Look, the breakup between President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk was inevitable.
Both men expect to get 100% of what they desire, and a complete coincidence of desires would have turned them into alter egos of each other.
Yet both are American originals.
They come from different places, succeeded in different businesses, belong to different generations.
The split between these two figures felt unavoidable — given their strong personalities, even the smallest difference was destined to escalate into a significant political clash.
When Trump and Musk came together in one big beautiful embrace, I told myself, “This can’t last six months.”
That turned out to be about right.
Right now, it’s hard to resist framing this disagreement as the match of the century. I’ll admit, I’ve indulged in this notion myself.
I mean, Trump vs. Musk — it’s the clash of titans.
It’s the rumble in the jungle.
When you’re witnessing the leader of the free world and the wealthiest person alive facing off with the whole world watching, it’s permissible to revel in the drama for a bit, choosing sides and reacting with cheers or boos based on our personal preferences.
A tricky balance
My job, however, is to make sense of things.
And I think I can make the case for a higher meaning to the Trump-Musk heavyweight championship fight.
Start with Trump.
He’s the deal-maker.
He honed this skill in the predatory environment of New York City real estate.
The president, without question, is committed to radical change.
He aims to sweep away the debris left behind by the rolling catastrophe that was the Biden administration.
But he’s also chief executive and head of a multifarious movement.
He must herd the 273 Republican cats in the House and Senate, staff, fund and manage the federal government, and keep the world from blowing up, while exchanging blows in the arena of public opinion with his ideological enemies in the Democratic Party and the media.
Trump will take the best deal that promotes revolution — thus disrupting his own government — while also ensuring that things keep running, thus sustaining the status quo.
It’s a tricky balance.
Musk, on the other hand, is a hard-line optimal-outcome seeker.
For every transaction, he demands nothing less than the perfect result, and he seems to feel no internal or external pressures to compromise.
He evidently believed he could do to the federal government what he had done with Twitter, where he fired two-thirds of the workforce, or with Tesla, a company he brought from the brink of bankruptcy to colossal success.
These qualities made Musk an unfettered revolutionary — by no means the first engineer to believe he could design a flawless society.
His instrument was to be the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to which Trump ceded a remarkably free hand in slashing and reshaping existing government agencies (see: USAID).
Musk’s goals for DOGE were ambitious, if not utopian: saving more than $1 trillion by ending fraud and redundancies.
Politics, however, is the graveyard of tidy plans.
As any creature of The Swamp could tell Musk, the Earth was likelier to spiral out of its orbit before that much wealth was surrendered by that many vested interests.
Betrayal of revolution?
We don’t have the details of what happened.
DOGE is supposedly still in business.
But at some point, Musk looked into the president’s Big Beautiful Bill, making its way laboriously through Congress — with all the political give-and-take that entails — and he decided it was a betrayal of the revolution.
The rhetorical style of digital communications is nasty and personal.
Musk, who might compete with Trump for the title of supreme digital communicator, got there fast.
He accused the president of association with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump, uncharacteristically, was more restrained, though he did suggest that his old ally had “lost his mind.”
If we look beyond the name-calling, we can discern a serious dispute about the fundamentals of government: taxes, programs, debt, and budget-making.
At one level, this was a generational collision.
In Sergey Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons,” the fathers were liberals and the sons became nihilists.
In the 21st-century version of the story, Trump, the father figure, is a populist change-agent, while the younger Musk has evolved into a burn-it-down rebel.
But that’s not quite accurate.
By temperament and ideology, Trump, in fact, has turned out to be a revolutionary leader.
At the heart of the conflict is a disagreement regarding what the revolution should be about.
Musk is uncompromising on savings and debt.
His revolution would reduce the size and debt of the federal government and make it more transparent and accountable to the public.
Trump is a culture warrior. His “revolution of common sense” would annihilate every vestige of the race-gender-climate ideology imposed on American institutions by the dedicated zealots who ran the Biden administration.
When it comes to the nation’s finances, the president would rather cut taxes and regulations than deal with deficits and debt.
The Big Beautiful Bill is the Trump Tower of legislation.
Besides making permanent the original 2017 tax cuts, it enshrines into law an immense heap of cultural victories — from banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs to building the longed-for wall on the southern border — while splashing gold paint on the ugly bits that deal with the debt.
Trump, for whom “big” is always “beautiful,” has never been a small-government politician.
A small, unintrusive government would deprive him of the most potent weapon in his attempt to reorient American culture — and it’s this reorientation, far more than a balanced budget, I believe, that is most ardently desired by his followers.
If the Tea Party revolt of 2010 was about cutting the government down to size, the MAGA movement consists of voters who want their country back from the clutches of the identitarians.
There are anti-debt fundamentalists in the Republican Party — but they are leftovers, not part of the fuel and fire that propel Trump’s revolution.
Bambi versus Godzilla
All of which hints at the answer to the inescapable question: Who wins the slugfest between Musk and Trump?
In reality, the correlation of forces (as the Soviets loved to say) is highly skewed.
Whereas Musk and Trump compete on an almost equal footing in the theater of attention that is the web, when it comes to politics, it’s Bambi versus Godzilla.
Musk may be admired by many in the MAGA crowd, but he represents no ideological tendency or personal constituency.
As a political force, he exists entirely by the grace of Trump.
All the president had to do is federalize the National Guard and send it against rioters in Los Angeles, and Musk, together with his complaints, sunk to a vague, inchoate whisper at the back end of the news cycle.
This fight was over before it began. The final question is whether the quarrel will generate any lasting problems for Trump.
Conservative personalities have expressed concern that the administration, which has been on a roll since Inauguration Day, will see its momentum dissipated by infighting.
“Unity, not discord, is needed now — and quickly,” urged historian Victor Davis Hanson.
“I want to tell them if they’re both watching, knock it off,” said Fox News host Greg Gutfeld.
“Don’t let the Dems get back up from the floor where they belong.”
Certainly, when the two leading figures in a movement turn on each other, the intuitive analysis would say that the movement will be weakened and possibly split asunder.
‘Sinister’ minister
But I wonder.
Trump is in no immediate political danger — interestingly, his popularity kept rising throughout the incident.
Musk lacks the heft to divide MAGA, a movement that belongs heart and soul to the president.
Yet Musk’s ruthless work with DOGE had inspired nearly equal levels of loathing from the left to what is habitually aimed at Trump.
Musk was the chief “oligarch,” a heartless despoiler of the civil service — and one of the Democrats’ few coherent lines of attack against the administration consisted in painting it as a tribe of rapacious billionaires intent on fleecing the country.
But if the president is now battling the most despicable of the oligarchs, what does that say about Trump?
A very old trick in a ruler’s palette of power is to allow the top minister to accrue all the hatred and unpopularity — then, at the appropriate hour, the minister finds himself beheaded to universal applause.
Long term, Musk could remain a thorn in the president’s side.
Besides being fabulously wealthy, he’s also brilliant.
But he may have auditioned, unwittingly, for the role of the minister whose departure counts as a political gain.
