The Trump-Musk Tiff in Theatrics and Policy The Trump-Musk feud played out like internet-age theater—loud, messy, and probably temporary, with politics, ego, and spectacle trading blows center stage. By Roger Kimball
https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/08/335926/
In 1939, the American novelist Ernest Vincent Wright self-published the 50,000-word novel Gadsby, a lipogram in which the letter “e” does not appear. Since “e” is the most common letter in English, producing a sustained work that is e-less is a tricky thing to do.
You might be asking yourself, “Then why do it? Isn’t it just a pointless exercise?”
Well, is writing a sonnet a pointless exercise? That has plenty of constraints, too, if it is to be a proper sonnet.
But to move from the literary to the political realm, I suspect that writing a novel—or perhaps I should say, “a work”—without the fifth, you know—is akin to writing about Elon Musk’s dust-up with Donald Trump without using, oh no, “bromance.”
In part, it’s a matter of nausea avoidance. If I read another headline with that silly neologism, I might just scream.
So I am going to avoid it here (and, no, I haven’t used the word; I have merely mentioned it).
The amusing aspect of this little drama is that it revolves around the Mr. Etna-like eruption of knowing commentary by people who know nothing about Trump, Musk, their relationship, or what really precipitated their break—if, that is, there really has been a break and not just a bit of calculated theater.
About all that, I know exactly as much as you do, which is to say, nothing.
No one would describe what has happened—or, rather, what is happening still—between them as a personal example of the stately quadrille, the movement of European alliances in the eighteenth century that danced to tunes established by the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748). That set concluded with the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, in which Austria changed partners from Britain to France, while Prussia linked arms with Britain.
To read what some in the commentariat have been writing, you might conclude that the Musk-Dump-Trump routine was a world historical event worthy of analysis by Talleyrand or Henry Kissinger.
A clever friend came much closer to the truth when she observed that
The Trump-Musk breakup is performance art for the Age of the Internet Era. Two cartoon-like celebrities with massive egos went from a superhero duo to arch-nemeses with the tap of a phone. It’s no different from Wrestlemania III, when friends and “faces” Hulk Hogan and André the Giant went from friends to enemies in the twinkling of a body blow. Back then, only 8-year-old boys took the performances seriously. Now, the entire commentariat is atwitter with apprehension and advice.
The ostensible issue, as all the world knows, is Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. I say “Trump’s bill,” but, of course, while the bill centers around the agenda (the “promises”) that Trump made in his campaign, it is, like all such bills, something that originated in the House of Representatives. Having been worked over by the special interests there, it is now being picked apart and modified by the Senate before it goes back to the House and has a final pow-wow with the Senate before landing on Trump’s desk, something that is supposed to happen by July 4.
Simply describing this extended process brings us to one possible source of Musk’s unhappiness, assuming that it is genuine and not feigned. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill,” he wrote on X, is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
That was before he asserted that he was responsible for Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, suggested—then retracted the claim—that Trump appeared in the Jeffrey Epstein files, suggested that Trump be impeached, and called for the creation of a new political party.
Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, SolarCity, the Boring Company, and who knows what else, is used to being the man in charge. He is a genius who Gets Things Done. Like Jack Aubrey in the Patrick O’Brien novels about the British navy in the Napoleonic Wars, he is used to saying “Make it so” and then watching while whatever he ordered was accomplished.
That’s not the way politics works in a bureaucratic, quasi-democratic regime like the United States. It’s not so much that compromise is the name of the game—though it plays a role—as that horse-trading and jockeying for advantage are. It’s messy. It’s imperfect. But it’s the system under which we live.
In the commentary on the Trump-Musk mini-series and the OBBB, two slogans have often recurred. One is Bismarck’s observation that the origins of laws and sausages ought not to be looked into too closely. The spectacle is unedifying.
The other slogan is the old saw that “the best is generally the enemy of the good.”
Both are true.
The Big Beautiful Bill is far from perfect. In my view, it does not cut enough spending or zero out enough programs. But it does a lot. The White House has listed fifty things that the bill accomplishes, from making Trump’s original tax cuts permanent, adding new tax cuts, and boosting border and immigration security to eliminating funding for Biden’s Green New Deal programs, unraveling woke DEI policies on America’s campuses, and upgrading the military.
It also adds between $2 and $3 trillion (depending on who you ask) to the already gargantuan federal debt over ten years.
That is one thing that earned Musk’s ire.
But remember that in the previous ten years, the people we elected to govern us added $18 trillion to the federal debt.
The federal debt, now some $37 trillion, is unsustainable. I think that Treasury Scott Bessent is right. The responsible way out of that burden is a combination of spending cuts and policies that encourage growth.
As I say, the BBB is far from perfect. But there is an important sense in which Trump’s spokesman, Stephen Miller, is right when he says that the bill is the “codification” of Trump’s campaign promises.
The spat between Elon Musk and Donald Trump has been entertaining for those addicted to what Henry James called the imagination of disaster. However, the investor Bill Ackman was right when he noted that he supported both Trump and Musk and argued that “We are much stronger together than apart.”
It was encouraging to see Musk reply, “You’re not wrong.”
There are, in fact, many signs that the split between Musk and Trump is resolving itself. We must credit the Democrats with playing an important role in the healing process. Their unfettered delight at the explosion of acrimony between the two had a dampening effect. “Few things,” Musk noted, “could convince me to reconsider my position more than Adam Schiff agreeing with me.”
It’s by no means clear that Donald Trump will be offering more golden keys to Elon Musk. But I suspect that before long, the two will once again be cordial, if not chummy, partners.
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