For starters, I say Donald Trump is due our congratulations and respect. He finally found a white Afrikaner he’d like to throw out of the country.
The early conventional wisdom on the Trump-Elon Musk divorce is that it was simultaneously shocking and inevitable. I suppose it was both of those things—Musk’s fusillade of tweets Thursday was pretty shocking, especially the Jeffrey Epstein bomb; and it’s true that this was bound to happen one day—no friendship between a ketamine-torqued egomaniac and a sociopathic liar with the emotional architecture of a 5-year-old is destined to go the distance.
Taking a somewhat more historical perspective, this is the feud that Milton Friedman’s America deserves. We’ve now lived through decades in which vast fortunes were amassed and lionized—and, importantly, at least in Trump’s case, inherited and far too lightly taxed. Fred Trump gave Donald over $400 million, adjusting for inflation, when he died in 1999. Errol Musk was an emerald-mine magnate who once bragged that he had “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe,” though the extent to which he supported his son is a matter of heated debate (between them, mostly). Whatever the truth is there, the bottom line is that here we are, stuck with a crooked and stupid billionaire president and a crazed narcissist who could buy several countries fighting over which one has the purer, more Friedmansque-reactionary vision for what the United States should become.
That’s a crucial matter to which we’ll return, but before we do that, let’s indulge in the fun stuff and just cut to the chase: Does Musk have the goods to bring Trump down if he wants to?
You should listen to my colleague Greg Sargent’s interview with Rick Wilson on his podcast today (transcript here, if you prefer). Wilson is entertaining, as usual, but what’s interesting is how his view of this goes against the conventional-wisdom grain. The emerging consensus is that Trump holds more cards here than Musk. He’s the president, after all, and more than that, he is, as we know all too well, a president who’s willing and eager to use the machinery of the state to settle personal scores. By this argument, Musk is in for weeks or months of hell if he doesn’t take steps to tone this down.
But to Wilson, “Elon has more weapons here than Trump does.” Prominent among those, obviously, is Twitter. We all know what Musk has done with Twitter since buying it: He’s reset the algorithms to elevate all manner of right-wing sewage—and to promote Donald Trump.
What if Musk decides to reverse that? Most of the pro-Trump chatter on Twitter and other social media isn’t coming from actual human beings. Most of it is coming from pro-Trump “bot farms” that take over accounts or create fake ones for some specific purpose. Some estimates are that 73 percent of all internet traffic is bot-farm-initiated. (And isn’t it lovely that up to three-quarters of what appears to be public opinion is totally faked by cynical and malicious people, if indeed it’s even people behind it anymore?)
Musk, Wilson told Sargent, could turn off the Trump bots in about three clicks. Doing that “would change the political climate in this country almost instantaneously,” Wilson said. “He could turn Twitter into a machine right now that will bash the tax bill.”
Does that assign Twitter too much power? Could be. But if Twitter turns on Trump and the bill, the political world will notice. The dug-in MAGAs won’t listen. But some of the non-MAGA people currently still saying they approve of Trump’s job performance just might. Trump is still, astonishingly to me, polling in the mid-40s. If he drops down to 40, we’re in a different political situation.
Then there’s the campaign. When Musk charges that Trump never would have won without his $290 million … well, that could be just a Johnson-measuring contest, in which case, who cares. But it’s possible Musk knows something about how some of that money was spent. I mean, if I gave somebody $290 million for an important purpose, I’d want to know how it was spent. Maybe it was just spent on those anti-trans ads. But let’s put it this way: We know Trump cheated in 2016. We know he’s cheated all his life at everything. So he got a massive $290 million infusion in 2020 and thought, “Let’s be sure to spend every penny toward legitimate ends!” Seems unlikely.
Finally, there’s the nuclear bomb. Let’s refresh our memories on the specific allegation against Trump with regard to Jeffrey Epstein.
The week before the 2016 election, a woman who alleged that Trump raped her when she was 13 was about to hold a press conference and go public. She charged that Trump assaulted her four different times at parties thrown by Epstein. The media didn’t take her allegations seriously at first because the woman allied herself with “an eccentric anti-Trump campaigner with a record of making outlandish claims about celebrities,” as The Guardian put it.
Then she hired lawyer Lisa Bloom—who had successfully sued the Boy Scouts, among others—and who is the daughter of Gloria Allred, who represented female accusers of Trump and Bill Cosby. The case was taken more seriously. The woman was ready to go public five days before the election, but she backed down after receiving many death threats. Trump, of course, denied the allegations.
Does Musk know of actual evidence? He’s not the world’s most stable person either, so it’s entirely possible that he’s blowing smoke. Epstein once told Michael Wolff, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.” And Trump told New York magazine in 2002 that “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
We presume innocence in the United States, especially on so touchy a matter as this. But presuming innocence doesn’t prevent us from wondering whether Musk is just trying to cause Trump maximum pain—or if he actually knows something.
There were signs Friday morning that the feud was being turned down a notch or two. The White House was desperate for a meeting with Musk to cool the temperature—interesting in itself that it wasn’t the other way around. So maybe Musk won’t follow through on Thursday’s threats. And who knows, with people this unstable, they could easily be BFFs again in six months.
But any eulogy for this relationship must first and foremost be a eulogy for the United States of America. An amoral billionaire who by rights should have been impeached and barred from running for office for life became president again—legitimately this time, as far as we know—and put the world’s richest multibillionaire in charge of a sensitive task that he oversaw with the delicacy of a hyena stripping a wildebeest carcass clean. Their efforts have already resulted in deaths around the globe and will cause untold harm in this country over time.
And now they’re engaged in a “substantive” argument that can be summarized like this. One, Trump wants a bill that is the usual Republican recipe for fiscal disaster—massive tax cuts for the rich, cuts to programs that help working and poor people, huge deficits and debts as far as the eye can see. The other, Musk, at least professes to care about the deficits and debt, but he’s totally chill with the massive tax cuts for the rich. He’s just against the “pork,” which is rich-man speak for things that might actually benefit people and communities.
It’s tragic that working Americans are held hostage to this madness. The small silver lining is the hope that Musk can make Trump’s life as miserable as Trump can make his.
