Things unravel fast.
The arrangement was for German chancellor Friedrich Merz and his party to spend the night across from the White House in Blair House after their Thursday visit to the Oval Office.
The football enthusiasts in the visiting contingent may have intended unwinding with the highlights of the fabulous France-Spain game. But like everyone else in Washington DC, the German visitors undoubtedly spent their late afternoon and Thursday evening glued to their screens as the once-heated connection between US president Donald Trump and Elon Musk degenerated into a jaw-dropping social media feud that is funny and nauseating and dismal all at once.
By nightfall, the richest man in the world had made the unsubstantiated claim, on the social media platform he owns, that Trump is “in the Epstein files”. He had reposted decades-old footage of the president in the company of the late and now-reviled Jeffrey Epstein, whose FBI files remain a source of fascination to a strand of the Maga support base.
Worse was to follow. By Friday, urgent White House preparations to broker a phone-call between Trump and his former first buddy were scotched by the president. The relationship had entered the territory of conscious uncoupling. It had become the most infamous breakdown in any male friendship since Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson last spent time on a small island.
Musk’s barrage of posts criticising Trump’s sweeping budget Bill began during Merz’s sit-down in the Oval Office and continued over the course of a day when his personal wealth fell by an estimated $34 billion, even as shares in Tesla slumped.
Once freed from his diplomatic duties, during which Trump admired Merz’s facility with German and looked less than thrilled to receive a framed birth certificate of Freidrich Trump, the German grandfather of whom he never speaks, the president was free to attack Musk on his own social media account.
[ Tesla suffers biggest one-day drop in market value after Trump-Musk spatOpens in new window ]
Piqued, he noted that the “easiest way” to save money in the budget is to “terminate Elon’s governmental subsidies and contracts”. He also went public with an observation that had become clear over the past six weeks as Musk’s prominence within the administration steadily faded.
“Elon was ‘wearing thin’. I took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do) and he just went CRAZY!”
As ever, the drama once again sent the 47th presidency rocketing into the realm of not just a rolling television soap opera, but the darkest parody of the landmark American political dramas. With Trump, the old line of history repeating itself doesn’t fully apply: the tragedy and farce seem to occur simultaneously.
Over the course of their Oval Office press spray, Merz, restrained and impressive, made several serious and sombre points about the Ukraine and Russia war but it was unclear if Trump permitted the clarity and gravity to penetrate. For much of the time, the German visitor sat silent while Trump riffed on his relationship with Musk, which was, on live television, experiencing the same return-to-Earth’s-orbit fate as one of the billionaire’s SpaceX rockets.
By teatime, Steve Bannon, a long-time vitriolic critic of Musk, had called for his deportation. Meanwhile, the Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill tasked with meeting Trump’s expectation that the budget Bill pass the Senate vote and be on his desk for his preferred deadline of July 4th, Independence Day, took stock of the spectacular feud.
“I have a rule. I never get between a dog and a fire hydrant,” the Louisiana senator John Kennedy told a reporter.
Kennedy is one of several senators who want to see the tax-and-spending Bill amended before it goes to a vote. The Republicans can afford just three defections if it is to get through the Senate. It is already clear that two senators, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, represent a hard No to the Bill. “The math doesn’t add up,” Paul posted earlier this week. “I’m not supporting a Bill that increases debt by $5 trillion.”
Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie sounded gleeful when he was asked who he would choose in the playground fight between Trump and Musk.
“I choose math. The math always wins over the words. I trust the math over the guy who lands the rocket backwards, over the politician’s maths. I think the patient is on life support and if the Senate thinks they are going to rehabilitate it and rewrite it, I think they are endangering this patient. Because people over here are looking for more reasons to be against it.”
Now, with Trump’s estranged “genius” and the world’s richest man seeking to sabotage the Bill with venom, it looks more fragile than ever.
Even during the height of their public union, when they engaged in a public mutual seduction, with Trump attracted to Musk’s limitless wealth and Musk dazzled by Trump’s mass public appeal and the peerless power that comes with the presidency, it was clear to everyone that it would be short lived. But as recently as February, Musk was moved to post: “I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man.”
Perhaps he is just a rank sentimentalist at heart. But this week Musk discovered the limitations and the cold commercialism of the presidential love reciprocated. On Monday, even as reports of his rampant narcotics use circulated, Musk suffered the indignity of a going-away present of an outsized golden key which, Trump clarified, he gives to “very special people”. It created the impression that there is a thousand identical keys crammed into a cupboard near the Oval Office.
The billionaire was sporting a black eye, which he claimed he acquired while horsing around with his young son. Musk said he invited young X to “punch me in the face” and the youngster – perhaps aware of his deteriorating future fortune – didn’t hesitate in socking one to the old man.
For the past four days, Musk found himself gone from the White House, his magic lanyard and access returned with nothing but a ceremonial key which opens no doors. And for all of the callous indifference to the vulnerable and impoverished Musk displayed as he set about implementing the federal cuts in his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, he may have believed that at some level Trump valued his work.
The Bill proposal represents not just an additional burden to America’s national debt; it is a personal snub to the man-hours Musk has put in since January. For a man with boundless intellectual vanity, to be made to feel a fool represents the worst insult. And there was a cold truth, too, to Trump’s rationale as to why Musk has suddenly gone rogue on him.
“I think he misses the place. He’s not the first. People leave my administration and then at some point they miss it so badly. Some of them embrace it and some of them actually become hostile.”
The feud does not bode well for the administration. For the Democrats came the welcome novelty of watching the other crowd infighting. But the bitter and reckless war of words will ask deeper questions of the many Republicans who championed Musk during the days when he was the president’s favourite courtier. And the critical decision over the big, beautiful Bill still looms.
“When 15 million people lose their health care and plunge into personal crisis,” Connecticut Democrat senator Chris Murphy wrote on Thursday evening, “none of them are going to give a s**t about a made-for-clicks Twitter fight between two billionaires arguing about who gets the bigger share of the corruption spoils.”
In happier days, Trump made a shrewd observation about Musk. “He’s a true patriot,” he praised. “And I don’t even know if he is a Republican.”
He may be about to find out.
