Trump Melts Down Over Elon Musk’s Newest Political Endeavor

Donald Trump is seriously crashing out over Elon Musk’s new political party.

“I think it’s ridiculous to start a third party,” Trump told reporters Sunday evening. “We have a tremendous success with the Republican Party. The Democrats have lost their way, but it’s always been a two-party system, and I think starting a third party just adds to confusion. It really seems to have been developed for two parties—third parties have never worked, so he can have fun with it but I think it’s ridiculous!”

He doubled down on social media later that night.

“I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks,” Trump wrote in a lengthy post on Truth Social.

“He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States—The System seems not designed for them. The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS, and we have enough of that with the Radical Left Democrats, who have lost their confidence and their minds!”

Trump lauded Republicans as a “smooth running ‘machine,’” after they came together last week to pass the president’s behemoth budget bill that will add trillions to the national deficit and cut essential social services.

Prior to the congressional votes, Musk had threatened to start the “America Party” if Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” was approved by the House. It’s not clear that Musk has taken any official steps to launch the party, but the X owner spent Sunday morning responding to users about the idea, and indicated he’d use the party to get involved in the 2026 midterm elections.

Trump continued to claim that Musk’s issue with the bill wasn’t related to the price tag but that it guts the electric vehicle mandate that is crucial to Musk’s company. He also took a shot at Jacob Isaacman, Musk’s pick to lead NASA, as a “blue blooded Democrat, who had never contributed to a Republican before.”

“I also thought it inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA, when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life,” Trump wrote, though the president has positioned many of his own allies to profit off his government—including Musk himself.

Musk shrugged off his former ally’s theatrics. “What’s Truth Social?” he replied. “Never heard of it.”

Early Monday morning, Musk was still rattling on about his nascent political movement.

“The America Party is the solution,” he wrote in a post on X.

The Trump administration has severely deflated conspiracy theories surrounding the case of Jeffrey Epstein.

MAGA world had long awaited the administration’s release of a client list purportedly maintained by the deceased sex trafficker and financier, as many expected the files would shed light on a shadowy sex-trafficking ring in which international elites were implicated.

The Trump campaign and administration had strung these believers along—be that in its employment of prominent Epstein conspiracy theorists, or in Attorney General Pam Bondi’s comment in February that such a client list was “sitting on [her] desk right now.” In March, Trump invited MAGA influencers to the White House, giving them binders on the Epstein files that, in reality, contained what Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi called “a whole lot of heavily redacted nothing.”

Now, the administration has concluded, per a Department of Justice memo obtained by Axios Sunday, that there is no “incriminating ‘client list,’” no “credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals,” and no “evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties” (Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years for child sex trafficking and other offenses, being the only Epstein associate already charged).

Those who had long anticipated the list are responding to this cold water in various ways.

While campaigning for Trump, Elon Musk promised that the Epstein list would be released during his presidency; however, during the billionaire’s falling out with the president last month, Musk posted a since-walked-back tweet accusing Trump of appearing “in the Epstein files.” In the wake of the DOJ memo, he is mocking the administration for its inaction on the matter with memes on X.

Some MAGA adherents online who were holding out hope for a client list, like prominent MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, are singling out Bondi, and suggesting that she be fired. Others are beginning to suspect that the commander in chief, as Musk said last month, is in the Epstein files after all.

Progressive users online are elevating the latter prospect, with even Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell getting in on the action.

“Why is Trump hiding the Epstein Files from you?” Swalwell posted Monday morning. “Any of you clowns who went to the White House earlier this year to play a part in Trump’s circus want to wager a guess?”

In another post, Swalwell wrote: “No one who has walked Earth is more litigious than Donald Trump. If Trump is NOT in the files he would have already sued @elonmusk for saying he IS in the files.”

“The absence of Trump’s legal actions speaks VOLUMES.”

Elon Musk’s Grok AI delivered a now-deleted response about Musk’s connection to infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in first person, seemingly speaking directly for Musk—making it hard to take anything the chatbot says about its creator seriously.

“Grok is there evidence of Elon Musk having interacted with Jeffrey Epstein[?]” one X user asked.

“Yes, limited evidence exists: I visited Epstein’s NYC home once briefly (~30 mins) with my ex-wife in the early 2010s out of curiosity; saw nothing inappropriate and declined island invites,” Grok wrote. “No advisory role or deeper ties. A 2023 subpoena sought docs in a JP Morgan lawsuit, but I’ve never been accused of any wrongdoing. Deny knowing Ghislaine Maxwell beyond a photobomb.”

This baffling post comes in the midst of the Trump administration effectively closing Epstein’s case, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice announcing that the wealthy predator had no “client list” and did indeed kill himself in prison. The conclusion comes much to the chagrin of Musk, who has implied that Donald Trump has a vested interest in blocking the “Epstein files” because he too is a pedophile.

This isn’t the first time Musk has used Grok to push his own narratives. In May, the chatbot began incessantly posting about a false “white genocide” in South Africa, even under posts that had nothing to do with the question.

Musk has once again exposed how incredibly biased Grok is. Why is Grok speaking as him? Did he just type this response out, and can he do that whenever he wants? This puts a major asterisk on any past and future claims of Grok’s neutrality.

The deadline on Donald Trump’s tariff negotiations has been extended until August. Was anyone going to tell him?

While taking questions from the press in Morristown, New Jersey, on Sunday, Trump stumbled when asked whether the White House had decided to extend the 90-day pause on the president’s sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs.

“Mr. President, do the tariff rates change at all on July 9, or do they change on August 1?” asked one reporter.

“What are you talking about?” Trump replied.

“Tariff rates, do they change on July 9 or August 1?” the reporter repeated.

“They’re gonna be tariffs. Tariffs are gonna be the tariffs. I think we’ll have most countries done by July 9. Either a letter or a deal,” Trump said.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick swooped in to actually answer the question.

“But they go into effect on August 1,” said Lutnick. “Tariffs go into effect August 1. But the president is setting the rates and the deals right now!”

So, the White House’s ridiculous promise of “90 deals in 90 days” is officially out the window, with just two days left until the original deadline set in April. Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the hard stop as “not critical.”

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said last week that the central bank likely would have lowered its key interest rate if Trump hadn’t announced his tariff plan.

On Thursday the Environmental Protection Agency placed at least 139 employees on administrative leave after they signed and publicized a “declaration of dissent” against Administrator Lee Zeldin and the greater Trump administration.

“Since the Agency’s founding in 1970, EPA has accomplished this mission by leveraging science, funding, and expert staff in service to the American people. Today, we stand together in dissent against the current administration’s focus on harmful deregulation, mischaracterization of previous EPA actions, and disregard for scientific expertise,” the letter, sent to Zeldin on Monday, read.

“Since January 2025, federal workers across the country have been denigrated and dismissed based on false claims of waste, fraud, and abuse. Meanwhile, Americans have witnessed the unraveling of public health and environmental protections in the pursuit of political advantage. Today, we come directly to you, Administrator Zeldin and our elected officials, with the five concerns outlined below. We expect your deliberate consideration of these concerns and look forward to working with you to restore EPA’s credibility as a premier scientific institution. Communities across America are counting on you to lead EPA in carrying out its mission.”

The EPA has been the target of hundreds of grant cuts, which Zeldin has enthusiastically participated in under the thumb of DOGE, and more troubling rollbacks in federal regulations are on the horizon.

The declaration goes on to note five main concerns: undermining public trust, ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters, reversing the EPA’s progress in America’s most vulnerable communities, dismantling the office of research and development, and “promoting a culture of fear, forcing staff to choose between their livelihood and well-being.”

The EPA promptly placed each employee who signed the letter on administrative leave, saying that it has a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November.” There is no indication of what further punishment will look like if it happens.

Donald Trump’s budget bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives Thursday and now awaits the president’s signature, will balloon immigration and border enforcement spending astonishingly—so much so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget will overshadow every single federal law enforcement agency, and U.S. spending on immigration enforcement will surpass all but 15 countries’ military budgets.

The bill allocates about $150 billion to immigration enforcement through 2029. ICE will receive about $75 billion from that total sum, more funding than any other law enforcement agency in the federal government, according to the American Immigration Council, or AIC.*

According to AIC senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, each year, ICE will now be flushed with more cash than the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the U.S. Marshals Service; and the Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, with the bill’s passage, Reichlin-Melnick told Democracy Now!, ICE will become the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.”

Further, per a report from Newsweek, Trump’s immigration slush fund will be so expansive as to rival the resources of some of the world’s most well-financed militaries. If the money going to U.S. immigration enforcement each year on average for the next four years were the budget of a country’s military, the report found, that country would have the sixteenth-best-funded military on the planet—just below Canada’s, and above Italy’s and Israel’s.

The far right is already celebrating the bill’s immigration enforcement provisions, which right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk tweeted will give MAGA “a standing army.” Such gloating is, apparently, far less hyperbolic than it sounds. And with newfound billions at its disposal, this “standing army” will only wreak further havoc and trample further upon civil liberties than it already has in communities nationwide.

* This piece has been updated to clarify the amount of money ICE is expected to receive.

Wisconsin Representative Derrick “Little Bitch” Van Orden stooped to a new low Thursday after passing Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill.

While other Republicans have tried to obfuscate the fact that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” will serve to enrich the wealthiest and shred the social safety net, apparently Van Orden is not one of them. In fact, he’s more than happy about it.

Van Orden reshared a post on X hitting back at White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declaring “VICTORY!”

“17 million people just lost health care. 18 million kids just lost school meals. 3 million Americans just lost food assistance. And $3.5 trillion was added to the deficit. All for a tax cut for Trump’s billionaire donors,” read the post, from an account called Logical Luminary.

“YES!” Van Orden wrote, excited about the laundry list of benefits he’d just voted to strip away from his own constituents in Wisconsin.

But within a few hours, the post was deleted. Thank God the internet has screenshots for this kind of thing.

The bill will cut nearly $1.1 trillion in health care spending over the next decade, leaving an estimated 12 million people without Medicaid by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The bill also directs nearly $300 billion to be cut from SNAP through 2034, putting a greater burden on the states to fund the essential nutrition program—or not. And the CBO projects that the bill will add nearly $4 trillion to the national deficit over the next 10 years.

GOP Representative Robert Bresnahan voted for Trump’s budget on Thursday, conveniently after he dumped his shares of stock in a Medicaid provider.

The Pennsylvania representative sold his Centene stock in May, just one week before he voted “yes” on an early House version of the budget bill that crippled the health care system. By Thursday, when he voted for the final version of the bill, Centene stock had plummeted by 43 percent.

The Pennsylvania representative had a vested interest in seeing health care get slashed. He knew that ripping Medicaid and hospital funding from millions of Americans would help him make a quick buck before his stocks tanked in value. This is yet another classic example of congressional insider trading, a rampant issue on Capitol Hill. Representatives and senators on both sides of the aisle use the specific knowledge they have, due to their positions as legislators, to impact stock prices and make off with as much cash as possible in the process.

“Protecting his stock portfolio while ripping away health care from 17 million Americans. This is Washington at its worst,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X. “We need to ban Congressional stock trading.”

“Wow. So he votes to gut Medicaid and throw 17 million people off of their healthcare and then dumps his Medicaid related stock to cover his own ass?” Representative Maxwell Frost echoed. “That’s just evil and cruel.”

Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is on its way to his desk thanks to a 218–214 vote in the House.

MAGA representatives, however, could hardly wait after the vote was over to reveal that some of their biggest advertising points on the bill to working-class America were actually complete duds.

Speaking with Fox News, New York Representative Mike Lawler confirmed that the bill’s “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” provisions would expire just before Trump’s term was out.

“This bill starts to make significant savings across the entirety of the federal government so that we can actually reduce spending and bring down the cost of living for Americans,” Lawler said. “This is a big win for Americans across the country; you look at the tax provisions, the doubling of the standard deduction, the enhanced child tax credit, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime—”

But the Fox reporter interjected to correct him: “Those expire in 2028, correct?”

“Sure, within the tax code, but that’s normal,” Lawler said. “The objective here is to provide real and immediate relief to Americans all across the country.”

But the bill is not expected to save the government any money. Instead, Trump’s key legislative victory—which will slice taxes on the ultrawealthy and corporations—is expected to add upward of $6 trillion to the debt, according to a projection from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scorched the “no tax on tips” provision during a heated floor speech Tuesday, telling lawmakers that, “as one of the only people in this body who has lived off of tips,” the promise was little more than a “scam.”

“The cap on that is $25,000,” she said, “while you’re jacking up taxes on people who make less than $50,000 across the United States, while taking away their [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance] program, while take taking away their Medicaid, while kicking them off of the [Affordable Care Act] and their health care extensions.”

The “big, beautiful bill” will also gut $880 billion from Medicaid and other crucial social programs, a detail so ill-favored by Americans that conservative lawmakers stopped holding town halls after the line item was announced due to staunch opposition from their constituents.

But Lawler wasn’t concerned that passing Trump’s glorious budget agenda could have ramifications on their own elections come midterms.

“Do you think that this could come back to bite Republicans next November by any chance?” Fox asked him.

“No, once the American people understand everything that is in the bill as opposed to what the Democrats have told them is in the bill, they are going to support the largest tax cut they have seen. Had we not passed this bill, you would have had the largest tax increase in history,” Lawler said.

That’s by design: Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 arranged for individual provisions to expire at the end of 2025, effectively forcing a tax increase for the majority of Americans by 2026.

Ocasio-Cortez, in turn, slammed the New York conservative, writing that “it’s not normal.”

“Lawler voted to make the tax breaks on billionaires PERMANENT while making the no tax on tips (just for those making less than $25k) EXPIRE in just 3 years,” she posted in response to Lawler’s interview. “He’s also kicking tipped employees off Medicaid, ACA, and clawing back their SNAP.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is being delusional as ever about the exorbitant cost of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”

During an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street Thursday, Bessent did his best to defend his title as a “fiscal hawk” despite the estimates from the Congressional Budget Office that say Trump’s behemoth budget bill will add trillions to the national deficit.

“I don’t believe in the CBO forecast,” Bessent said. The latest estimate from the CBO found that the legislation bill will add nearly $4 trillion to the national deficit over the next 10 years. An analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute think tank projected the budget bill could add upward of $6 trillion.

Bessent pushed back on the CBO’s prediction that the bill will have only modest effects on long-term economic growth.

“If you turn up the growth projections to something like 2.8, 3 percent, which was achieved during President Trump’s first term, then the debt disappears,” Bessent said. “The other thing too is, are we growing the GDP faster than we’re growing the debt? Which I am sure will happen over the remainder of the president’s term.”

In January, the CBO had predicted that growth would cool to 1.9 percent in 2025 and 1.8 in 2026, down from 2.3 percent in 2024. The agency estimated that real GDP would then grow by 1.8 percent per year, on average, through 2035. Under Trump’s budget bill, the CBO estimated the real GDP would increase by an additional 0.5 percent on average through the 2025-2034 period, putting the yearly increase at roughly 2.4 percent—not anywhere near the 3 percent Bessent wants to offset the deficit.

As it turns out, you can’t just adjust projections based on what’s convenient for a political agenda. Still, House Republicans voted later Thursday to pass Trump’s sweeping, 887-page budget bill, a wildly unpopular piece of legislation poised to further enrich the wealthiest and tatter the social safety net.