employee about a year and a half ago, We know who the bot farms are. Some get taken out, and some do not. And he could switch off the pro-Trump bot universe probably with three clicks, and it would change the political climate in this country almost instantaneously.
I think Trump has not thought this through. I don’t think these people have thought this through. I don’t think anybody’s thought this through on Trump’s team. But then again, I also think that Trump’s team is being absolutely railed by this news right now, and they are completely out of control.
Sargent: Yeah, I want to return to a point you made earlier about whether Trump actually has a big gun against Musk or not. I want to read what Trump posted on Truth Social. He said, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” So here again, Trump just shows [that] he thinks everybody’s corrupt. Biden should have done it because if he had just thought to be corrupt like me, he would have done that. So Trump can’t for a second envision making any decision around any conception of what’s in the national interest, right? Everything’s up for corrupt horse trading or to be used to punish and extort enemies. I got to say, it’s pretty funny to see Musk now get victimized by this, isn’t it, Rick?
Wilson: Oh, it is. It’s beyond funny to me because he is a guy who was ready to use his power to victimize a lot of Americans. He was ready to use his power to tear down people who did jobs in this government that were important to the American people. And watching him be on the receiving end of the tornado of Trump’s attacks—karma is a bitch, but occasionally she shows up dressed for the garden party. This guy has gotten, he is really.… In the “fuck around and find out,” he is well into the “finding out” phase.
Sargent: But you think in the end that Trump really can’t use the power of the government to punish Musk via the contracts because the space program and other things are just too dependent on him.
Wilson: Yeah, we are way too dependent on the Falcon platform. The Starship isn’t there yet, but on the Falcon Heavy and the Falcon 9 platform, they carry something like 95 percent of all U.S. space payloads for NASA and the military. And it’s legitimately a good rocket. It’s legitimately a real good functioning platform, and it’s cheap. But man, it is going to be tough to replace those without some real pain at NASA and the DOD. And there’s no immediate replacement for them anyway. Jeff Bezos can’t switch out; ULA doesn’t have the rockets on hand to switch out. It’s going to be tough for them to pull that off.
Sargent: Well, you’re a Florida guy. You know all this stuff. Saving the best for last here. Elon Musk tweeted this, “Time to drop the really big bomb: Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Now, Rick, I find it pretty funny that Elon Musk spent $250 million to elect Trump while knowing something this hideously incriminating about him. It’s a striking admission of his own corruption if you accepted it at face value. Beyond that, I don’t know what to make of this, so I’m turning this one over to you. Like I said, you know how to dissect these pathologies like no one else.
Wilson: Inside the MAGA world, there is an origin story of Trump’s elevation. That origin story started in 2016 where a conspiratorial wing of the party was fed a story. It was a story promoted by guys like Jack Posobiec, and it was the story of Pizzagate, where Hillary Clinton supposedly was the center of a global pedophile ring that was based in a pizza restaurant in Washington—a restaurant with no basement, a restaurant with no ties to anything like that. And that expanded to Jeffrey Epstein, who was close to Trump, very close to Trump but also was friendly with the Clintons. This conspiracy theory was a definitional element in this giant undertone in Republican and MAGA messaging, that everybody who is opposing us is a pedophile. Everybody who’s against us is part of this global child-trafficking network. They’re all child pornographers or whatever it is.
Epstein is the heart of that, and he’s talismanic for them in that storyline. Even though Trump and Epstein were close, close, close friends—Trump rode on the jet; Trump partied with him; there were contemporaneous quotes by Trump saying, Jeffrey’s a good guy to party with, and he likes his ladies on the younger side; all this creepy, gross stuff for years—at the end of the day, Trump never got held to account for being close to Epstein because they hived it off in their mind. They’re like, Nope, nope, nope, nope, didn’t happen. It’s all fake news. It’s not fake. And this idea that we’ve been hearing for a couple of weeks now—that Bondi and Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are slow-rolling the Epstein file release—has made MAGA very angry. And now this is like throwing a big old chunk of sodium in the water. It’s going to explode, it’s going to boil over, and it’s going to be lit as hell.
Sargent: It just occurred to me. I didn’t even really realize.… This is why we’re having you on, Rick, to explain how fucking nuts all this is. I didn’t realize what Elon was actually saying here. Now I get it. Elon is actually accusing Pam Bondi and Kash Patel of a coverup on Trump’s behalf, right?
Wilson: Yes.
Sargent: And the whole idea is to light this fuse that’ll blow MAGA to smithereens over this, right?
Wilson: Look, I keep saying this: Elon has more weapons here than Trump does. And I can envision what’s happening in the White House right now. They are in full lockdown. They’re in full panic mode. They don’t know what to say. Susie Wiles and her people will be saying, We’ve got to end this story, cut it off, stop talking about it. It’s going to hurt us. John Thune and Mike Johnson are calling Trump saying, Please, please, please stop. This guy will blow this thing up. We want to pass this tax cut for our donors. There is no good outcome here for Trump. None at all. And look, Elon’s fucked too, but there is no upside here for Donald Trump. He is in a deep, deep, deep, deep hole.
Sargent: I want to try to get what I think this really means, which is that one of the big reasons that Elon has such big guns against Trump is because he knows how MAGA actually works, right? He knows how to push its buttons, both literally—like with Twitter [where] he can manipulate the algorithms to boost certain people and turn off other bot farms or whatever—and also figuratively, right? He knows exactly—
Wilson: He’s of that culture.
Sargent: Right.
Wilson: He’s of that troll culture. And look, there are two normative forces in Trump’s space: Twitter and Fox News. Elon controls a lot of the mindshare of the Republican base. And he’s out talking about Maybe I form a new political party. Maybe I should advertise against people supporting the bill. We are in the middle right now of a cataclysmic political change on the right in this country. The last six hours while we’re … well, it’s been about six hours since this broke—you and I are recording this in the in the late afternoon on Thursday—but I think this is going to continue to unfold and expand because Musk is not stopping.
He’s been tweeting while we’ve been talking. It’s like four tweets in the last five minutes. He’s bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. So we’re going to have a lot of additional excitement, I think, as we go through the weekend, because it is truly insane. My favorite tweet of the day is Kanye West saying, “Broooos please noooooo We love you both so much.”
Sargent: Yeah, that’ll work. Oh, Elon Musk just unloaded on the tariffs, “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.”
Wilson: Why, yes, he did.
Sargent: Well, it’s interesting. With Susie Wiles and all the Trump insiders—the ones who come from the old wing of the Republican Party, that old Republican Party that you belonged to, back in the day—this is the shit that’s going to absolutely drive them ballistic with panic.
Wilson: The free-market guys and the low-tariff guys and the small-government guys were already having a very bad year. It is about to get much, much worse.
Sargent: Right. And I just want to go back to a key point about Musk having all this firepower, which is that he understands the pathologies, right? He’s got his finger on the nerve centers. He knows how crazy this world is, and he knows how to aggravate the crazy. You know what I mean?
Wilson: He knows how to poke that crazy. He knows how to hit that combination of fear in the MAGA amygdala and rage and arousal. They love to get revved up about real and fake moral crises. And I think he’s just really equipped to place a major fuck-around here.
Sargent: Right. Because he’s very trusted among a certain component of MAGA who will see him as someone who knows deep secrets, right? Now whether he does or not is irrelevant, right? He’s seen as knowing these deep secrets. So if he says something like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are covering up this Epstein scandal in which Trump is in the files, that sets off this massive fire.
Wilson: It is. It is going to … at the minimum, it requires the White House to say, No, he isn’t in the Epstein files, and most voters equate a denial with a full confession of guilt in this country. It’s crazy.
Sargent: So I will say a big MAGA influencer, Ian Miles Cheong, seems to agree that Elon’s got the power here. He reacted to the Epstein claim by saying, My money’s on Elon. Trump should be impeached and replaced with JD Vance. Now that’s the rumor, or I don’t know, maybe—
Wilson: Man, if you’re JD Vance tonight, you’re like, I don’t know much about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, but when I—
Sargent: Right. Well, the conspiracy theory in some quarters is that the tech oligarchs are manipulating this whole thing so that Trump gets into the White House, gets JD Vance in there, and then Trump gets taken out in some form—figuratively, of course—and then is replaced by the tech oligarchs’ real dark choice, JD Vance.
Wilson: Yeah. Look, this country would not be better off with Donald Trump being in power or JD Vance. It’s two separate pathways of hell. But man, that alone is going to cause Trump inside the White House to begin going after JD Vance—maybe not publicly but to begin to be paranoid about Vance and worry about who Vance is meeting with, and who he’s talking to, and so on.
Sargent: What I keep coming back to, and I tweeted this, is that one thing that continues to be a reliable guide to human affairs is “No honor among thieves.”
Wilson: None whatsoever.
Sargent: These guys, man. Where does it end up? Can you play this out a little bit more, Rick? I guess what I hear you saying is that ultimately Trump hasn’t thought this through. It’s going to blow up in his face, for a couple of reasons. One, he doesn’t actually have the big gun to use against Musk because Musk’s companies really are deeply woven into the fabric of the federal government and the national security establishment, right?
Wilson: Yes. And look, I don’t think that we’re going to see Elon Musk swing to the left or become a progressive or become a Democrat or anything like that. He is a right-wing weirdo, but he is going to be … this is one of those examples where the cat fight is going to be so loud and so ugly and so mad that I’m going to keep encouraging Elon to stand up for his honor.
Sargent: That is very big of you, Rick, I have to say. And the second reason that Trump could come to regret this is that Musk actually has his finger on the pulse of MAGA and knows how to fuck with all these people in their heads, in a way that nobody else does.
Wilson: He does. Look, he has control of the algorithmic power that has given Trump such a phenomenal degree of control over his base—and thus the Congress.
Sargent: So where does it go? Play it out.
Wilson: If Elon puts his finger on the trigger here and starts to deemphasize Trump and starts to deemphasize the MAGA bot universe and all that stuff, I think it ends up diminishing the chances of this bill passing. And that hurts Trump in a very serious and deep way. If he doesn’t pass this bill, he’s burned a lot of power.
Sargent: Is there any chance the two of them sit down and say, OK, this is getting out of control, we got to work this out?
Wilson: Trump will never. His ego will not let him do that.
Sargent: So this continues.
Wilson: And this is going to drag on until somebody is a bloody political corpse. My money at the moment is on Elon only because of his control of the platform. And Trump is also … look, Trump has lost a step in the last six months, even more so in the last two years. Elon can sit up jacked up on ketamine all night and tweet until his fingers fall off, and I don’t think Trump has the same energy level and focus that Musk does.
Sargent: Well, I think you’ve actually got your finger on what pisses off MAGA—
Wilson: I have some skill in pissing off MAGA. This is a true statement.
Sargent: —when you say that Trump is losing his energy and losing his step.
Wilson: Weak, sad, low energy. Low T!
Sargent: Well, Rick, we knew that you’d be able to explain these pathologies to us, and you didn’t disappoint. Rick Wilson, thanks so much for coming on, man. Always good to talk to you.
Wilson: Great being with you, my friend. Talk to you soon.