Only in Washington could a legislative process called “reconciliation” actually drive President Donald Trump and his erstwhile ally Elon Musk apart.
Less than a week after Musk stepped away from his role at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency, with a seemingly gracious exit from the Trump administration, a full-on feud finally broke out.
Within a few hours on the afternoon of June 5, Trump accused Musk of going crazy and mused on social media about pulling the tech billionaire’s government contracts. Musk took to X to accuse Trump of being named in the Epstein files, claiming it was the real obstacle to their promised public release, and seemingly endorsed a post calling for Trump’s impeachment and replacement with Vice President JD Vance.
The proximate cause of their split was the so-called big, beautiful bill, through which the bulk of the Trump second-term agenda was to be enacted by Congress in straight party-line votes. This includes making the Trump tax cuts permanent and new funding for immigration enforcement, as well as new deficit spending, budget forecasters projected, raising Musk’s ire.
Even before Musk removed his many DOGE baseball caps, he was increasingly sniping at the bill, which passed the House by one vote and is now working its way through the Senate. “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” he told CBS News while still technically a special government employee, “but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said.
Finally freed of his tethers to Trump, Musk began to amp up the criticism, saying he “just can’t stand it anymore.”
“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” Musk wrote on X. “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
Initially, Musk left Trump and the White House out of it. But his complaints emboldened fiscal hawks in the Senate, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), while making some House Republicans who had voted for it express second thoughts.
But it always seemed likely that this would eventually irritate Trump. “Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, where he and Musk had traded kind words just days before. The president described himself as “very disappointed” in Musk.
Soon afterward, Musk was threatening to start a centrist political party (though he would need to get the Constitution amended to be eligible to serve as its presidential nominee) and taking credit for Trump’s victory.
Musk was a big spender on behalf of Trump in that campaign. Republicans now seem unlikely to be beneficiaries of his largesse as they defend their congressional majorities next year. They may even be targeted by Musk for primary or general election challenges.
The man behind SpaceX and Tesla also partnered with conservative activist Charlie Kirk to take on the experienced Democratic field operation and turn out low-propensity voters. Trump swept all seven battleground states.
But it remains to be seen whether Musk has the same juice on the Right after going so negative against Trump, who has now been perched atop the Republican Party for nearly a decade. Musk also tipped his hand that he wasn’t bothered just by the big, beautiful bill’s deficits but also by its cuts to electric vehicle subsidies.
Trump has clashed with close allies before. One of the most notable rifts of his first term came when he fired Steve Bannon as his top White House strategist, slamming the populist some commentators dubbed as the real intellectual force behind Trumpism.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” Trump said in a statement. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.” Trump credited “the forgotten men and women of this country” for his 2016 win and added, “Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself.”
Bannon remained an influential figure in MAGA circles afterward, and the two eventually reconciled. But his nationalist strain of conservatism predated his affiliation with Trump, while Musk is a recent convert to techno-libertarianism. The Trump-Musk split is also less one-sided and feels more personal.
ELON MUSK EXIT PART OF TRADITION ON SPENDING FAILURE
Interestingly, Bannon was always a Musk skeptic within Trumpworld. He called Musk a “total and complete phony” who was “owned — lock, stock, and barrel — by the Chinese Communist Party.”
Bannon took a victory lap after this big, not-so-beautiful blowup. He told the New York Times that Musk is an illegal immigrant who “should be deported from the country immediately.”
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.