Trump-Musk feud shows president knows how to hit a narcissist where it hurts
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-$80,000 red Model S. Now, he says he's going to sell it.
READ MORE
Thursday was the most titillating day here 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 boîte on Capitol Hill, assured Politico, 'Maga will not sell out to ketamine.'
[
Keith Duggan: Trump-Musk bromance descends into a jaw-dropping feud that is funny, dismal and nauseating
Opens in new window
]
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. Musk deleted the post on Saturday.
Musk did, however, expose Trump and Republican lawmakers as hypocrites, using his online bullhorn to shame them about their broken promises to reduce the debt. The big domestic Bill is a dog's breakfast of Republican proposals that could add more than $3 trillion to the debt to make the rich richer, while cutting healthcare coverage for the poor. Republicans are the ones who always claim they're fiscally responsible, even while they keep exploding the debt.
Musk reposted Trump's old tweets on the social platform X, such as this one from 2012: 'No member of Congress should be eligible for re-election if our country's budget is not balanced – deficits not allowed!'
Musk sneered: 'Where is the man who wrote these words? Was he replaced by a body double!?'
As the weekend began, Trump seemed to be winning the fight, as Musk grew quieter and Fox News commentators had pleaded with their parents to get back together.
Trump has exposed Musk's naive streak – something I saw in 2017 when I reported that another tech lord had to explain to Musk that he couldn't get away from artificial intelligence by going to Mars; it would just follow him there.
Just because Musk hung in the Oval and Mar-a-Lago and debated moving into the Lincoln Bedroom, it didn't mean he understood politics or power – or Trump.
Trump didn't care about the potential conflict of interest in having the SpaceX chief pick the head of Nasa. But he did care that Musk's candidate had donated to top Democrats – and about the aborted plan for Musk to attend a briefing about military strategy against China at the Pentagon, and about Musk's barbed public trashing of Trump's 'beautiful' tariffs and 'beautiful' Bill.
When I studied Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in graduate school, I was struck by how much the 1818 novel by a teenage girl reminded me of the bros in Silicon Valley.
The brilliant scientists with their edgy experiments, too high on their own supply to consider the ramifications of AI. What if your creation grows stronger than you and comes back to haunt you?
Musk posted that Trump was ungrateful because the nearly $300 million he spent on Republicans is what made Trump president. Musk
created
the monster!
But Trump created a monster, too. He gave Musk free rein and enormous power over a world he knew nothing about and people for whom he had no empathy. And in the end, of course, Musk's demon mode came out and Trump's monster turned on him.
'Elon was 'wearing thin,'' Trump acidly posted, knowing how to hit a narcissist where it hurts. 'I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!'
For all his macho swagger, Trump sure loves a catfight. – This article originally appeared in
The New York Times
.
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