The most powerful man in the world and the richest man in the world squared off again this week as the One Big Boondoggle finally made its way through the Senate, where Vice President J.D. Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. After Elon Musk wrote a number of provocative posts about it on X, Donald Trump finally weighed in on Truth Social, threatening to destroy Musk’s businesses and later telling the press that his former bestie “shouldn’t be playing that game” with him. And then he went even further.
Musk has been apoplectic about the deficit and raising the debt ceiling for months. The first big blow up between the two came just a few days after Musk’s rather tepid send-off in the Oval Office. He exploded on X, calling Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill “a disgusting abomination” and shaming the House Republicans who voted for it: “you know you did wrong. You know it.” In response, Trump said Musk was just mad because the bill repeals the electric vehicle (EV) mandate and subsidies, and then things escalated from there, culminating with Musk accusing Trump of hiding the Epstein files because he is in them and Trump firing back that Musk is “big time drug addict.”
It was glorious.
The two former BFFs decided to call a ceasefire, but Musk just can’t get past his dismay at the legislation. On Monday, he fired off another post decrying all the “insane spending” and declaring that America has become a “one-party country — the PORKY PIG PARTY!” Later that day, Musk called for “a new political party that actually cares about the people” and vowed to back primary challengers against every Republican who voted for it. On Tuesday, in a move that surely made Trump’s head explode, Musk indicated he would donate to the reelection campaign of GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of the president’s biggest critics within the party. (Trump has threatened a primary challenger for Massie, and on June 22 he launched a MAGA super PAC targeting the congressman.)
Having found that cutting spending is easier said than done, Musk apparently thought Republicans in Congress would rebel and refuse to raise the debt ceiling, slashing spending in this budget even more than they did.
Trump finally responded to Musk on Tuesday, claiming in a Truth Social post that the billionaire is only upset about the EV mandate and threatening to sic DOGE on his subsidies. In a press gaggle on the south lawn of the White House, he called DOGE “the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.”
If all of this sounds like more childish tantrums from two very spoiled rich and powerful men with poor impulse control, well, it is.
If all of this sounds like more childish tantrums from two very spoiled rich and powerful men with poor impulse control, well, it is. It’s possible, but highly unlikely, that Musk will spend the kind of money it will take to start a third party, and he’s certainly not going to primary every Republican who voted for the bill. But it’s quite interesting that this rift seems to have made him start to question some of his naive assumptions about politics.
For instance, Musk seems to have belatedly realized that the Republicans have decided to Make America Great Again by being stuck in the past. He labeled the Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act “utterly insane and destructive,” and said, “It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”
He has also indicated some surprise at the regressiveness of Trump’s tax cuts and asserted that a provision of the bill — later removed by the Senate parliamentarian — rescinding funding for enforcing contempt of court orders would have enabled “many other abuses of power by the President.”
Musk’s new role as Trump critic seems to have him reassessing his past views and actions. He threw cold water on a popular right-wing conspiracy theory that undocumented workers are receiving health care that’s denied to American citizens. Musk even admitted he shouldn’t have wielded that chainsaw because it lacked empathy. (There’s still no word on whether his actual destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which a new study estimates could cause 14 million more deaths in the next five years, lacks empathy.)
Has Musk suddenly become enlightened? It’s unlikely. As an immigrant himself, one might have thought Musk would have possessed some empathy for the immigrants being terrorized by Trump’s draconian mass deportation policy. But as far as we know he’s still a big believer in replacement theory, which holds that Democrats are importing foreigners to replace the real — meaning white — Americans, destroy the culture and seize permanent political power.
Musk might want to rethink that one too — especially since it was reported this week that the Justice Department has plans to revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes. The new memo urges U.S. attorneys to “prioritize” cases involving “a potential danger to national security,” but it also gives them latitude to target other cases “[determined] to be sufficiently important to pursue.”
Since Musk is still very much involved in national security, he might want to watch his back. Trump said on Tuesday that he would “take a look” at deporting Musk. The president later threatened to deport Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, who was born in Uganda and is a naturalized citizen.
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From these and other remarks by the president, it’s quite clear that citizenship is no longer any guarantee of being free from the threat of deportation. Trump said as much yesterday — “maybe that’ll be the next job” — after he toured the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention camp in Florida that is surrounded by swampland. He’s now threatening to deport anyone he doesn’t like, basically.
Trump, of course, is not going to deport the richest man in the world. He wants Musk to keep his money here, even if Trump personally can’t stand him anymore. (And if he tried, Musk could just buy himself an island somewhere and relocate his businesses to a friendlier country.) But it’s telling that Trump feels free to openly threaten Musk with it anyway.
It’s always tempting to assume that the president is just popping off like that proverbial old guy at the end of the bar who rants about what he’d do if he were in charge. But Trump actually is in charge, and it pays to remember that as he celebrates the possibility of immigrants being eaten alive if they try to escape the Florida detention center, he once also proposed building an alligator-filled moat along his beloved border wall.
At this point, I wouldn’t bet against Trump following through with any of his ruthless, inhumane policies. When it comes to that sort of thing, it’s promises made, promises kept.
