The Trump-Musk Feud and the Deeper Republican Rift
The alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk was always likely to be about as durable as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the 1939 deal Nazi Germany struck with the Soviet Union days before invading Poland. I won't extend the analogy too far for obvious reasons of taste, except to say that deals rarely last when they are made for short-term advantage between two parties with outsize ambitions but divergent characters.
The more important question is: Does this split signal something fundamentally awry in the MAGA coalition? What does the quick disillusionment of the Republican Party's most prominent convert mean for the president and the party's wider fortunes?
On the face of it, not much. For one thing, the rupture seems mainly personal. In some respects the MAGA movement is a personality cult. Mr. Musk wasn't that personality. The Tesla and SpaceX boss is a brilliant but mercurial man whose pathologies can lead him to dark places, as we have learned more since the breakup. Even in this White House, it seems, some decorums can't be breached.
But Mr. Musk's rising animus seems also to have been based on a belated realization that the returns from his alliance were heavily asymmetric. As an example of Mr. Trump's facility for one-sided deal making, it can hardly be bettered. What Mr. Musk gave—in campaign money, in good publicity for the Department of Government Efficiency's assault on wasteful spending, in lost value for Tesla, and in his own diminished personal wealth and reputation—wasn't close to matched by whatever he was supposed to be getting in return. At least the Soviets got a chunk of Poland and the Baltic states before Barbarossa ended the relationship.
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