Elon Musk tells Trump: You'd have lost without me — follow live

Times

2 days ago

Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary-general, said that most US allies supported President Trump's demand that they invest 5 per cent of gross domestic product on defence and were ready to ramp up security spending even more.
'There's broad support,' Rutte told reporters after chairing a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels on Thursday. 'We are really close,' he said, and added that he has 'total confidence that we will get there' by the next Nato summit in three weeks.
European allies and Canada began to step up investments in their armed forces since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The stock price of Elon Musk's electric vehicle company Tesla has plummeted as his war of words with the president has burst into public view.
Tesla shares were trading at $302 (222 pounds) at 1pm ET, down about 8 per cent from where they opened on Thursday morning.
Sources close to Musk have said that his anger at the so-called 'big beautiful bill' was fuelled by the Trump administration's moves to remove subsidies for electric vehicles.
The rapidly deteriorating relationship between Trump and Musk continues to play out on the tech billionaire's social media platform X.
Trump said during the Oval Office meeting that he would have won the swing state of Pennsylvania without the estimated $280 million in campaign donations from the Tesla chief executive.
Musk wrote in response: 'Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.'
'Such ingratitude,' he added.
From Katy Balls in Washington
Where President Macron of France put on a bold display when he met Trump in February — daring to interrupt him to correct the record on European aid to Ukraine — today Merz adopted a softly, softly approach.
After giving Trump his grandfather's birth certificate, Merz let the president take centre stage as he criticised Elon Musk and talked up trade with China.
The one point of light tension was on Russia-Ukraine, as Trump equivocated the two sides by saying: 'You're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.' Merz intervened gently to name Russia as the aggressor. The hope will be that he has more luck pushing this point in the private talks that follow the two leaders' display for the cameras.
Elon Musk has responded in real time to criticism levelled at him by President Trump that he knew the tax and spending bill 'better than anybody'.
'False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it,' Musk wrote on X.
Musk further denied Trump's assertion that his complaints were related to rollbacks of electric vehicle subsidies. He wrote: 'Whatever. Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill.'
Trump has ended the press conference. The two leaders will now head to private lunch.
Merz demurred when asked if he agreed with Trump's characterisation that the Russia-Ukraine war was akin to a playground fight between children.
The German chancellor told Trump 'we are looking for more pressure on Russia' to end the war, and said he was the most important voice in the peace process.
Merz implored Trump to 'look at the kids, the kids who have been kidnapped'.
Trump said that the world would be 'amazed' by how tough he would be on Russia if the fighting continued.
'Remember this — they like to say I'm friends with Russia. I'm not friends with anybody,' he said.
President Trump compared the war between Russia and Ukraine to 'two young children fighting like crazy in a park'.
'Sometimes you're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart,' he added. He said he told Putin during a phone call yesterday that 'maybe you're going to have to keep fighting, suffering a lot'.
'You see it in hockey, you see it in sports, the referees let them go at it for a while,' he added.
Asked about a deadline for imposing further sanctions on Russia, Trump said that the date was 'in my brain'.
Merz agreed with Trump that Germany was 'looking for measures to bring this war to an end', and mentioned that tomorrow is the 81st anniversary of D Day.
'That was not a pleasant day for you?' Trump asked.
'This was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship,' Merz replied.
Trump said he expected President Putin to respond with force to the successful drone attack by Ukraine on Russia's bombing fleet last week.
'He got hit, he's been doing hitting,' said Trump. 'But he got hit hard. I don't think he's playing games.'
Trump said that Merz 'feels the same way' about wanting to end the war.
Trump said he was surprised by Elon Musk's reaction to his 'big, beautiful' tax and spending bill.
'Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody,' Trump said. 'He only developed a problem when he found out we were going to have to cut the EV mandate,' he added, referring to a subsidy that paid billions of dollars to Musk's electric car company Tesla.
'I'm very disappointed in Elon, I've helped Elon a lot,' the president added.
Musk has called the bill a 'disgusting abomination' and lobbied Republicans in Congress to oppose its passing.
Trump casually dismissed claims that the US would withdraw its troops from Germany, saying they would remain 'if they'd like to have them there'.
There are about 35,000 active-duty US troops stationed in Germany.
'They're highly paid troops and they spend a lot of money in Germany,' Trump said.
Merz has brought the president the framed birth certificate of Trump's grandfather, Friedrich Trump. Friedrich Trump was born in Kallstadt, Germany, which was then part of the Kingdom of Bavaria before immigrating to the United States in 1885.
The questions turned to domestic politics and Trump's order to open a criminal investigation into anyone who worked to hide Biden's mental decline from the public during his time in office.
Trump said that Biden 'didn't have much of an idea what was going on'.
'He was never for open borders, he was never for transgender for everybody,' said Trump.
Trump said that his interactions with Merz over the past few months had been both 'difficult' and 'good'.
'I've been dealing with the chancellor. He's a very good man to deal with,' said Trump. 'He's difficult, you wouldn't want me to say you're easy, right?'
He said he hoped to make progress on trade and tariff negotiations with Merz.
Trump characterised his 90-minute call with President Xi as 'very positive'.
He said that the two countries had agreed to hold talks in the near future to reach an impasse over trade and rare earth materials.
'I'll be going there with the first lady at a certain point and he'll be coming here, hopefully,' he said.
Trump's Oval Office meeting with Merz began with questions about his travel ban on 12 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran and a host African nations.
Trump said that the ban was needed for security and terrorism concerns. 'We have thousands of murderers,' Trump told reporters.
'I hate to say this in front of the chancellor, but you have a little problem too. You have your own difficulties too.'
Merz has arrived at the White House before the first meeting between the two leaders.
Trump greeted the German chancellor with a friendly handshake at the door to the White House and the two leaders walked inside.
Asked by a reporter if he had a message for the German people, Trump responded: 'We love the people of Germany.'
Merz has struck a cordial tone in the lead-up to Thursday's Oval Office meeting, writing in a statement this week that the US was 'an indispensable friend and partner of Germany'.
'Our alliance with America was, is, and remains of paramount importance for the security, freedom, and prosperity of Europe,' the chancellor wrote.
Those remarks stood in contrast to his posturing prior to his election as chancellor in May. In February, Merz said that strengthening Europe was his 'absolute priority' in order to 'achieve independence' from the US.
The same month, he wrote on X that his impression was 'that Russia and America are finding common ground — over the heads of Ukraine, and consequently over those of Europe'.
President Trump held a 90-minute phone conversation with President Xi of China on Thursday amid stalled trade negotiations between the two countries.
The US president said the conversation had a 'very positive conclusion' and announced that the two countries would hold talks in the hopes of breaking an impasse over tariffs and global supplies of rare earth minerals.
'Our respective teams will be meeting shortly at a location to be determined,' Trump wrote on his social media platform.
Trump added that Xi had 'graciously' invited him and the first lady Melania Trump to visit China, and that he had reciprocated the gesture. The Chinese foreign ministry said Trump had initiated the call between the leaders.
Over the years foreign leaders have gone out of their way to bear eye-catching gifts when they meet President Trump: a personalised golf club, a nativity scene made of mother-of-pearl, a gold-plated model of a jet fighter and a presidential aircraft worth an estimated $400 million.
When Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, steps into the Oval Office on Thursday, though, he does so with the unusual advantage of bringing more or less precisely the thing Trump has asked for.
Barely five months ago Trump's demands that his European Nato allies stump up 5 per cent of their GDP for defence were regarded by most national capitals as outlandish, at or beyond the worst end of their expectations.
Yet now the yardstick is rapidly becoming a matter of orthodoxy in the alliance, and no member state has moved so far towards it in such a short span of time as Merz's Germany.
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Speaking to German journalists before his meeting with Trump, the chancellor said he wanted to strengthen Berlin's relations with the White House.
'I am looking forward to the visit,' Merz said. 'We are well-prepared. Nato will be a major topic, as will trade and Ukraine. When we talk about German domestic politics [the right-wing AFD], I will use clear words.
'The chancellery will intensify bilateral talks.'
Germany's spy agency, the BfV, has classified the Alternative for Germany party, of AfD, as a far-right extremist group, saying that the party has on several occasions attempted to 'undermine the free, democratic' order.
Senior members of the Trump administration, including vice-president, JD Vance, have criticised the move, arguing that it undermines freedom of speech.
The US has been engaged in a tariff tit-for-tat with the European Union since Trump's second term began in January. Trump has accused the EU of treating its largest trading partner 'very badly' and claimed that the bloc was created for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the US.
The two sides began talks on a trade deal in April after Trump paused his so-called reciprocal tariffs. The US president then threatened to levy a 50 per cent tariff on European goods, saying the bloc wasn't moving fast enough towards a deal.
Trump later delayed the tariffs until July 9. As talks appeared to be getting back on track, Trump said last week that he would double tariffs on steel and aluminium, including from Europe, to 50 per cent.
An EU spokesman said the move added further uncertainty to the global economy and increased costs for consumers and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.
Merz's government is intensifying a drive that began under his predecessor Olaf Scholz to bolster the German armed forces and counter the looming Russian threat.
In Trump's first term, he frequently singled out Germany for failing to meet the current Nato target of spending 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence. The White House is now demanding at least 5 per cent from its allies.
Scholz set up a €100 billion ($115 billion) special fund to modernise Germany's military after years of neglect.
Merz has endorsed a plan for all Nato countries to aim to spend 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2032.
Merz will be hoping to avoid the kind of Oval Office showdown that President Zelensky of Ukraine and President Ramaphosa of South Africa experienced in recent months.
Asked about the risk of a White House blow-up, Stefan Kornelius, a spokesman for Merz, said the chancellor was 'well-prepared' for the meeting and that he and Trump have 'built up a decent relationship'.
The two leaders have spoken several times by phone either bilaterally or with other European leaders since Merz took office on May 6.