Quite frankly, I’m rooting for each of them to destroy the other.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Friday, May 30, 2025.(Francis Chung / Politico / Bloomberg)
What happens when two of the largest egos on the planet have a falling out? We are about to find out.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are sparring over the administration’s massive legislative package that Trump and his team are trying to strong-arm through Congress, with the president saying on Thursday that he was “very disappointed” in his former adviser. On Tuesday, Musk took to X to declare the legislation to be a “disgusting abomination.” Well, from out of the mouths of babes…
Musk railed against members of Congress who voted for the bill, and announced that America would, come the next election cycle, fire these dullards. The subtext was that the world’s richest man would likely unleash his social media muscle and open his vast wallet to facilitate challenges to those feckless enough to vote for a bill that they well knew would swell the deficit (and obliterate tax credits for buyers of Teslas and other electric vehicles).
Trump isn’t exactly overjoyed by this. After all, the big, beautiful bill that is currently wending its way through Congress contains pretty much every heinous idea that Trump and his inner circle could come up with: multiplying, by orders of magnitude, the already obscene amounts the US spends on locking down its borders and harassing asylum seekers, refugees, and others fleeing poverty and violence; ending pretty much all subsidies and tax credits for sustainable energy infrastructure; slashing health and nutritional spending for the poor; and boosting tax cuts for the über-wealthy.
It’s basically one-stop shopping for mean, nasty people. It’s like a hot pot soup where every ingredient plus the kitchen sink is thrown into one, big, boiling concoction—in this case of undiluted horribleness.
And now, here comes Musk—the ungrateful, ketamine-addled, Sieg Heil–saluting brat—who, despite Trump’s having essentially given his raiding parties free rein to sabotage every aspect of government they chose, and Musk himself carte blanche to ignore every conflict-of-interest regulation in existence, is daring to throw a tantrum over the national debt.
For the first day, Trump maintained his composure over Musk’s attacks. But that couldn’t last long; it’s simply not in the gangster-president’s DNA to passively accept a betrayal of this order of magnitude. And, true to form, by Thursday the two megalomaniacs were at each other’s throats, with Trump floating the idea of ending all government contracts and subsidies to Musk-owned firms, and Musk floating the idea of creating a new political party.
In his fury, Musk claimed credit for Trump’s election victory, and live-posted his responses to Trump’s criticisms of him; and in his petulant anger, Trump took to social media to declare that he would have carried the swing states even without his sidekick’s intervention. Musk responded by taking to X to announce that Trump’s name was in the notorious Epstein files, and then endorsing a call for Trump’s impeachment. I’m sure by the time this column is published, Trump will have hit back at this latest allegation with his own brew of bile.
This has the potential to make Game of Thrones look like child’s play. And, quite frankly, I’m rooting for each of them to destroy the other.
But it’s not only Musk whom Trump was feuding with this week. MAGA-man and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett—whose accession Trump celebrated in a raucous White House event barely a week before the 2020 elections—are on the outs, reputedly because she isn’t quite the rubber stamp that he assumed she would be when he nominated her during his first go-round in the White House. Sure, she was instrumental in the push to overturn Roe v. Wade, but more recently she hasn’t been quite as monolithically unpleasant as have Alito, Thomas, and, for the most part Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. In a series of rulings over the past several months, Barrett has sided with the more liberal judges, as well as, at times, Chief Justice Roberts, stymieing some of the more flagrantly unconstitutional of Trump’s power grabs, especially around immigration.
MAGA world has taken notice, with commentators and influencers critiquing Barrett for not being reliably enough in the hard-right camp, and, presumably, for backtracking on the spirit of the 2024 Supreme Court ruling that presidents can basically do whatever the hell they want so long as they say they’re doing it in their official capacity. In recent days, CNN and other outlets have reported that in private Trump himself has joined the pile-on.
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Given his inability to rein in his id, it seems only a matter of time before the president goes public with his attacks on Barrett too. He has already done so with his criticisms of the Federalist Society’s animating force, Leonard Leo, who is more responsible than anyone else in the country for the current conservative slant of America’s courts, and who, Trump casually noted, “probably hates America.” Again, from out of the mouths of babes…
Wouldn’t everything be so much easier if Musk and Barrett—and the rest of the Federalist Society judges who are unexpectedly proving themselves thorns in Trump’s side—could simply be as quiescent as Peter Hegseth, the eminently unqualified lout who rose to political prominence solely through his ability to out-lickspittle pretty much everyone else in Trump’s orbit?
Since he became defense secretary earlier this year, Hegseth has been busily waging war on DEI—which, in his petty and bigoted mind, seems to involve firing every general he can who has skin darker than his and genitalia different from his, as well as wantonly humiliating transgender soldiers; restoring Confederate names to military bases; and ordering the censorship of military libraries.
Now Hegseth has decided that having a US navy vessel named after murdered gay rights icon Harvey Milk is somehow an affront to American masculinity. And so, in order to make America’s military more lethal, in order to improve the caliber of the killing machine, he has ordered the renaming of the ship.
A Pentagon spokesman stated, “Secretary Hegseth is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos.”
The first third of that trifecta, I think it’s fair to say, is undeniably true. Hegseth and Trump are of the same small-minded ilk. Both believe that America is best served by scrubbing its history of all complexity, diversity, and cultural pluralism. Both believe that America is a white, heterosexual, manly man’s land. And both are insecure enough to believe that any acknowledgement of the country’s flaws and any nod to the progress embodied by civil rights advocates such as Harvey Milk somehow destroy the pedestal upon which people like them perch.
Who in their right mind would try to invisibilize the stories of American heroes such as Harvey Milk? The same sort of homunculus scoundrels who believe that in this country of immigrants, in this country of hundreds of millions of unique stories, “diversity,” “inequality,” “discrimination,” “underprivileged,” “feminism,” “community,” and “climate change” are all dirty words.
There’s not a whit of greatness to these people, not a whit of decency. They are small, scared little creatures, jumping at every shadow, spooked by every whiff of difference.
Sasha AbramskySasha Abramsky is the author of several books, including The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar, and Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. His latest book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, is available for pre-order and will be released in January.