We Made Musk and Trump Fight Each Other

Protest works

Many people predicted the Musk/Trump breakup, and no wonder. Musk and Trump are both massive asshole narcissists used to unrelenting sycophancy from those around them. They’re also both massively incompetent. At some point, they were going to start blaming each other for all the failure and then get enraged at each other because they’re both entirely unable to admit to being failures. Their alliance was never going to last. Unlike Musk’s constantly exploding spacecraft, this is not rocket science.

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Most analysis of the feud has, like that last paragraph, focused on the personalities of the assholes involved. And (as in that last paragraph!) I agree that the asshole personalities involved were a ticking time bomb of assholery. But I think there’s also a danger in treating the tensions in the administration at the moment as solely the product of palace intrigue. The individual awfulness of those in power is relevant. But it’s not the only relevant thing.

As I wrote earlier this week, Musk was pushed out of the White House in large part by the very successful protests against Tesla. Musk has become hugely unpopular, and as a result people have refused to buy his cars. The stock price has fallen; sales plummeted; Tesla investors have been demanding that he actually spend time running the company rather than gallivanting around DC.

Musk’s threats to use his billions to interfere in elections also began to look a lot less credible after he tried to buy a Supreme Court race in Wisconsin only to see his candidate got embarrassingly crushed in part because Ds played up Musk’s influence in the race. Rather than securing his political power and wealth, the public—through protests, through consumer choices, through voting—made Elon Musk’s tenure expensive and humiliating for one, Elon Musk. That’s why he oozed away.

Trump hasn’t been quite so thoroughly chastised, but he’s also had his problems. His policies are very unpopular, and as a result his polling has collapsed. He’s had a drumbeat of court losses; he keeps losing nomination fights and losing personnel; he’s had to return the wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who his administration loudly boasted would never be returned. More, Musk very obviously has not actually cut federal spending as he and Trump promised (a fact which apparently led to an actual fist fight between Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.)

Musk and Trump would probably have fallen out at some point; there’s no question of that. But it’s always easier to negotiate interpersonal conflicts when everything around you is going well. If Musk’s time in the White House was great business for Tesla, he would have had significant incentives to remain close to Trump and to put his ego aside for just a little longer, and just a little longer than that. If Trump could see that Musk’s money was winning him elections, or if he felt in general that with Musk on board everything was going his way, he would probably cheerfully preen about having the world’s richest man at his beck and call while heading out for another golf “victory.”

We’re used to seeing administrative policy and especially administrative personnel as governed from the top down. When powerful people squabble, they squabble based on the personal characteristics of powerful people. When Trump and Musk are slinging poo at each other like squawling fascist monkeys, you naturally tend to attribute their poo slinging to the psychology of squawling fascist monkeys. It’s about them; we’re just along for the ride.

I think it’s important, though, to remind ourselves that we are not just along for the ride. We’re part of a (struggling) democracy. The decisions of the powerful affect us, but our decisions affect them as well. When people protest, when they vote, when they boycott, when they call their reps—when they take to the streets, as they are currently doing in LA—that influences the actions, the calculations, and even the interpersonal relationships of those in power.

Those in power don’t want to admit that; Musk, who considers himself a Nazi Superman, is never going to say, “Oh, yeah, I had to scurry out of the White House like a cockroach because so many people had made fun of my shitty cars.” Trump is never going to admit that the American people think he’s an orange blight. And much of mainstream media, which fancies itself important because of its access to the powerful and the wealthy—and which lives to write more and more Musk puff pieces— is not necessarily in a great place to recognize how the actions of the non wealthy and the non powerful can drive events.

But we should recognize it. Fascist shitheads like Musk and Trump want us to think that they are uniquely suited to lead, and that our fate is in their hands. And to some extent it is; they have a lot of power and can do a lot of harm. What we’ve saw this week, though, was that we have power too—and one way we’ve used it is to get those Nazi shitheads to harm each other.