Musk vs. Trump: A power couple tumbles into a messy divorce
As feud erupts into the open, president threatens former ally; Musk appears to call for impeachment
It's splitsville for a global power couple. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are tumbling into a messy public divorce, with unusual political fallout.
Tension between the erstwhile Oval Office buds bubbled into open view Thursday, as they exchanged digs in public and on their own social media sites.
It got ugly, quickly. Within hours, Musk appeared to call for Trump's impeachment. Meanwhile, Tesla stock had plunged, as the market feared the president might punish Musk businesses.
The official cause of the breakup between the world's most powerful elected politician and its richest man was the hefty U.S. federal budget deficit.
Musk has been disparaging the president's signature budget bill since leaving his government role last week, fuming recently that the legislation will plunge the U.S. deeper into its debt hole. He called it "a disgusting abomination."
Trump's reply: Musk is just bitter. He suggests Musk is unhappy with parts of the bill that hurt his electric-vehicle business. He also suggests the Tesla billionaire misses the action in the White House.
And because this is Donald Trump's Washington, the chancellor of Germany happened to be seated in the room, witness to one side of the feud.
"Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we will anymore," Trump told reporters during a lengthy photo op Thursday in the Oval Office with Friedrich Merz.
"He's not the first. People leave my administration and they love us. And then at some point, they miss it so badly.... I don't know what it is. It's sort of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I guess they call it," he said.
"They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour's gone, the whole world is different — and they become hostile. I don't know what it is."
It degenerated from there.
Trump continued the dispute on his own social-media site. On Thursday afternoon, he posted on his social-media platform Musk was "wearing thin," and suggested he'd fired him.
"I asked him to leave," Trump wrote on Truth Social, to which Musk responded on X, formerly Twitter, "Such an obvious lie. So sad."
The president also uttered a thinly veiled threat: Trump wrote that one easy way to trim the federal budget is to cancel government contracts with Musk's companies, worth billions. "I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!" Tesla stock plunged abruptly, dropping 14 per cent within a couple of hours.
'Without me, Trump would have lost'
Musk, meanwhile, has been using X, the enormous online megaphone he owns, to rail at the administration.
He's disputing that his own business interests soured him on the budget bill. The legislation, which has passed the House but faces an uncertain path in the Senate, eliminates an EV tax credit.
And he's demanding a little more gratitude after he dumped the equivalent of nearly $400 million Cdn into electing Trump and his allies.
"Without me, Trump would have lost the election," Musk posted Thursday on X. "[Democrats] would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate."
He later replied, "Yes," to a tweet calling for Trump's impeachment. Musk also predicted Trump's tariffs will cause a recession.
The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year <a href="https://t.co/rbBC11iynE">https://t.co/rbBC11iynE</a>
—@elonmuskAnd in an eye-poppingly personal string of tweets, Musk referred several times to Trump's encounters with the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, offering no evidence or detail to buttress his ominous insinuations.
Hints of trouble in political paradise
It's an abrupt plot twist: The pair were all smiles and praise for each other just last week, as Musk announced his departure from Washington.
But there were hints of trouble in political paradise.
There were occasional reports of blowups between Musk and other members of the administration, and the New York Times reported that sources were concerned about Musk's frequent use of different drugs, including, allegedly, so much ketamine that it was affecting his bladder. Musk denied it.
Now Musk has gone from White House consigliere to chief heckler in under a week — a speed record even for D.C.
As is custom in Trump-era Washington, the human-resources gossip risks overshadowing the substantive challenges of the U.S. government.
With American debt levels ballooning, and the cost of servicing the $36 trillion national debt recently outpacing even military spending, Musk was tasked with controlling finances.
He slashed countless offices, programs, research initiatives, and even the entire agency that oversaw U.S. international aid.
Still, it put only a modest dent in federal spending. Musk's DOGE project has eliminated an estimated $170 billion US, less than one-10th of the annual budget deficit.
Musk's uncertain legacy in government
If anything, the initiative demonstrated that actually halting the growth of the national debt would require real sacrifices from Americans: Either popular programs get cut or taxes go up.
Even if Musk had eliminated all U.S. foreign aid, he could do it 25 times over, and the U.S. would still have a deficit, and the debt would keep growing. That's because the vast majority of U.S. federal spending is on pensions, the military, public health, income support, and paying past debt.
But some of Musk's critics say his legacy in government can't be counted solely in terms of public finances.
The co-author of a report titled Corruption In Plain Sight said at least 32 federal investigations into Musk companies might have vanished during his months in politics — in part, because the investigating agencies were defunded or the investigators were fired.
"Musk's legacy under DOGE is something that has benefited him, largely," said Margaret Poydock of the Economic Policy Institute, a group focused on fighting inequality that's funded mostly by union or left-of-centre donors.
She cited several examples, like the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which screens federal contractors for workplace bias and racial discrimination, and can fine and punish offenders.
It was auditing Tesla, but it was gutted quickly after Trump's inauguration. The U.S. Agency for International Development, meanwhile, had been investigating Musk's company Starlink over its service of satellites supplied to Ukraine; he eliminated the agency.
"I think that's pretty egregious," Poydock said.
Thursday's stock-market plunge, however, illustrated Musk's dalliance with politics also included downside risks. Unlike some relationships with Donald Trump, this one didn't come with a prenup.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
