It was a comic book come to life. Bam! Pow! Zing! The two most powerful men in the world broke up. Badly. Donald Trump will always trump anyone who goes up against him because, well, he’s the president who loves to fight. But Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is a worthy adversary who, by many accounts, went a little crazy attacking the president on social media.
TV news networks also went crazy, devoting hours and hours to this long-predicted eye-popping divorce of the masters of the universe. But for a medium that relies on interviews and video, Musk called their bluff. No interviews, only X posts. Silence. Of course, it helps that Musk owns X and hundreds of millions see his posts. A far cry from more modest news ratings.
And it’s remarkable in this age where pictures and sound make the story, news programs were forced to produce graphics from the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X. Nobody else could get away with this.
Trump took the traditional route: Talking on television, giving interviews, slamming his once-best friend. He supplemented his attacks on his social media platform, Truth Social, insisting he had asked Musk to leave the administration. And the result was the biggest entertainment fest of the year. You can’t blame the media for blowing this story out of the water. It was a jaw-dropping display of prowess and gut punches.
Musk, who spent almost $300 million on Trump’s campaign, fired the first shot, railing against his “big, beautiful bill,” which, if passed by the Senate, contains Trump’s entire domestic agenda. Musk called it an “abomination.” And he said it would drive up the federal deficit and undo the work he did cost-cutting for DOGE. Trump, playing hardball, threatened to cut off Musk’s billions of dollars in SpaceX contracts.
The president, who never lets an insult go unanswered, said Musk has “lost his mind” and he had “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and posted that he was, yes, “CRAZY.” It descended into more personal attacks with Musk essentially accusing Trump of being a pedophile when he was hanging out in the ‘80s with Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of sex trafficking of minors. He died in prison in 2019.
“Time to drop the really big bomb. @donaldtrump is in the Epstein files. This is the real reason they have not been made public, Have a nice day, DJT!” Trump shared a post on Truth Social written by Epstein’s former lawyer saying, “I can say authoritatively, unequivocally, and definitively that he had no information to hurt President Trump. I specifically asked him!”
And Musk shared another post calling for Trump’s impeachment, responding “yes.” Musk’s bull-headed, impulsive outbursts caused his net worth to take a nosedive. Tesla’s 18% drop cost him $157 billion in market share. He has since deleted the Epstein and impeachment posts.
Trump spent last Friday morning calling anchors with on-the-record comments about how he’s not thinking about Musk at all, though the phone blitz would strongly suggest otherwise. He told Fox’s Bret Baier that “Elon’s totally lost it,” and he has no interest in speaking to him.
Besides the showbiz aspect of the smackdowns, the policy implications of the bill have real consequences for the country. And that alone justifies the coverage. It was the perfect storm for TV, which can pretend to be interested in the substance of the bill, while really going haywire over what MSNBC host Chris Hayes called the “Real Housewives of Mar-a-Lago.”
The bill includes provisions that would reduce Medicaid spending, and includes funding for border security and possibly completing the border wall. And it proposes making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. Even though he disputes the numbers, nonpartisan estimates say the bill would increase the budget deficit by at least $2.4 trillion over ten years.
The slugfest leads us to wonder why this happened in the first place. I tend to agree with the New York Times, which said Musk was angry that his candidate to run NASA had his nomination withdrawn, though it was already known that he’d contributed to Democrats. But I also agree with Donald Trump, who said that Musk missed being in the White House spotlight after leaving his role as head of DOGE. He seemed to love having the world turn on his every action. Once the nonstop media attention died down, he went off the deep end.
Bad for him, but entertaining for the rest of us, if it wasn’t so tragic.
Since we are talking about the hazards of social media posting, I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the controversy swirling around ABC’s Terry Moran, a longtime senior national correspondent who recently interviewed Trump. Late on Saturday night, he wrote that deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is a “world-class hater,” and put the president in that category as well. Moran continued by lambasting Trump: “But his hatred is only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”
As White House officials expressed outrage, ABC suspended Moran, saying the company “stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others…the post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards…”
And late yesterday came word that ABC News had fired Terry Moran — not renewing an expiring contract — which was inevitable, given the way he blew up his career with those harsh and hateful attacks..
Good for ABC. While right-wingers had been slamming Moran, left-wing pundits were hailing him, claiming he was telling the “truth” about Miller and Trump. It’s a mess of Moran’s own making that cost the veteran newsman his job, just like Elon’s posts cost him billions and his reputation. What a toxic mishmash for everyone involved.
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