Elon Musk and Trump Lock Horns Over Republican Budget Holdout

Representative Thomas Massie awoke Tuesday morning to find himself at the center of the feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. 

Musk posted on X in the small hours of Tuesday morning, indicating that he would donate to the Kentucky Republican’s reelection campaign. In recent months, Massie had become a pariah in his party for refusing to bend the knee on any Trump-backed spending bill and opposing the president’s strike in Iran. 

Prior to coming out in support of Massie, the former DOGE czar had been escalating his opposition to Trump’s behemoth budget bill and threatening to launch his own political party if the legislation passed in the Senate, even though he previously claimed he was done spending money on elections. 

Now, Musk seems to have found a new politician to hitch his wagon to, and sparks are already flying.

“I woke up this morning to find out @elonmusk is supporting my re-election!” Massie wrote in a lengthy post on X Tuesday morning. He thanked Musk for his financial support and lauded the billionaire technocrat’s X (formerly Twitter) takeover for allowing Massie to “bypass conventional media.”

Massie added that the debate over Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” was “a referendum on whether members of Congress can think and act independently based on what’s best for the country, or whether all members of congress must be reduced to rubber stamps for their respective political parties and swampy special interests.”

Musk, who embodies those very “swampy special interests,” replied to another one of Massie’s posts: “You’re awesome.”

“You’re too kind, but thank you!” Massie flirted back. “A large part of my job is to keep government from screwing things up for the engineers and entrepreneurs who do make this world a better place. I don’t think enough people appreciate the contributions you and your teams have made to civilization.”

Trump must’ve caught wind of the chemistry between Musk and Massie. “New poll: Anybody I Endorse beats Thomas Massie of Kentucky by 25 points. Get ready. Massie is a very bad guy!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Tuesday morning.  

In response to Trump’s threat to unseat him, Massie took a shot at pollster Doug Kaplan. “His pollster looks like a homeless man broadcasting from the stairwell of a crack house. DJT should buy him a cheeseburger,” Massie wrote in a post on X.  

A poll from Kaplan Strategies had found that Massie’s rift with the president had made him unpopular among Republican voters. Only 19 percent of respondents had said they would vote for Massie, and that number would drop to 14 percent if Trump endorsed an opponent.

President Trump made dehumanizing jokes about detained immigrants being eaten by alligators on his way to visit the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” ICE facility in Florida on Tuesday.

“With Alligator Alcatraz, is the idea that if some illegal immigrant escapes, they just get eaten by an alligator, or a snake or something?” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked the president.

“I guess that’s the concept, this is not a nice business. I guess that’s the concept,” Trump said with a smile.

“You know, uh, snakes are fast. But alligators, we’re gonna teach [the detained immigrants] how to run away from an alligator, OK? If they escape prison, how to run away: Don’t run in a straight line, run like this,” Trump continued, making a zigzag motion with his hands. “And you know what? Your chances go up about one percent. Not a good day!”

This “Alligator Alcatraz” is a hastily constructed immigrant detention center in the middle of the Everglades that Florida was granted federal approval for last week. It is expected to open this month with 5,000 beds, eventually increasing to 10,000. The detention center will cost the state $450 million per year to run, which will be reimbursed through FEMA.

“We are working on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote on X last week. “Alligator Alcatraz will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida.”

This detention center has been widely condemned. Conservationists and environmental groups have protested the facility’s construction on the grounds that it will endanger the lush, natural wildlife in the area that Trump spoke so lightly about. And Miccosukee and Seminole Native American groups are opposed to the project due to its proximity to their ancestral land.

Overall, this facility is another step in Trump’s aggressive deportation crackdown on Latinos that will play particularly well on Fox News and Newsmax. And the way Trump talks about those who will be detained at the center—joking about the people he’s been snatching off the streets being mauled to death by animals—shows that he simply does not think immigrants are deserving of basic human dignity.

Vice President JD Vance is being lambasted for dismissing social safety net rollbacks under the Trump tax bill currently making its way through Congress.

On Monday night, Vance attempted to rally support for the bill in a post on X, writing, “Everything else—the CBO score [the Congressional Budget Office cost estimate], the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

Many were rubbed the wrong way by Vance’s claim that the bill’s worrisome qualities are of little consequence compared to its staggering expansion of federal immigration enforcement (which a majority of Americans already believe has “gone too far” in carrying out Trump’s deportation agenda).

Particularly odious was the suggestion that “the minutiae of the Medicaid policy,” among other all-but-trivial concerns, is “immaterial.” After all, in delivering “the most dramatic reductions in safety net spending in modern U.S. history,” per The Washington Post, the bill could cause 17 million people to lose their health insurance and, according to some estimates, lead to tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year. It is also projected to add trillions to the deficit.

“If Republicans wanted to pass a big ICE funding bill they could,” posted journalist Matthew Yglesias on X. “What they wrote is a bill that has trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of regressive tax cuts partially offset by cuts in programs for poor Americans but that also massively increases debt.”

Yahoo Finance reporter Jordan Weissmann tweeted: “As far as I can tell, the Medicaid changes would be the largest rollback of the health care safety net that a modern developed country has ever passed. JD Vance is dismissing that as ‘minutia.’”

“100K+ people will die from preventable deaths when millions lose their health insurance,” posted Yale Law professor Natasha Sarin. “Hard to see how that is immaterial.”

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna tweeted, “What happened to you [JD Vance]—author of Hillbilly Elegy—now shrugging off Medicaid cuts that will close rural hospitals and kick millions off healthcare as ‘minutiae?’”

To think that the vice president touting mass deportations as an acceptable balm for the untold suffering unleashed by historic social program cuts positions himself as something of a populist within the GOP.

The next victim of Donald Trump’s deportation crusade could be Elon Musk.

The president suggested Tuesday that he’s open to giving his biggest financier the boot, telling reporters before boarding Marine One that his administration would “have to take a look” at getting the South African out of the country.

“We might have to put DOGE on Elon,” Trump said. “You know what DOGE is? DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible. He gets a lot of subsidies.”

The world’s richest man has become one of the most vocal opponents of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which would extend his 2017 tax cuts for millionaires and corporations at a cost to critical social programs such as Medicaid. But Musk’s frustration with the bill stems more from the initiative’s exorbitant price tag, which he claims is incongruent with Trump’s previous promises to size down government spending. On Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Senate legislation would increase the deficit by more than $3.9 trillion over the next 10 years.

Trump, however, suggested that Musk’s real reasoning behind his recent opposition of the administration was due to the termination of electric vehicle mandates.

“When you look at it, who wants—not everybody wants an electric car,” Trump said. “I don’t want an electric car. I want to have maybe gasoline, maybe electric, maybe a hybrid, maybe someday a hydrogen—if you have a hydrogen car there’s one problem, it blows up.”

“So I’m going to give that one to Peter,” Trump added, likely referring to trade adviser Peter Navarro.

(It’s interesting Trump says he doesn’t want an electric car, considering he staged a whole Tesla dealership at the White House for Musk in March. Trump promptly sold the Tesla he bought that day after he and Musk publicly broke up.)

Responding to the video Tuesday, Musk posted on X: “So tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now.”

Musk has spent the last several days elevating opposition to the bill and its contents. Late Monday night, the billionaire retweeted a post claiming that “ELON NEVER WANTED AN EV MANDATE OR SUBSIDIES,” pointing to a 2022 interview in which Musk argued that ending the electric vehicle mandate would improve Tesla’s performance.

He also shared graphs of America’s rising debt and questioned why both parties continue to raise the debt limit ceiling. He underscored that the conservative hoopla regarding undocumented immigrants receiving Medicaid was effectively a red herring, since it’s already illegal for them to do so, and posted a poll on X for his 221.5 million followers asking if the bill should be “allowed.”

“Removal of funding for enforcement of federal contempt of court orders is the actual crux of this spending bill,” Musk wrote. “This is nominally aimed at removal of illegal immigrants, but obviously also enables many other abuses of power by the President.”

An hour after the poll was shared, more than 65,000 respondents, or 64.7 percent, had voted “no.”

Donald Trump’s sycophants are seriously pissed that people are trying to track ICE’s sweeping deportation efforts.

CNN aired a segment Monday night highlighting ICEBlock, an app that allows users to anonymously log sightings of ICE agents, serving as an “early warning system” about immigration enforcement, according to app creator Joshua Aaron. Users can provide additional information about what ICE officers are wearing, and details about their vehicles, to make their communities aware of ICE’s movements.

One by one, members of Trump’s team hit back at the report, touting the dubiously increasing rates of assault against ICE agents and threatening Aaron with legal action.

Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed during an appearance on Fox News’s Hannity that the government was investigating Aaron, and fretted that the app might “hurt” law enforcement officers.

“He’s giving a message to criminals where our federal officers are, and he cannot do that, and we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out,” Bondi said. “Because that is not protected speech, that is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers throughout this country, and shame on CNN!”

Crucially, the majority of people swept up in ICE’s sweeping raids aren’t criminals at all. Seven out of 10 people arrested during ICE’s crackdown in Los Angeles last month had no criminal convictions, and six out of 10 had never even been charged with a crime.

ICE acting Director Todd Lyons released a statement following CNN’s report, claiming that ICEBlock “basically paints a target on federal law enforcement officers’ backs” and touting the number of alleged assaults against ICE agents.

Border czar Tom Homan also railed against CNN for elevating the app. “This is horrendous that a national media outlet would be out there trying to forecast law enforcement operations throughout the country,” Homan said. “It’s incredible where we’re at as a country, and I think the [Department of Justice] needs to look at this and see if they crossed a line.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the app “sure looks like obstruction of justice” in an X post Monday. “If you obstruct or assault our law enforcement, we will hunt you down and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” she wrote.

CNN hit back at the implication that they’d crossed a legal line by reporting on ICEBlock. “This is an app that is publicly available to any iPhone user who wants to download it. There is nothing illegal about reporting the existence of this or any other app, nor does such reporting constitute promotion or other endorsement of the app by CNN,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement to The New Republic.

This story has been updated.

The fate of the centerpiece legislation of President Trump’s agenda—the wildly unpopular, social safety net–slashing, “big, beautiful bill”—may rest in the hands of moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. 

In recent days, the Senate has been seeking to buy off Murkowski’s vote to win over the key GOP holdout on the bill, which would be potentially ruinous to Murkowski’s home state, to say nothing of the other 49. 

To court Murkowski, the Senate exempted Alaska from a provision shifting greater portions of the cost to administer the Supplemental National Assistance Program, or food stamps, onto the states.

The Senate sought to add a version of the carve-out Monday night—which included just Alaska and Hawaii, evidently to pretend it wasn’t a carve-out for a single state—but it didn’t pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian, who has been winnowing away nonbudgetary provisions of the bill (which cannot be included if it is to pass as a budget reconciliation, which requires just a simple majority, rather than the impossible 60 votes that would be needed to break a filibuster). 

Early Tuesday morning, however, Senate Republicans succeeded in getting the SNAP carve-out in the bill—by having it apply to states with the highest error rates.

Several Democratic lawmakers have expressed their disapproval of the bribe. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, for example, tweeted, “The most absurd example of the hypocrisy of the Republican bill: they have now proposed delaying SNAP cuts FOR TWO YEARS ONLY FOR STATES  with the highest error rates just to bury their help for Alaska: AK, DC, FL, GA, MD, MA, NJ, NM, NY, OR. They are rewarding errors.”

It’s unclear whether this’ll be enough to win Murkowski’s vote. Republicans failed to include other provisions to sweeten the pot—or, rather, make it less sour—such as one that would have increased the federal share of Medicaid spending for Alaska.

Summing up the absurdity of the situation aptly, journalist Sam Stein of The Bulwark wrote on X: “So basically, the future of this bill comes down to whether one Senator (Murkowksi) feels comfortable enough that she has shielded her state from the worst parts of this bill that the other 49 states (give or take a few) will have to endure?”

Stein also observed that Murkowski, in 2017, told the press she would be unswayed by attempts to buy her vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

Murkowski had said at the time, “Let’s just say that they do something that’s so Alaska-specific just to, quote, ‘get me.’ … Then you have a nationwide system that doesn’t work. That then comes crashing down and Alaska’s not able to kind of keep it together on its own.” We’ll soon know whether she maintains this noble resolve.

President Trump and former DOGE head Elon Musk still seem to be on icy terms as their beef over Trump’s budget bill continues. 

Trump took to Truth Social at nearly 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning to assert that Musk was only against his One Big Beautiful Bill Act because it revokes the electric vehicle mandate that directly benefits Musk’s Tesla corporation. He also posited that DOGE should investigate Musk for the amount of subsidies he’s received from the federal government.  

“Elon Musk knew, long before he so strongly Endorsed me for President, that I was strongly against the EV Mandate. It is ridiculous, and was always a major part of my campaign. Electric cars are fine, but not everyone should be forced to own one,” he wrote. “Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE. Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”

Musk had been lambasting the bill for days on X before Trump’s Truth Social post, and on Monday threatened to primary any Republicans who support the legislation and start his own third party if it passes. 

“If this insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day,” Musk wrote on Monday. “Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat-Republican uniparty so that the people actually have a VOICE.

“Anyone who campaigned on the PROMISE of REDUCING SPENDING, but continues to vote on the BIGGEST DEBT ceiling increase in HISTORY will see their face on this poster in the primary next year,” he wrote above a picture of Pinocchio up in flames. 

This dynamic—Musk eviscerating the spending bill, while Trump asserts that Musk’s known about the legislation and is only upset about the E.V. mandate removal—has been ongoing since early June. While Musk’s vehement opposition to the spending bill is surprising given his months of close proximity to Trump, this bromance seems to be all but over as the “big, beautiful bill” is likely to pass through Congress.  

It looks like Elon Musk’s break from political spending is over after all of five minutes.

“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame!” Musk wrote on X Monday. “And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”

Last month, Musk claimed he planned to do “a lot less” political spending going forward, after spending at least $20 million to back the Republican candidate in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race—and losing.

The billionaire technocrat said he thought he’d “done enough” and wouldn’t drop a dime unless he saw a reason to, despite his previous promises to bankroll the Republican primaries.

Well, it seems that Donald Trump’s wildly unpopular behemoth budget bill has called Musk back into the fray. The former DOGE czar has been an outspoken critic of the legislation, putting him at odds with his old ally Trump.

Musk seemed to be getting carried away with his dreams of small government. “It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country—the PORKY PIG PARTY!!” he wrote earlier Monday in a post he pinned to his profile. “Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people.”

This latest threat ups the ante on his call to “fire all politicians who betrayed the American people” come November 2026.

If Republicans who support Trump’s disastrous spending bill should “hang their head in shame,” what should the guy who put him in the White House do? Might I suggest self-deporting to Mars and staying far, far away from U.S. politics?

As fireworks will rocket into the sky this weekend, national pride has, under Trump, sunk to its lowest point in recent memory, per a new Gallup poll.

Since January 2001, the polling firm has asked Americans whether they are proud to be an American, and this year’s results—published with the Fourth of July on the horizon and the semiquincentennial a year away—have proven to be the most dismal on record.

Only 41 percent of American adults reported being “extremely” proud to be an American, and only 17 percent were “very” proud, according to Gallup. Twenty percent find themselves on the less-proud portion of the spectrum, saying they are “moderately,” “only a little,” or “not at all” proud (19, 11, and nine percent, respectively).

Only 36 percent of Democrats report being very or extremely proud to be an American, a 26-point drop from last year. The only other time when less than a majority of Democrats were proud was in 2020, during a global pandemic.

Independents’ pride—which has steadily declined since 2001—is also lower than ever, with just 53 percent being very or extremely proud.

Meanwhile, Republicans, 92 percent of whom are very or extremely proud, are as chipper as ever. Members of the GOP have consistently floated around that figure, only dipping below the 90 percent mark in 2016 and 2020–2024.

According to Gallup, there is a significant generational divide in national pride: The younger the generation, the less likely than the previous it is to be very or extremely proud to be an American.

From 2021 to 2025, just 41 percent of Gen-Z adults and 58 percent of millennials were very or extremely proud, Gallup reports, whereas that figure for Gen X, Baby Boomers, and the Greatest Generation is 71, 75, and 83 percent, respectively.

In his inaugural address, Trump promised that his “top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free.” Perhaps the best that can be said of his presidency is that he’s delivered to his base on that first promise.

Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan couldn’t care less that people are dying in ICE custody.

A reporter asked Homan Monday to respond to reports that Isidro Perez, a 75-year-old Cuban man who’d been living in the United States for nearly 60 years, died last week in ICE custody.

“I’m unaware of that, I’m not aware of that. I mean people die in ICE custody, people die in county jail, people die in state prisons,” Homan replied, brushing off that a man had just died on his watch.

“The question should be how many lives does ICE save? Because when they go in detention, we find many with diseases and stuff that we deal with right away to prevent that,” Homan said. Perez is at least the twelfth person to die in ICE custody so far this year, a notable uptick from previous years in line with the Trump administration’s directive to increase the rates of ICE arrests.

“People can argue with me all they want, but the facts are the facts. I think the politicians in New Jersey found this out, that we have the highest detention standards in the industry,” Homan said. He was referring to a group of three lawmakers the Department of Homeland Security previously claimed had stormed Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, last month.

Homan claimed that the lawmakers had found the standards of the 1,000-bed ICE detention facility to be “outstanding” and added that it was “probably the cleanest facility in that entire state.”

But crucially, the lawmakers who visited Delaney Hall last month never completed their inspection of the newly reopened ICE facility. A court filing in Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s lawsuit against Alina Habba, New Jersey’s acting U.S. attorney, stated that lawmakers were kept in a waiting room inside the facility for over an hour before they departed to join Baraka outside, where a wild confrontation ensued, resulting in Baraka’s arrest and landing Representative LaMonica McIver with assault charges, to which she pleaded not guilty last week.

New guidelines released by ICE this month asserted that lawmakers are not permitted to inspect ICE field offices and must give three days’ notice before arriving to inspect another facility, in violation of federal law. ICE claimed that lawmakers have no right to inspect field offices, because they are not detention centers, though the agency routinely holds immigrants at field offices and does not distinguish between those offices and larger detention centers, according to Democracy Docket.

Despite the illegality of ICE’s rule, lawmakers have been repeatedly locked out of ICE facilities. “They are undergoing conditions that are inhumane, in my opinion. They were not able to change their underwear for 10 days,” said California Representative Judy Chu, after she was blocked from entering a facility outside of Los Angeles.

Instead of encouraging more visits, Homan referred individuals concerned over safety standards to ICE’s website.

“Go to ICE.gov and look at our detention standards; it’s the highest detention standards in the industry at a very expensive cost to the taxpayers,” Homan said, adding: “Go look for yourself and then come back to me.”

ICE facilities’ poor conditions are well documented. The agency recently renewed a contract with a facility that was previously decommissioned for its failure to comply with health standards, and the DHS has been quick to brag about its “Alligator Alcatraz” tent facility in the middle of the Florida Everglades.