Celebrity Deathmatch: Trump vs Musk Edition

What can we learn from the Trump/Musk fallout?

So, it finally happened. Musk and Trump have ended their “Epic Bromance.” What began on paper as a meeting of the minds over the incoming Trump White House’s plan to staff the administration with true believers and destroy the Deep State ended the way everyone outside of the cult knew it would, in chaos.

It’s fitting that it came to this, too; not so much that inevitable conflict arose between two powerful figures vying for political and cultural influence. Rather that it unfolded primarily through spectacle. And what spectacle! I wasn’t the only one who felt like my X timeline had sent me back to the days before our nightmare era when Twitter was fun, the days of real-time playoff basketball memes, or that week we were all months into being locked inside and glued to our screens only to discover that He Had It. In this way, the ongoing Trump/Musk feud is a classic, late Web 2.0 Event: Elon, a dullard, singularly possessed of an overwhelming need to be loved, with a wallet so bottomless he bought the app he thought would give it to him, self-destructing through the very same memetic logics he failed to master on his own. If you spend that much time online trying to be funny eventually you will; but it won’t happen the way you had imagined. And then there’s Trump, the reality TV auteur who understands better than anyone on the planet the logics of televisuality he weaponizes to capture the attention he both craves and controls.

One analysis of the breakup would simply point to this vast multimedia apparatus both men use to manage their empires, under which the rest of us access whatever reality we think we live in. But it seems telling that all of this is mostly experienced as if it were a silly feud between celebrity rappers rather than as a political event. The Right is months into their newly-captured control of the better part of the American state apparatus, and they are acting like it’s their last chance to take over the world. Anything that goes wrong can be an opportunity, not only for us to learn but to highlight weaknesses and fractures even they might be missing. And this one involves two of them! So we should enjoy the drama—and to be clear, it is extremely funny—but it would behoove us to see through the spectacle and try to understand what, exactly, is going on.

The dominant liberal perspective on the feud seems to be that this was an inevitable outcome of two narcissists vying for control over the institutions they don’t know how to operate. This one was prepared from the beginning; as soon as it was announced that Elon Musk would be spearheading a new project called the Department Of Government Efficiency, Real Journalists and Democrats recoiled in shock and predictions of disaster. How could these two get along? Trump will dump Musk the moment he steps on his toes! But it seemed as if their furor was not necessarily in response to DOGE articulating a clear plan to complete the Right’s decades-long project of dismantling civil society and hand it over to private, commercial interests. The real problem seemed to be that such perfectly legitimate work would be overseen by morons who named the whole thing after an old meme nobody has used in earnest since 2012 (except for Elon, which is kind of the point).¹

But it’s important to note that the breakup didn’t unfold the way most of us had expected. Until the past few weeks, Trump and Musk mostly stayed out of each other’s hair as they went about their business, appearing on camera for various photo-ops with what Elon had assumed would be matching hats, saying nice things about each other, assuring their audiences the savings would trickle down to the Precious American Taxpayer if they just had a little more patience. While the rest of us were looking on in horror, the online right were jerking themselves off with Epic AI-generated memes imagining the two as a dynamic duo, saving civilization by ushering in a new mythos of American Business Greatness, reborn from the ashes of Bidenomics. Ted Cruz bought a Tesla because people were being Mean to Elon. Every day there was a new crypto asset (Trumpcoin auspiciously launched two days before the inauguration), bringing millions of disaffected young men from a rapidly decentralizing new media sphere into the core of the Right’s ongoing coalitional transformation.

This is precisely what critics missed: the spectacle of Musk shamelessly parading himself around like a moron provided a successful cover for what was really going on behind the scenes as the White House went about its business. This convenient arrangement had the potential to gently bring that new coalition into the party: gambling addicts enamored with Musk, convinced that crypto was their ticket to stability (and maybe a girlfriend), hoping against hope they were one good post away from becoming the next dumb guy podcast star. This is what happens when your economy can’t promise stable careers in a growing industrial project, by the way.

We don’t pay enough attention to these demographic shifts on the Right. Trump first went down that escalator to enter our political world over a decade ago, and the reactionary suburban retirees who used to make up such a central part of their coalition have been decreasing in influence by the year. Trump might control all three branches of government, but even they admit they are using up all their political capital now to destroy the economy before we all realize it by the midterms. But despite being the party of traditional American business, the Republican party still only knows how to view class and coalition as operating in the realm of visual signification and self-identification. This is why they are right when they say they are the party of the working class, by which they mean guys in pickup trucks. That’s because American society has very little real class consciousness and it’s only getting worse as the memory of the 20th century fades further with every new iPhone model.

I think this is part of what DOGE was responding to. It was a media spectacle that absorbed long-existing ideas on the right about “fiscal responsibility” and threw them into the hyper-online world of crypto and the Silicon Valley right, a mode of discursive outreach designed to expand the coalition and manage its ideological undercurrents. Whoever thought they were in charge—Musk buying that hat and pretending to be a Christian, Trump hoping Elon could take the heat for defunding PBS—what mattered is what it gave rise to, even while it was busy destroying. After time, Musk seemed to figure out he could weasel his companies into the federal bureaucracy with every new door he kicked in. One could theorize he saw the whole thing as an opportunity as the world’s richest man to stage a coup of his own, the world’s wealthiest capitalist now overseeing the world’s largest economy himself. But none of it was embedded at the material level of the economy itself. Musk’s real coup was over contracts, signatures on paper that can be fed through a shredder if he ever lost control of his empire. In other words, he couldn’t offer the people who worked for his companies as footsoldiers for the right in the same way he could offer anonymous posters on the internet as a mass of potential converts to the Right’s political project.

Still, it worked for a while. Fox News would close the night by announcing to the MAGA faithful they found yet another wasteful study on potatoes (you know, food?), and Musk’s antics would make the rounds on TikTok for the kids, and BAM, only the blue hairs are complaining about school lunches. For the better part of six months, everything was working; they were laying off thousands of federal workers and replacing them with contractors (something liberals are enamored with themselves), saving the government trillions billions millions of dollars, and most importantly: owning the libs in the process. We were the only ones paying attention to the anomalies, which over time began appearing through sporadic leaks to the media about how much everyone hated being around Elon, or in live footage Fox couldn’t editorialize or explain away.

But then the paradigm started to shift. As Thomas Kuhn reminds us, anomalies in a given epistemological system are at first all but imperceptible, stuck as we are looking for what we have been trained to see. But once enough accidents start to accumulate, they eventually are noticed by those who know how to see something new. Believe it or not, the Trump crowd was the first to notice, insofar as they were actually the ones spending time around Elon trying to hijack cabinet meetings with an epic meme, or having to deal with his increasingly public crippling Ketamine bender that started to impact his appearance as well as his behavior.

Finally it was announced that Elon was going to be stepping back from DOGE, but he never seemed to actually be on his way out. At one point, Elon appeared with Trump wearing a black tire around his eyes with a face that just screamed at you SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT HERE. There were rumors of some kind of romantic liaison with Actual Nazi Stephen Miller’s wife, which was suggested as one source of the injury, later word came out that the punch likely came from Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, who had been very public in his disdain for Musk since the early days DOGE’s onslaught. Musk, to his credit, acknowledged that the black eye was indeed the result of an altercation: his son “X” (jesus christ) accidentally poked him while the two were horsing around.

Here’s what seems to have been reconstructed in order to describe what happened next: everyone had finally had enough of Elon—and by everyone I mean everyone, from the Tesla board to his Saudi investors to the RNC, furious he likely threw a crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court election through his undisciplined posting. At this point, Musk is chewed out by Trump, after which he finds time to play with his son (?) before running to X, his personal diary machine, to tweet against the Big Beautiful Bill, after which all hell breaks loose. I’m not going to round up all of the responses because you’ve seen them, and they are funny enough on their own to demand you encounter them directly rather than through my filter. But this catches us up to the present and gives critics the chance to finally prove they were right all along. These critiques were right insofar as anyone could tell you a guy like Elon Musk was going to fuck up, and fuck up bad. The vagaries of personality defects and ego are convenient laurels upon which liberals can rest their theory of History, it allows them to make sense of the chaotic present catastrophe as the result of a few bad decisions made by characters who, like a scorned narrator in an airport novel, foreshadows their own downfall on the book’s opening pages. Far be it to admit it’s actually about a crisis of capital accumulation as such.

Does it matter exactly what happened outside the spectacle? Yes, but I don’t claim to possess any hidden knowledge from behind closed doors as Elon took a chainsaw to the National Science Foundation. I have guesses, but I couldn’t tell you who was in charge the entire time—nor who thought they were, these are both powerful capitalists. But the Musk/Trump alliance collapsed into a dramatic spectacle precisely because that is what it was always meant to be: a story about the Awesomesauceness of the Trump White House and its vision to Bring Back Prosperity. This was a story they wanted to tell a new audience, knowing full well they couldn’t offer them any material promises, but hoping the memes would bring them in and keep them there. It certainly wasn’t meant for the civil servants newly unemployed and without benefits (they vote for the Democrats anyway), in fact, it wasn’t even for the blue collar worker who knows the Mexicans are coming for their job because the TV says so. It was for a generation of Right-curious, incoherently post-ideological Chat GPT priests, a “class” who know deep down inside there isn’t a place for them in the economy Trump is ushering into being, but that maybe, just maybe, that this guy Elon could reignite the Promethean American Business spirit Woke caused us all to forget we had.

Trump doesn’t need DOGE to dismantle whatever is left of the welfare state. He has the Big Beautiful Bill to do that, although now he has to figure out a new way to assign blame for its effects as skeptical Senators realize they are now on the hook for the water Elon had been carrying up to that point. That this all finally exploded with Musk’s rejection of the bill seems so symptomatic. In classic Freudian fashion, Musk’s rejection of the bill clearly has less to do with its contents than with a realization he had ceased to be useful, that the family he thought he had finally found hated his guts, kicked him out the door and told him he’s adopted as he walked away in shame. Now, as he goes home to pick up the pieces, it turns out the integration of his companies into the federal infrastructure he thought would give him access to power might be turned against him to seize his life’s work and hand it over to a man who built his wealth on shady real estate deals that are his family’s specialty (a conflict between capitalists, in other words). Musk played the role well, but the episode is over, and he lost. It remains to be seen what he’ll do in response, but it seems fitting his only real defense seems to be reminding everyone of what they already knew or have insulated themselves from believing—that Trump, who was elected to the Presidency mere days after revealing himself as a sexual predator on national television, had ties with Jeffrey Epstein. Alex Jones seems pissed off but who knows how long that is going to last.

Now what? I have no idea, and it’s a fools errand to predict anything in the right wing mediasphere beyond a guess that whatever post is at the top of the eternally refreshing feed probably has something to do with eugenics or masculine virility. Will the crypto idiots turn on Trump and follow Kekius Maximus into war against MAGA’s decades-built capture of the American right? None of that can happen through the media logics that defined their feud, and while there’s plenty of embarrassment to go around, the fact remains that this coalition between the Republican Party and a nascent digital reactionary force failed to permanently fuse the two together.

That’s because DOGE was a spectacle designed to be consumed, with the hopes of distributing responsibility for the effects of what is being forced on us so far and wide that anyone upset would be diverted while new believers were being baptized by the post. The Right knows that it can’t offer a new economic contract to the country, that the machine has been broken for the better part of 50 years, and that the seniors who live off their investments and fall asleep in the chair listening to Fox News only have about a decade of influence left in the coalition. We should be thankful for this fact, and that the alliance between Musk and Trump was shortsighted enough to chase immediate benefits at the expense of creating long lasting political economic institutional connections with an emerging class of voters who will one day be the ones running the country. That’s going to be scary enough without a Musk/MAGA synthesis, and we should be thankful to face what else is coming with the knowledge we still don’t know what shape it will take.

1. My own representative, Blue Dog “moderate” “centrist” “whatever-you-want-to-call-me-as-long-as-you-don’t-think-I’m-one-of-Those-Democrats-even-though-I-am” would regularly make statements to the effect of acknowledging the necessity of DOGE but criticizing the way it was being done. Which is baffling for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that NOBODY LIKES DOGE OR ELON MUSK AND EVERY POLL SAYS SO!!!! Someday I might write more about my thoughts on Glusenkamp Perez, who I think many leftists don’t fully understand (this district is not a “Portland Suburb” like national critics like to argue, imagining a nose ringed PDX AOC could take this district peopled by suburban Evangelical small business guys, who own glocks and listen to Joe Rogan while fulfilling orders for their instagram hot sauce company). It is just true that the only Democrat who could win this district needs to distance themselves from a certain image of “the left” that occupies the minds of voters; what’s baffling is that she thinks the way to do this is by chumming up with Vox neoliberals whose only constituency is themselves.