Like Frankenstein on steroids, Musk and Trump both created monsters
Sometimes you're better off letting the children fight. That was President Donald Trump's callous wisdom on looking the other way as the Russians and Ukrainians continue to kill each other. But it might better be applied to Trump's social media spat with Elon Musk. It's hard to think of two puer aeterni who are more deserving of a verbal walloping.
Their venomous digital smackdown fulgurated on their duelling social media companies, flashing across the Washington sky.
In March, Trump showed off Teslas in the White House driveway and bought a more than $US80,000 red Model S. Now, he says he's going to sell it.
Thursday was the most titillating day in the US since the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, when a spaceship landed an alien to warn human leaders to stop squabbling like children, or the aliens would destroy Earth.
On Friday, Trump tried to convey serenity. 'I'm not thinking about Elon Musk,' Trump said aboard Air Force One. 'I wish him well.' But Trump then jumped on the phone to knock Musk, telling ABC's Jonathan Karl that Musk has 'lost his mind' and CNN's Dana Bash that 'the poor guy's got a problem'. Trump had to know that would be seen as a reference to the intense drug use by Musk, chronicled by The New York Times.
As Raheem Kassam, one of the owners of Butterworth's, the new Trumpworld boite on Capitol Hill, assured Politico, 'MAGA will not sell out to ketamine'.
The Washington Post reported on Friday: 'Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE's staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperilling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.'
On Truth Social on Thursday, Trump threatened to take away government contracts that have handsomely enriched Musk even though, as Leon Panetta pointed out on CNN, 'some of those contracts, particularly on SpaceX, are very important to our national security.'
Musk tried to tie Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, offering no evidence. He shared a post on Epstein that said Trump should be impeached. Trump reposted a message from Epstein's last lawyer, saying the smear was 'definitively' not true.
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Sydney Morning Herald
15 minutes ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Trump v Musk is the final battle before a catastrophe
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Loading The shame of it is that the Musk who built Tesla and SpaceX into two of the world's most successful companies over a period of nearly two decades has been almost entirely absent while at DOGE these past four or five months. Instead, we have seen a reckless, chainsaw-wielding – and if the American press is to be believed, drug-fuelled – Musk who, like his one-time boss Donald Trump, seems to regard government more as performative art than public service. We can all point to myriad examples of public sector waste, of unfathomable spending decisions and stultifying, jobsworth bureaucracy, but the imagined savings from addressing these things nearly always turn out to be a mirage. In Britain, Nigel Farage's Reform UK claims there is £7 billion to be saved by scrapping public sector spending on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. Sadly, no such saving exists. Recent government figures showed just £27 million ($56 million) was spent by the civil service on DEI measures during 2022-23. This might well be £27m too much, but it is not going to solve Britain's debt crisis. The two big cash-burners in advanced economies' state spending are public sector salaries and welfare, and both desperately need to be addressed if Western democracies are ever to extract themselves from now mountainous debt. Musk has comprehensively failed on the first of these missions, and not surprisingly so. The sort of productivity-improving automation and digitalisation we see widely applied in the private sector to stay competitive is a marathon, not a sprint, and it requires precision in planning and execution. None of these characteristics was on display from the tech bros sent in to tackle the bloated size of the American state. 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Back here in Britain, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, shows similarly little sign of getting to grips with the leviathan of public spending as she puts the finishing touches to next Wednesday's spending review. Public sector salary costs are rising, not falling, and while ministers talk the talk on welfare reform, their approach to the issue is no more convincing than that of Trump. It's just a little tinkering around the edges. Simply getting working-age benefits back to their pre-pandemic level would save £49 billion a year – more than enough to avoid tax rises and fund the desired increase in defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP, Jeremy Hunt, Reeves' Conservative predecessor as chancellor, points out. Spending on disability benefits alone has surged from £37 billion just before the pandemic to £56 billion now, much more than in any comparable economy, with the bulk of the growth coming from mental health conditions. Loading Yet Reeves used up almost all her political capital axing the winter fuel allowance to all but the poorest pensioners, a course of action that saves only £1.5 billion a year. This has left her with virtually no space for more serious entitlement reform. In both the US and Britain, cutting state spending back to size is simply not happening on the scale needed to stem the rising tide of debt. Attempts by Musk to draw a line in the sand have ended in acrimony and recrimination. Nobody can tell you exactly when the storm will break, but Musk's failure brings the final reckoning that much closer.
The Age
15 minutes ago
- The Age
Trump v Musk is the final battle before a catastrophe
Who needs reality TV when there's the psychodrama of Donald Trump's White House to keep us all entertained? As plot lines go, the falling out between Trump and Elon Musk was perhaps about as predictable as they come, but the sheer venom, speed and combustibility of the divorce has nevertheless proved utterly captivating. Even the best of Hollywood scriptwriters would have struggled to do better. The stench of betrayal hangs heavy in the air, a veritable revenger's tragedy of a drama. Beneath it all, however, lies a rather more serious matter than the sight of two of the world's richest and most powerful men breaking up and exchanging insults. And it's one that afflicts nearly all major high-income economies. Slowly but surely – and at varying speeds – they are all going bust. Yet few of them seem even capable of recognising it, let alone doing anything to correct it. None more so than the United States, where the Congressional Budget Office last week estimated that Trump's 'one big, beautiful bill' would add a further $US2.4 trillion ($3.7 million) to the national debt by 2034. Loading Let's not take sides, but Musk was absolutely right when he described the bill as 'a disgusting abomination'. It taxes far too little, and it spends far too much. It is hard to imagine a more reckless piece of make-believe. Musk had backed Trump not just out of self-interest – more government contracts, protection of the electric vehicle mandate, personal aggrandisement and so on – but because he genuinely believed he could help stop the US from bankrupting itself. This has proved a monumental conceit. The $US2 trillion of savings in federal spending he initially promised has turned out to be at most $US200 billion, and probably substantially less once double accounting and wishful thinking is factored in.
