Elon Musk Is Still Not Your Friend

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After months of political bliss, it seems as if the president and the world's richest man are ready to call it quits. Donald Trump and Elon Musk traded barbs on their respective social media websites on Thursday and into Friday, as social media users happily looked on.
It was only a matter of time before Trump and Musk, who are not known for making and keeping allies, had a spectacular falling out. The inciting incident turned out to be Musk's criticisms of the Trump-backed 'Big Beautiful Bill,' the House's spending bill that slashes the safety net in order to provide $4.5 trillion worth of tax cuts to the rich.
At first, Musk's comments were mild, saying the bill doesn't reduce the deficit and 'undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.' But he went fully nuclear on Thursday. Musk, who already claimed he won the election for Trump, posted to X to accuse the president of being in the 'Epstein files,' or a list of people with suspicious associations with the financier, who died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. (Trump and Epstein socialized in the 1980s and 1990s, but Trump has denied ever being on his private plane or island, where some of the alleged sex crimes took place.) Trump, in turn, suggested on Truth Social he would cut Musk's government contracts, while the president's allies even started talking about deporting Musk.
At this point, it seems clear that the once-budding bromance is toast.
Many people reacted with schadenfreude to the world's weirdest celebrity breakup. But it also had a few Democrats seeming ready to slide into Musk's DMs.
'We should ultimately be trying to convince him that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with,' Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told Politico on Thursday. 'A commitment to science funding, a commitment to clean technology, a commitment to seeing international students like him.'
Other Democrats also signaled that the rift could benefit their party. 'I'm a believer in redemption, and he is telling the truth about the legislation,' Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said, while still cautioning that Musk's slashing of the federal government is still an open wound. 'There are Democrats who see his decimation of the federal workforce and the federal government as an unforgivable sin.'
Making the enemy of your enemy your friend is not always an outlandish idea. There have been multiple reports that even some in the Trump administration were fighting with Musk behind the scenes, making it seemingly feasible to build a new alliance between him and Democrats. And Musk is known for dumping truckloads of money into politics when he's on your side. He was, by far, the largest Republican donor in the 2024 cycle, contributing more than $290 million to Trump's campaign. Then in April, Musk made a Wisconsin Supreme Court race the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history by spending $25 million to boost Brad Schimel, the GOP candidate. (Schimel lost by 10 points.)
But there are strange bedfellows, and then there's extending an olive branch to someone as toxic as Elon Musk.
For one thing, Musk is deeply unpopular with basically everyone. An April ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that Musk only had a 35% approval rating nationwide. It was even worse among the people who the Democratic Party represents — just 4% of those voters approve of Musk's works. In fact, he's so disliked that it seems likely Trump can spin their very public split into a good thing for him politically.
And when you boil it down further, nearly everything Musk has done as a part of the Trump campaign, and later, the Trump administration, is anathema to what Democratic voters believe.
Musk's purchase of Twitter, which he renamed to X, in 2022 began the South African billionaire's journey to becoming Trump's closest ally and biggest donor. When a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man attempted to assassinate Trump in July 2024, Musk solidified his support by officially endorsing him. Musk appeared at Trump rallies and spent the final weeks of the campaign spreading conspiracy theories and throwing money around in order to send Trump back to the White House.
Then at Trump's second inauguration, Musk was widely condemned for doing a Nazi-like salute while speaking to supporters. This didn't stop Trump from giving him a semi-official role in government, with the power to set up the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and hire a cadre of inexperienced employees to ostensibly cut waste from the government. DOGE staffers accessed private data, fired critical employees and were named in multiple lawsuits — many of which are still ongoing today.
Musk has repeatedly shared antisemitic posts on social media, including claiming 'Hitler didn't murder millions of people.' He's a proponent of a racist 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory, which claims that people of color are executing an intentional plot to eliminate white people. While the Trump administration has ramped up deportations, blocked migrants from receiving asylum and used ugly rhetoric about immigrants in general, Musk was able to convince the president to admit white South Africans as refugees, claiming there is a 'white genocide' happening in South Africa.
Then there's the fallout from the cuts his team at DOGE has made across the federal government. Musk spearheaded the effort to cut funding for essential agencies, impacting everything from the IRS to HIV prevention to natural disaster response to Social Security. The entire U.S. Agency for International Development was effectively dismantled, which led to the deaths of children abroad and put millions of lives at risk. Across the federal government, everyday people, including Trump supporters, were thrust into unemployment as DOGE officials decided their roles weren't important.
'I want a big tent party too, but Elon's primary policy goals don't fit within the tent,' Democratic pollster Evan Roth Smith of Slingshot Strategies told HuffPost. 'There's nothing around Social Security or Medicare cuts that fits within the tent of the Democratic Party at all.'
Over the last five months, Musk has hardly signaled that he's ready to pivot to liberalism. In fact, up until this week, he remained by Trump's side, appearing at Cabinet meetings (despite not being a Cabinet member), irritating those in Trump's inner circle and parading around the White House with one of his children. Musk's time at the White House was scheduled to come to an end at the end of May when his 130-day 'special employee' status expired.
The Democrats are in a bit of a political wilderness, and it can be tempting to look for a powerful new ally.
After losing to Trump, the infighting has been continuous, with many placing the blame on former President Joe Biden for failing to step aside sooner, with others pointing at former Vice President Kamala Harris for running a campaign that wasn't capable of defeating Trump.
But Democrats should remember that their attempts to reach across the aisle and find common ground are not what their base is asking for.
A March NBC News poll found that 65% of Democrats did not want the party to compromise with Trump — even if it means getting nothing done in Congress.
'There's no reason to take Elon back,' Roth Smith said.
Kevin Robillard contributed reporting.