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The Politics Desk Pries Apart Musk and Trump. Plus: Pulp, Maggie Rogers, the Secret History of Vine, George Clooney, and More…
Dear Wags,
Such ingratitude!
The messy breakup of Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk—a sure thing from the instant that pair of erratic titans hooked up a few months ago—has arrived. Last October, when the tech tycoon did a herky-jerky dance on stage at a Trump rally in Butler, PA, the Politics Desk gave the dynamic duo a year before they started biting and pulling hair. We were optimists.
How wildly entertaining the last 24 hours of their social media clawing have been. How quickly Musk went from expressing Trump love to the point of homoeroticism to implying Trump was part of Jeffrey Epstein’s merry band of pervs. The president hit back by vowing to suspend the government contracts that made Musk so rich.
Musk countered that he might yank SpaceX's rocket service to NASA. Trump claimed Musk was just mad because his “one, big, beautiful,” deficit-exploding bill cuts incentives for electric vehicles. Musk snapped that an ungrateful Trump would’ve lost without the nearly $300 million he shoveled into his campaign. MAGA witch doctor Steve Bannon demanded Musk be deported. Musk called for impeachment and promised to campaign against Republicans who vote for Trump’s “disgusting abomination” of a budget.
Trump claims Musk is just the latest casualty of Trump Derangement Syndrome—making him at least 50 percent right. Everyone involved is exquisitely unhinged.
Maybe Bill Ackman, hedge fund moneybags and couples counselor, will succeed in his effort to broker a truce. After tweeting, “I support @realDonaldTrump and @elonmusk and they should make peace for the benefit of our great country. We are much stronger together than apart,” Musk replied, “true.” Which some panicked GOP operatives are taking as a parting of the clouds.
These must be people who have never watched an episode of The Real Housewives. The dopamine high from this drama is too much for either of these high-net-worth harridans to resist.
The bigger story here is how Trump played Musk and other members of what’s sloppily shorthanded as the Tech Right into believing he shared their agenda, simply because they had a few enemies in common. Perhaps Musk genuinely believed the president backed his DOGE massacres because he sincerely wanted to streamline big government and make it more like some volatile Santa Clara startup. If so, it’s not just the arrogance that’s breathtaking. It’s the naïveté.
Like so many pilgrims before him, Musk seems to have believed he could force the government to run like a business—specifically, his businesses. This notion rests on a quicksand of false assumptions. For one thing, it should be blindingly obvious that the incentives are different: a government is not supposed to drive profits for a CEO or a handful of shareholders; it’s supposed to operate in the best interests of us all.
It would be jolly if its services were modernized and streamlined, and its alleged inefficiencies and waste poofed to nothingness. What the government should and should not do is a respectable debate to have. How anybody could fool themselves into thinking Trump—of all people!—gives a hoot about such things is another matter.
Musk, who clearly understands the power of grabbing attention, ought to grasp that Trump is driven by little more. He has not read his budget—or much of anything at all. He does not care whether humankind reaches Mars. He does not stay up at night worrying about the dark potentialities of AI or how technology might optimize human life. He is not kitting out an apocalypse compound in New Zealand. He will never reference Atlas Shrugged or play a game of Settlers of Catan.
He is consumed with the next headline, and with his own enrichment and survival. The great unwashed public knows this about him, and plenty support him anyway. It’s the wizards in Silicon Valley who still don’t seem to get it.
Which makes them the latest in a long line of patsies. Once again, Trump is not a real businessman—let alone a startup founder—he’s a genius promoter. And he is a political animal in the most animalistic sense, a student of optics, a master of dominance and revenge. The moguls who think they can do deals with him always misread what he means by the term deal. He seeks only to deepen his advantage, not broker an agreement where everybody wins. He aims to win and not give an inch.
Musk isn’t wrong about Trump’s atrocious budget. His revolt may even give cover to Republicans who backed it out of fear or delusion. As voters catch on, many will likely agree with him. They’ll hate it for gutting Medicare and rewarding the ultra-rich—not because it’s stuffed with pork, as Musk claims. It’s actually not; the spending is naked and aggressive, funneled straight to the Pentagon and the deportation machine. But it is another black eye (they’re going around) for the GOP’s myth of fiscal restraint.
This may not be a problem for Trump’s base, who’ve never been Phil Gramm–style, green-eyeshade types (Google him). But it ought to vex the tech moguls who’ve swallowed a host of policies—on immigration, tariffs, and research—that run counter to their galactic ambitions.
The Tech Right saw Trump as an avatar in their war with the Woke Left. He’s seemingly aligned with them on taxes and deregulation, and has discovered crypto as a spiffy new cash funnel. (He’ll never back them on undermining the strong dollar—he’s too hooked on the word strong.)
They projected libertarian affinities onto him. But Trump is neither a civil nor an economic libertarian. He’s not civil, and he knows nothing of economics. What he does believe in—avidly—is the power of the state, so long as he gets to wield it.
Unlike other Trump adversaries, Musk commands a formidable information platform and understands exactly how to weaponize it. It’s possible he could derail far more than the president’s budget. Still, a web of shared interests makes this a tricky moment for both operators. Musk has spoken of forming a third party (that old dream), but it’s Trump who groks raw human politics, and connects viscerally to people whose hatred of elites extends to the one embodied by Elon Musk.
What Trump and Musk share are psychologies thoroughly juiced and addled by the chaotic information ecosystem that enhances their power. They are both cultural pioneers—pushers and addicts of the same drug. In combat, they both spiraled quickly into fantastical narratives embedded in the digital arena, so much so that those not drowning in it might miss many of the digs. They are hurling insults at one another in a kind of loopy, MAGA social media code.
We’re used to this demeaning incoherence. We should strain to remember how stupid it all is, how it speaks to a bankruptcy of leadership—in Washington, in Silicon Valley, and beyond. Information has become crass, immersive entertainment, and an endless, grinding, competitive sport. It’s easy to forget that people still depend on it to survive.
This isn’t just another smackdown between narcissists. It’s the natural result of the infernal machinery the Valley erected and sold as salvation. The dream of informational freedom has curdled into a hallucinatory feedback loop; utopian visions for humanity’s future devolved into grunty pettiness. The tycoons who preached disruption as a new social gospel are as warped by it as everyone else.
There’s the tedious, Nietzschean swagger of startup culture—the fantasy, voiced by Marc Andreessen, of “technological supermen” remaking the world into a Randian paradise, where innovators are gods. And then there’s the durable reality of guns, bombs, and tanks. These remain in the furry mits of terrestrial rulers—and they have a long habit of crushing empires, virtual or otherwise, that get in their way.
How could Musk have believed, even in a fit of X-juiced pique, that Trump would be grateful? The vanity of an emperor is not to be trifled with. Bannon’s already floated nationalizing Musk’s companies. That sounds absurd, but Trumpian bluster always starts that way. If tech moguls imagined Trump would let them rule the future, they badly underestimated a man whose appetite for scaling up eclipses even their own.
Yours Ever,
Mae Holland
Fore!
Stick (Apple TV+). We might go for a light flaying over lugging clubs around the sun-baked, gnat-swarmed green wasteland of a golf course. That said, Jason Keller’s Stick isn’t about golf any more than Ted Lasso is about footie, any more than Field of Dreams…you get the idea. Here we are again, with a bruised has-been Pryce Cahill (Owen Wilson), having trouble moving on from his ex (Judy Greer), who discovers a kid prodigy (Peter Dager) he thinks he can turn into the next Tiger Woods. The kid has a tough but tender mom (Mariana Treviño) who needs some persuading, but after winding up in a few sand traps, off they go on a road trip with a scrappy sidekick (Marc Maron) to earn the boy a slot in the amateur championships. Along for the ride is Zero (Lilli Kay), the bartender with a heart of gold (there may be no other kind).
Look, just because you’ve played a game a thousand times before doesn’t mean it can’t be fun—if it’s well-executed, that’s part of the fun. Stick (we’d have workshopped the name) is warmhearted and charming. It will teach you that the lessons we learn in golf are really….oh, you know that part!
— Carl Spackler
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