Trump’s Breakup With Elon Musk Is Sending MAGA Into a Full Panic

MAGA is struggling to cope with the sudden rift between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire former bureaucrat they’d come to embrace as one of their own. 

Trump’s sycophants were left high and dry Friday after Musk broke with the president, attacking his big beautiful bill for being too, well, big, while Trump claimed that Musk is only mad because the spending bill would remove the electric vehicle mandate that subsidizes Tesla. Things remain tense, after Trump threatened Thursday to revoke Musk’s government contracts, leading the technocrat to raise the president’s ties to convicted sex offender and alleged human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. 

On Capitol Hill, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he was struggling to corral the fighting. 

“I don’t know what has motivated this disturbance to begin, but obviously it’s not helpful,” said Johnson, whom Musk had previously targeted when the Tesla CEO opposed the last government spending bill in December. 

“My way is that policy disputes are not personal,” Johnson continued. “I’ve tried very hard to speak with Elon over and over, you know? And talk with him about what I believe are misconceptions he has about this bill and what it is.”

On Fox News, anchors tried to walk the line between Trump and Musk.

Sean Hannity called the rift over the missing E.V. mandate “understandable,” but he also leapt to respond to the Epstein allegations, despite the fact that Trump’s name was indeed in the Epstein files that his own administration released in February. 

“And on the Epstein issue, wasn’t it Donald Trump, he booted Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago nearly 20 years ago?” Hannity argued. Trump had reportedly banned Epstein a few months before the New York financier pleaded guilty to sex offense charges in 2008.

Hannity continued, turning his attention to someone else entirely: former President Bill Clinton. “Is he in those files also? I can’t say for sure, I haven’t seen them. But if I was a betting man, I know where I’d put my money!”

Jesse Watters summed the rift up as an “issue of donor maintenance.”

“But maybe they could patch things up,” Watters said. “Vance called Trump ‘Hitler,’ and he’s on the ticket!”

And online, where MAGA really lives, people were spiraling. 

Catturd, a pitiable MAGA shill account, seemed lost after Musk unfollowed him, and got into a fight with Alex Jones for failing to defend Trump. “Many large influencer accounts desperately tried to stay neutral today,” Catturd wrote, adding that his position on Trump had never changed. 

“But when you come out and call Trump a pedophile—that’s when you’ve crossed a redline. Don’t care about anything you have to say after that,” he added. 

Jones did ultimately defend Trump Friday, writing in a post on X, “I have investigated Trump for 10 years looking for any connection to Epstein’s crimes and found zero evidence.”

Right-wing filmmaker hack Dinesh D’Souza brought his own brand of copium to the debate, and mused in an outlandish post on X that there may be a greater conspiracy behind the apparent rift. 

“Is this some sort of perverse scheme to force the release of the Epstein files? How great it would be to have a horde of bad guys publicly exposed. Then Trump and Elon break out the champagne,” D’Souza wrote.

Others counseled reconciliation. “Broooos please noooooo 🫂   We love you both so much,” wrote Kanye West, outspoken antisemite and musical artist. 

The House of Representatives is trying to pass a resolution making the term “Free Palestine” an official antisemitic slogan. 

Republican Representative Gabe Evans from Colorado introduced the resolution in the wake of the attack on a gathering for Israeli hostages in Boulder this week. Mohammed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, has been charged for the attack, during which he yelled “Free Palestine,” according to the FBI.

“Whereas, while shouting ‘Free Palestine,’ an antisemitic slogan that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and Jewish people, Mohammed Sabry Soliman attacked the peaceful demonstrators with homemade Molotov cocktails,” the resolution reads. House Republicans are expected to vote on the nonbinding resolution next week.

The term “free Palestine” has been a touchy subject among liberal and conservative Zionists alike, as they have long deemed even saying it to be antisemitic hate speech against Jews rather than an acknowledgment of the decades of displacement, destruction, death, and apartheid that Palestinians have suffered at the hands of the Israeli government. This right-wing attack on free speech clearly demonstrates the hypocrisy of these “anti-woke” Republicans who love to wax poetic about the land of the free while kidnapping students off the streets for writing op-eds. Now this resolution seeks to further entrench the flawed logic that the Jewish religion and culture and the Israeli government that has been starving and bombing Palestinians are one and the same. Anyone who votes against this bill in an attempt to protect free speech will be labeled a terrorist sympathizer.   

The labor market is slowing, but it’s all good news in the White House.

The U.S. added 139,000 jobs in May, a slight decline from April, according to a jobs report released Friday. The unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent, still within the ballpark of historic lows reached in 2023, when the unemployment rate reached 3.4 percent—the lowest it had been in more than five decades. But within the folds of the report hid a major red flag for Donald Trump’s agenda: The U.S. is still bleeding manufacturing jobs.

“GREAT JOB NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG! AT THE SAME TIME, BILLIONS POURING IN FROM TARIFFS!!!” Trump celebrated on Truth Social.

But even the president’s favorite conservative network couldn’t hide its dismay at the slight manufacturing downturn.

“Now, 8,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in May. That’s not what you wanted to see,” said Fox Business host Stuart Varney.

“Well, we’re certainly holding steady,” said Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. “And under the Trump administration, manufacturing jobs are still up over what the last administration, under [Joe] Biden, had.

“The focus of my ‘America at Work’ tour is to increase those manufacturing jobs, and we’ll continue to stay laser focused on that as the president continues to double down on how important this is to the American economy,” she added.

“But how come we’re losing 8,000 manufacturing jobs in May, when there’s a big push to bring manufacturing jobs back to America? How come we’re losing those jobs?” Varney pressed.

Chavez-DeRemer was stuck in her script. “We’re certainly holding steady,” she insisted.

Since the beginning of April, Trump has pitched his global tariff agenda as a means to return manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores. But two months later, the president’s on-again, off-again tariffs have done little more than add tumult to American markets and trade. Investors have learned to play the market by an unflattering acronym—TACO, or “Trump always chickens out”—while administration officials such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have blundered by publicly admitting they have no intention of bringing tariffs between the U.S. and other nations down to zero.

The breakup is really official now: President Trump is getting rid of his Tesla.

Trump’s red Tesla with Florida tags will be given away or sold, according to Fox News. This comes after Elon Musk and the president’s massive argument spilled over on Thursday, as Musk lambasted Trump’s big, beautiful bill for adding trillions to the deficit, while Trump posited that Musk knew about the bill all along and was just upset that he was losing his E.V. subsidies. Now Trump is ditching his Tesla too.

While this beef isn’t particularly shocking, it’s a long way from where the two men’s relationship was just a few months ago. In March, Musk pulled up to the White House with multiple Tesla trucks and cars and did free promo with the president.

“I’m going to buy [a Tesla] because, number one, it’s a great product,” Trump told reporters then. “It’s as good as it gets. And number two, because this man has devoted his energy and his life to doing this. I think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people.”

Musk has tweeted through the pain over the last 24 hours, calling his critics “retards” and threatening to pull his Space X program from the U.S. But Trump couldn’t seem to care less as he pushes his bill forward regardless of what his former confidant says. This is what happens when the richest man on earth gets into it with perhaps the pettiest president ever.

For months, Donald Trump and Elon Musk were practically inseparable. Now, a week after the Tesla CEO formally left the White House, the president has a new title for his ex-financier: “the man who has lost his mind.”

Speaking with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl early Friday morning, Trump added fuel to the MAGA duo’s viscerally public breakup. He did not, however, sound “angry or even concerned” about the feud, reported Karl.

“As for reports that there is going to be a Trump/Musk call scheduled for today, Trump told me he is ‘not particularly’ interested in talking to Musk although he says Musk wants to talk to him,” Karl wrote on X.

People close to the president have described Trump as “bummed” about his severed relationship with Musk.

The fiery back-and-forth between Trump and his former adviser is the culmination of differing opinions on the president’s “big, beautiful bill.” Musk has spent days trying to size down Trump’s domestic budget agenda, which aims to extend his 2017 tax cut plan for multimillionaires and corporations.

The tech billionaire has referred to the spending package as “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination,” criticizing the continuing resolution for potentially adding trillions of dollars to the national deficit. Musk has also leveraged his gargantuan fortune to influence Congress against voting for the bill, pledging to finance primary opponents to any lawmaker who votes in favor of the tax cut.

On Thursday, the stern disagreement boiled into a digital spectacle, with the two powerhouses throwing insults at each other over social media in real time until Musk claimed that Trump was mentioned in the infamous Epstein files. Musk wrote on X that Trump’s alleged involvement was “the real reason” the pedophile exposé had not yet been made public.

In response, Trump posted on Truth Social, “I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago. This is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress. It’s a Record Cut in Expenses, $1.6 Trillion Dollars, and the Biggest Tax Cut ever given.”

Hours later, Musk was retweeting Trump’s posts from 2012 and 2013, claiming that the deficit- and budget-minded former reality TV star had been replaced by a “body double.”

But Musk has had real influence in breaking up the MAGA block. Several Republican senators have said they oppose Trump’s bill as-is, with the majority of naysayers citing the budget’s enormous price tag as their reason why.