'Billions of dollars of fraud': Donald Trump's Super Bowl 2025 interview about Elon Musk resurfaces amid their dramatic feud
Donald Trump's Super Bowl appearance in 2025 was overshadowed by his controversial interview (Getty Images)
In a throwback to Super Bowl Sunday 2025, former President
Donald Trump
made headlines not only for attending the big game — the first sitting U.S. president to do so — but also for his wide-ranging, and highly controversial, interview with Fox News' Bret Baier.
The conversation, which aired ahead of Super Bowl LIX, touched on everything from federal agency overhauls to space colonization,
Elon Musk
's surprising role in government, and even Trump's eyebrow-raising suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state.
Donald Trump's bold gamble: Elon Musk and the
Department of Government Efficiency
Among the most talked-about revelations was Donald Trump's defense of his decision to appoint tech mogul Elon Musk to lead the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk, already heading companies like SpaceX and Tesla, was given sweeping access to federal departments — a move that alarmed privacy watchdogs and triggered lawsuits.
'I've had a great help with Elon Musk, who's been terrific,' Trump stated during the interview. He also dismissed a federal judge's ruling to block Musk's access to the Treasury Department, saying, 'I disagree with it 100%. I think it's crazy. And we have to solve the efficiency problem.'
Musk's team has already slashed funding to USAID, and there were plans to shut it down completely before a court intervened. Trump remained unbothered: 'We're going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse. And, you know, the people elected me on that.'
Donald Trump on the Super Bowl,
Patrick Mahomes
, and American unity
As for the game itself, Trump backed the Chiefs, saying, 'I guess you have to say that when a quarterback wins as much as he's won, I have to go with Kansas City.'
He noted his attendance as a symbolic gesture, adding, 'I thought it would be a good thing for the country to have the president be at the game.'
Despite past clashes with the NFL, Trump applauded the league's removal of the 'End Racism' slogan from end zones. 'We have to come together,' he said. 'But to come together, there's only one thing that's going to do it, and that's massive success.'
Trump and Musk's dramatic feud explodes: Accusations, broken alliances, and political chaos
The once-powerful alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has now collapsed in a spectacular political firestorm.
Musk, furious over Trump's sweeping 'One Big Beautiful Bill,' called it 'a disgusting abomination' and even claimed, 'Trump would have lost the election' without him. Trump fired back, mocking Musk's exit from DOGE and warning of cancelled government contracts.
Also Read:
"This is crazy": Chiefs' Jaylon Moore's wife calls out Donald Trump for putting women's lives at risk with shocking abortion mandate rollback
The tension reached boiling point after Musk hinted Trump is in the 'Epstein files,' triggering widespread speculation. With both titans trading blows, Washington braces for fallout that could reshape 2025's political and tech landscape.
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New Indian Express
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Vance says Musk making a 'huge mistake' in going after Trump but also tries to downplay the attacks
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NDTV
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What It Would Take To Convert Qatari Jet Into Air Force One To Safely Fly Trump
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The first aircraft to get the designation was a propeller-powered C-54 Skymaster, which ferried Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference in 1945. It featured a conference room with a bulletproof window. Things are a lot more complicated these days. Boeing has spent years stripping down and rebuilding two 747s to replace the versions that have carried presidents for more than three decades. The project is slated to cost more than $5.3 billion and may not be finished before Trump leaves office. A 2021 report made public through the Freedom of Information Act outlines the unclassified requirements for the replacement 747s under construction. At the top of the list - survivability and communications. The government decided more than a decade ago that the new planes had to have four engines so they could remain airborne if one or two fail, said Deborah Lee James, who was Air Force secretary at the time. 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Testifying before Congress this week, Meink discounted such estimates, arguing that some of the costs associated with retrofitting the Qatari plane would have been spent anyway as the Air Force moves to build the long-delayed new presidential planes, including buying aircraft for training and to have spares available if needed. In response, Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said that based on the contract costs for the planes that the Air Force is building, it would cost about $1 billion to strip down the Qatar plane, install encrypted communications, harden its defenses and make other required upgrades. James said simply redoing the wiring means "you'd have to break that whole thing wide open and almost start from scratch." Trump, as commander in chief, could waive some of these requirements. He could decide to skip shielding systems from an electromagnetic pulse, leaving his communications more vulnerable in case of a disaster but shaving time off the project. After all, Boeing has already scaled back its original plans for the new 747s. Their range was trimmed by 1,200 nautical miles, and the ability to refuel while airborne was scrapped. Paul Eckloff, a former leader of protection details at the Secret Service, expects the president would get the final say. "The Secret Service's job is to plan for and mitigate risk," he said. "It can never eliminate it." If Trump does waive some requirements, James said that should be kept under wraps because "you don't want to advertise to your potential adversaries what the vulnerabilities of this new aircraft might be." It's unlikely that Trump will want to skimp on the plane's appearance. He keeps a model of a new Air Force One in the Oval Office, complete with a darker color scheme that echoes his personal jet instead of the light blue design that's been used for decades. What Happens Next? Trump toured the Qatari plane in February when it was parked at an airport near Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort. 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How The Vatican Manages Money And Where Pope Leo XIV Might Find More
Vatican City: The world's smallest country has a big budget problem. The Vatican doesn't tax its residents or issue bonds. It primarily finances the Catholic Church's central government through donations that have been plunging, ticket sales for the Vatican Museums, as well as income from investments and an underperforming real estate portfolio. The last year the Holy See published a consolidated budget, in 2022, it projected 770 million euros ($878 million), with the bulk paying for embassies around the world and Vatican media operations. In recent years, it hasn't been able to cover costs. That leaves Pope Leo XIV facing challenges to drum up the funds needed to pull his city-state out of the red. Withering Donations Anyone can donate money to the Vatican, but the regular sources come in two main forms. Canon law requires bishops around the world to pay an annual fee, with amounts varying and at bishops' discretion "according to the resources of their dioceses." U.S. bishops contributed over one-third of the $22 million (19.3 million euros) collected annually under the provision from 2021-2023, according to Vatican data. The other main source of annual donations is more well-known to ordinary Catholics: Peter's Pence, a special collection usually taken on the last Sunday of June. From 2021-2023, individual Catholics in the U.S. gave an average $27 million (23.7 million euros) to Peter's Pence, more than half the global total. American generosity hasn't prevented overall Peter's Pence contributions from cratering. After hitting a high of $101 million (88.6 million euros) in 2006, contributions hovered around $75 million (66.8 million euros) during the 2010's then tanked to $47 million (41.2 million euros) during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many churches were closed. Donations remained low in the following years, amid revelations of the Vatican's bungled investment in a London property, a former Harrod's warehouse that it hoped to develop into luxury apartments. The scandal and ensuing trial confirmed that the vast majority of Peter's Pence contributions had funded the Holy See's budgetary shortfalls, not papal charity initiatives as many parishioners had been led to believe. Peter's Pence donations rose slightly in 2023 and Vatican officials expect more growth going forward, in part because there has traditionally been a bump immediately after papal elections. New Donors The Vatican bank and the city state's governorate, which controls the museums, also make annual contributions to the pope. As recently as a decade ago, the bank gave the pope around 55 million euros ($62.7 million) a year to help with the budget. But the amounts have dwindled; the bank gave nothing specifically to the pope in 2023, despite registering a net profit of 30 million euros ($34.2 million), according to its financial statements. The governorate's giving has likewise dropped off. Some Vatican officials ask how the Holy See can credibly ask donors to be more generous when its own institutions are holding back. Leo will need to attract donations from outside the U.S., no small task given the different culture of philanthropy, said the Rev. Robert Gahl, director of the Church Management Program at Catholic University of America's business school. He noted that in Europe there is much less of a tradition (and tax advantage) of individual philanthropy, with corporations and government entities doing most of the donating or allocating designated tax dollars. Even more important is leaving behind the "mendicant mentality" of fundraising to address a particular problem, and instead encouraging Catholics to invest in the church as a project, he said. Speaking right after Leo's installation ceremony in St. Peter's Square, which drew around 200,000 people, Gahl asked: "Don't you think there were a lot of people there that would have loved to contribute to that and to the pontificate?" In the U.S., donation baskets are passed around at every Sunday Mass. Not so at the Vatican. Untapped Real Estate The Vatican has 4,249 properties in Italy and 1,200 more in London, Paris, Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland. Only about one-fifth are rented at fair market value, according to the annual report from the APSA patrimony office, which manages them. Some 70% generate no income because they house Vatican or other church offices; the remaining 10% are rented at reduced rents to Vatican employees. In 2023, these properties only generated 35 million euros ($39.9 million) in profit. Financial analysts have long identified such undervalued real estate as a source of potential revenue. But Ward Fitzgerald, the president of the U.S.-based Papal Foundation, which finances papal charities, said the Vatican should also be willing to sell properties, especially those too expensive to maintain. Many bishops are wrestling with similar downsizing questions as the number of church-going Catholics in parts of the U.S. and Europe shrinks and once-full churches stand empty. Toward that end, the Vatican recently sold the property housing its embassy in Tokyo's high-end Sanbancho neighborhood, near the Imperial Palace, to a developer building a 13-story apartment complex, according to the Kensetsu News trade journal. Yet there has long been institutional reluctance to part with even money-losing properties. Witness the Vatican announcement in 2021 that the cash-strapped Fatebenefratelli Catholic hospital in Rome, run by a religious order, would not be sold. Pope Francis simultaneously created a Vatican fundraising foundation to keep it and other Catholic hospitals afloat. "They have to come to grips with the fact that they own so much real estate that is not serving the mission of the church," said Fitzgerald, who built a career in real estate private equity.
