Donald Trump betrays or breaks with everyone, even the guy who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars of his own money to put Trump in the White House. It was inevitable that his alliance with Elon Musk would collapse as Trump is incapable of doing anything but thinking about himself.
We take no sides in this war that has erupted between the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man, but note that it took less than a week from Musk’s Oval Office departure ceremony for the billionaire to go for the throat of his former boss, tweeting that Trump “is in the Epstein files” and that this is the “real reason” the totality of the infamous late pedophile’s investigative files have not been made public.
Trump’s friendship with the dead sex offender is well-documented, and he is already known to have frequently appeared on the flight logs of Jeffrey Epstein’s jet. It’s entirely possible that the president appears elsewhere in whatever files remain unreleased, though at this point these files have such a mythical status among the right in particular it’s hard to discern whether there really is anything else there.
The point is that Trump’s former right-hand man is now tying Trump to one of recent history’s most notorious monsters while going on an all-out assault on his spending bill pending before Congress. He followed up by claiming Trump will cause a recession and should be impeached. At this rate, he’ll soon take a page out of Trump’s playbook and accuse him of orchestrating JFK’s assassination.
Notch one more bit of evidence that there is absolutely no one that Trump — or, for that matter, Musk — won’t alienate and push away. It seems like ancient history now, but Trump’s first term was littered with cabinet secretaries and other high-level officials who stormed out, including former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who called Trump a fascist. Now it’s Musk, who’s going scorched earth for reasons that will surely come further into focus later on.
This result might be eyebrow-raising but it is certainly not surprising, and is in fact the entirely predictable outcome of putting two narcissists who have seldom heard the word “no” in a pressure cooker with a nearly impossible mandate to completely reformulate the massive federal bureaucracy.
Not that Musk can really be said to have meaningfully reformed anything, unless you count torching things to the ground “reform.”
If these two arsonists want to take each other down, we hope that they don’t set the country on fire. We have little but contempt for Musk’s disastrous time in government and his self-centered quest to enact massive cuts without understanding what he was targeting or how it would affect people, but maybe it took that tenure to convince him that the administration that he formed part of is a mess.
It’ll be one more warning sign for anyone thinking of throwing their lot in with Trump that there is nothing that the reality TV star will care about more than himself and burnishing his image, no matter who he has to throw under the bus. Conversely, anyone thinking of taking the devil’s bargain of Musk’s money should know that the billionaire can and will go knives out.
