From Bromance To Blood Feud— Why The Musk-Trump Breakup Terrifies Republicans

Could This Republican Civil War Destroy The GOP? Blow Up Trump’s Agenda?

Once the drug-addled Musk went from attacking Trump politically to attacking him personally, he sealed his fate. Musk hater-in-chief Steve Bannon will never let Trump forget who exposed the Jeffrey Epstein connection (again). At that point, Trump’s basal ganglia— his reptilian brain— went into “kill Elmo” overtime. On Saturday, Trump spoke with NBC News and when they asked him about rumors that Musk might contribute to Democrats’ campaigns, Trump said “If he does, he’ll have to pay the consequences for that. He’ll have to pay very serious consequences if he does that.” No more sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom? Trump told NBC he has no interest in repairing his relationship with Musk. He said he has no plans to speak with Musk anytime soon because he’s been very disrespectful to the office of the President. “I’m too busy doing other things. I have no intention of speaking to him.” Meanwhile, during an interview on This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von that was taped on Thursday but released Saturday, Vance described Musk’s attacks on Trump as “nuclear” and said he’s “always going to be loyal to the president, and I hope that eventually Elon, kind of, comes back into the fold. Maybe that’s not possible now because he’s gone so nuclear.” Vance called it a “huge mistake” for Musk to target the president over his frustrations with the House version of the bill.On Friday evening, Eric Lipton and Kenneth Chang had lain out some of his options, which Trump aides had already pointed out to him: 

Since the government has allowed itself to become dependent on Musk’s SpaceX, which basically controls NASA, that would be very tough. “But,” wrote Lipton and Chang, “there are options available” to Señor TACO. “Trump’s most accessible weapon to punish Musk is the ability to instruct federal regulators to intensify oversight of his business operations, reversing a slowdown in regulatory actions that benefited Musk’s businesses after Trump was elected… Before Trump was elected, at least 11 federal agencies had ongoing investigations or lawsuits targeting Musk’s companies. These included the Federal Aviation Administration’s scrutiny of launch safety issues, the Environmental Protection Agency’s inquiry into potential water pollution at SpaceX’s Texas launch site and transportation regulators’ questions about fatal accidents involving Tesla cars using autopilot. Several of those inquiries were put on hold. In other instances, fines that Musk’s companies had been assessed were being reconsidered.”

Meanwhile, the 24-7 team of reporters that the NY Times has covering the Alien vs Predator dust-up reported Friday night that “Trump is blaming Elon Musk’s behavior on drug use… Trump has been telling associates over the last 24 hours that Musk’s ‘crazy’ behavior is linked to his drugs… [S]ome of Trump’s political advisers are preparing for a possible drawn-out war against Musk in which allies of both men in tech and politics are forced to choose sides.”

There’s an inherent problem for Republicans in this battle continuing. Charlie Mahtesian reported on the pitfalls the GOP issue facing over the messy public meltdown. And the danger goes beyond Musk being the richest man on earth (not counting Putin), beyond Elmo’s ownership of Twitter and beyond Elmo’s status as top GOP election season sugar daddy. “It’s Musk’s stratospheric popularity with the Republican base,” he wrote, citing polling. “Musk is not about to overtake Trump himself as the dominant figure in the party, to be clear. But the jilted former ‘special government employee’ is uniquely suited to become a chaos agent who could terrorize the GOP— potentially wreaking havoc on Trump’s legislative agenda and the party’s midterm election plans… While Democrats and independents quickly soured on Musk’s [DOGE] leadership, Republicans are still enthralled. In the most recent Economist/YouGov Poll, 76 percent of Republicans viewed Musk favorably, compared to just 18 percent who viewed him unfavorably. A late April NY Times/Siena poll placed his favorability rating among Republicans at 77 percent.”

Mahtesian acknowledged that Musk’s popularity with the GOP/Fox base “may change after Musk’s scorched earth break-up with Trump,” but he insists that “the odds aren’t great’ and that Musk is far more popular than GOP luminaries like MAGA Mike, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and almost everyone else in the party. Only Señor TACO and JD Vance are more popular among Republicans. “The Trump-era GOP is a party where staffers feel free to publicly attack principals, where elected officials regularly attack each other for deviations from MAGA orthodoxy and where the unofficial mantra is Trump’s ‘fight, fight, fight.’ Yet for days after Musk’s initial broadsides against the ‘big, beautiful bill,’ no one— not even Trump, who’s known for nuking even the mildest of critics— laid a glove on Musk. The silence was a tacit acknowledgement of a new apex predator in the political and media ecosystem, a Godzilla to Trump’s King Kong… The stature accorded by Musk’s DOGE portfolio, its alignment with traditional Republican values surrounding government spending and budget deficit reduction, his limitless wealth and social media megaphone make him a uniquely dangerous rival, not just for Trump but for the party as a whole… a potential bomb that could blow up the party’s plans.”

All that isn’t all Republicans are wary of. “Musk boasts his own base of support that exists outside traditional partisan boundaries, particularly marked by the parasocial relationship young men have with him. That makes him a danger to the fragile coalition Republicans relied on in 2024… Musk knows MAGA’s pressure points. He’s been in the room where MAGA happened, on stage at the rallies, present for the Cabinet dog-and-pony shows. The old axiom about never picking fights with those who buy ink by the barrel applies here: It’s a bad idea to feud with a tycoon who can not only deplatform you, but trash you to his 220 million followers… [H]is ability to dominate the attention economy makes him uniquely suited to upend Trump’s agenda on Capitol Hill and Republican efforts to hold on to Congress in 2026. Like Trump, Musk learned fast about politics. When he embarked on his crusade to sink the sweeping tax-cut package, he recognized the precise language to employ to cut through the noise and provoke a reaction from the GOP base— “a disgusting abomination,” he called it, “[a] massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill.”

Musk also knew exactly how to trigger the president. He picked at the impeachment scab, suggested Trump couldn’t have won the White House without his help and predicted Trump’s tariffs will cause a recession. Musk went straight for the jugular by suggesting the president’s name appears in records of the investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; of course, it’s already public that Trump and others have been referenced in court documents related to the case and Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing. But Musk fueled the GOP base’s penchant for conspiracy theories by claiming records “have not been made public.”

It’s a page ripped straight out of Trump’s playbook, timed to perfection just as MAGA adherents are growing restless with the Justice Department over its failure to deliver evidence of “deep state” involvement in one of the leading conspiracies animating the far right.

Musk also managed to roll a grenade into the Capitol, where he’s already undermined GOP congressional leadership by blasting them by name, and emboldened hardliners who were likely to be steamrolled. His potential for mischief remains considerable even in the event of a personal truce with Trump since the megabill, if it passes the Senate, still must make it back through the House.

If it seems like the GOP cavalry has been slow to aid Trump so far, that’s because Musk strikes fear into officeholders who can easily envision him funding primary challenges and hounding them on social media. And it’s not just the individual electeds who have cause for concern. Musk on Thursday floated the idea of creating a new political party “that actually represents the 80% in the middle” in an online Twitter poll.

In less than 24 hours, more than 5 million votes had been cast.

But… but… but… is it possible that this is all a great big charade? Kabuki theater to turn around the reputational damage done to Musk’s businesses? No one I know thinks so, but Wired published a piece by David Gilbert yesterday, Conspiracy World Thinks the Musk-Trump Breakup Is a ‘Psyop’, that makes a case that “in the conspiracy-theory-addicted corners of the internet, the feud between Musk and Trump is nothing more than a fake, planned distraction… a plan to trick Democrats into calling for the Epstein files to be published. Rather than admit that two of their favorite people have fallen out and are making increasingly dire threats against each other, QAnon folks prefer to believe that this is all part of a scheme cooked up by the pair in recent months. ‘Smooth-brained folks who haven't been paying attention and don't understand that kayfabe is in play, actually believe Trump and Musk are fighting,” AwakenedOutlaw, an anonymous Twitter account that promotes far-right talking points with over 300,000 followers, wrote on Thursday evening. Kayfabe is a decades-old term used in the world of pro wrestling to describe how wrestlers maintain the illusion that fights are real and that their hatred of their opponents extends outside the ring.”

Among the Pizzagate lunatics— thought we haven’t heard from Marjorie Traitor Greene yet— people are being instructed to “grab your popcorn and watch the media and Democrats falsely report Trump is a pedophile and a sex trafficker— this boomerang will be epic! 5D chess at its finest, baby— checkmate!”

Outside of QAnon, conspiracy theorists were struggling to come to terms with MAGA’s biggest figures having such a public falling out. “This World stands on the brink of Total Destruction,” Alex Jones, the conspiracist who called the Sandy Hook school shootings a hoax and was sued for defamation and found liable by default, wrote on Twitter, adding that he would need to investigate the allegations about Trump and the Epstein files further before picking a side.

Meanwhile, Jack Posobiec, a prominent Pizzagate promoter who recently traveled to Ukraine as a member of the press with a Trump cabinet member, put the whole thing down to men being men.

“Some of y'all can't handle 2 high agency males going at it and it really shows,” Posobiec wrote on Twitter. “This is direct communication (phallocentric) vs indirect communication (gynocentric).”

In some comments, people didn’t seem to really understand what this all meant.

“What is this being used as a distraction from??” one user wrote on Telegram, while another suggested: “Elon most likely wrote it anyway.” A third added: “I wonder if that leads more into the auto pen and Biden doubles?”

Finally, someone else just said what everyone else was clearly thinking: “I’m so confused.”