The Trump-Musk alliance implodes: From the Politics Desk

NBC News

a day ago

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team's latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.
In today's edition, we break down how President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's feud burst into public view. Plus, Jonathan Allen sifts through the spin to provide a reality check on what the 'big, beautiful bill' would actually do.
— Adam Wollner
The Trump-Musk alliance implodes
By Rebecca Shabad and Alana Satlin
The simmering tension between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk boiled over into a full-blown public brawl Thursday.
Act I: After a series of social media posts from Musk in recent days trashing Trump's 'big, beautiful bill,' the president offered his first response during an Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
'I'm very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill,' Trump said of his former adviser. 'I'm very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot.'
Trump suggested that Musk, the world's richest man, was upset that the legislation cut out a tax credit meant to incentivize electric vehicle purchases.
'Elon's upset because we took the EV mandate, which was a lot of money for electric vehicles and they're having a hard time with electric vehicles and they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy,' Trump said. 'Elon knew this from the beginning.'
Act II: Musk initially brushed off Trump's criticism, posting 'whatever' on X before firing off dozens of posts blasting the Republican bill and the president himself.
'Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,' Musk said, referring to the hundreds of millions of dollars he spent on the last election. 'Such ingratitude,' he added.
Act III: Trump then fired back on Truth Social, claiming that Musk 'went crazy' after the president 'asked him to leave' his White House role. Trump also suggested the government could sever ties with Musk's companies, which have billions of dollars in federal contracts.
Act IV: In response, Musk claimed that the president was in what are known as the 'Epstein files' — a reference to a trove of documents and files spread across a number of investigations and lawsuits involving the late Jeffrey Epstein. The Justice Department earlier this year released hundreds more pages of documents related to the Epstein investigations.
Although Trump and Epstein knew each other, there have been no new revelations about their relationship in any of those files. Trump has never been implicated in Epstein's abuse of underage girls. He denied any wrongdoing, saying in a post last year, 'I was never on Epstein's Plane, or at his 'stupid' Island.'
Act V: Trump's latest word on the matter: 'I don't mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago.'
Analysis by Jonathan Allen
As the Senate considers President Donald Trump's ' one big, beautiful bill ' (or 'OBBB'), there's a lot of dubious rhetoric flying around and, in some cases, hitting the fan.
It can be hard for voters to know what to believe. So, it's worth assessing the purpose of the legislation, which the House has already passed a version of, and what it would actually do.
The vehicle for the catchall measure is called budget reconciliation, a process created by Congress half a century ago to provide a fast track to bills that would bring spending and taxing into closer balance. That means it can't be filibustered, so Republicans only need a bare majority to get it through the Senate.
But over the years, Republicans and Democrats alike have perverted the intent of reconciliation, using the advantage of the fast track to blow ever bigger holes in the budget. That's what OBBB would do, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The most obvious tell is that its enactment would require an increase in the legal cap on the national debt. If the debt were going down, there would be no need to raise the limit.
Specifically, the House-passed bill would cut taxes by $3.7 trillion or so over a decade — largely by extending the rates that Trump and Congress put in place in 2017. At the same time, it would slash 'mandatory' spending — the accounts that pay out based on eligibility for long-standing programs rather than through annual 'discretionary' appropriations — by $1.3 trillion over a decade. The debt hole that's left is about $2.4 trillion.
The White House argues that the CBO's bottom line is wrong because it wants congressional accountants to ignore the fact that current tax rates are set to expire. Instead, Trump's team contends, the CBO should assume that current rates will be extended — like an athlete assuming his income will continue to flow in when his existing contract is up. If Congress does nothing, taxes will go back up, which would bring a burst of revenue at a cost to taxpayers.
In his bid to defeat the measure, or at least rewrite it, Elon Musk has charged that it is full of 'pork' — a term that, until he used it, was reserved for earmarks in the annual discretionary spending bills that are unaffected by OBBB.
Calling the measure a 'disgusting abomination,' Musk treats it as a spending bill. But while there are some increases in funding — primarily for the Defense Department and efforts to combat illegal immigration — the main provisions are focused on slashing taxes and federal programs, including Medicaid and food stamps.
The debt comes from the fact that the bill would not cut spending nearly as much as it would reduce revenue. And that's just arithmetic.