The Scene
The Donald Trump-Elon Musk alliance ended like it started, 11 months ago: two of the world’s most influential men, on the social networks that they own, posting about each other.
But on Thursday afternoon, as Musk mused on X about supporting Trump’s impeachment, launching a third party, and exposing his supposed ties to Jeffrey Epstein, nationalist conservatives celebrated the self-exile of a tech billionaire they never trusted.
Their man was in the presidency. A South African immigrant who posted cringe, dreamed of microchipped brains, and didn’t understand the importance of halting mass immigration was going to become irrelevant.
“Trump is a hero, and Elon Musk is not,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said on the Thursday episode of his War Room podcast. Musk’s eight-figure support for Trump in 2024 was “deal baggage,” and the deal had been completed months ago.
“Elon Musk is illegal, and he’s gotta go, too,” Bannon said. “Deport immediately.”
Bannon told Semafor late last year that Musk “wrote a quarter-of-a-f*cking-billion-dollar check when we had no money,” and helped execute a winning GOP strategy. But Musk, he added, was out of sync with a populist economic project more than a decade in the making.
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Musk’s public spat with Trump began on Tuesday, when the former DOGE head began attacking the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, warning that it would “bankrupt” the country. Democrats rubbernecked from the sidelines, happy to watch Musk make some of their arguments, skeptical that it would amount to anything.
Pro-Trump conservatives were on surer footing. They saw the end of Musk’s advocacy for policies that clashed with their vision, including visas for highly skilled immigrants and tax credits for electric vehicles. And they spied victory over the GOP’s libertarian wing — down to a handful of congressional Republicans, and Musk — who were more worried about deficit reduction than immigration.
“Debt is an important issue,” the pro-Trump influencer Jack Posobiec wrote on X. “But there is one issue that is more important than all others, and that is Immigration. This bill funds the Mass Deportations.”
This faction of MAGA notched one victory before Trump took office. The day after Christmas, when he was slated to lead DOGE alongside Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy defended tech companies that “hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans,” arguing that modern America didn’t venerate the right skills or ethics.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy wrote.
Ramaswamy left DOGE just hours into the Trump presidency, launching a run for governor of Ohio that Trump would soon endorse. But his riff on American competitiveness, and the need for more smart immigrants, became infamous on the nationalist right.
“When an outsider comes here, gets in your face, and starts throwing definitions at you, and you gotta Google sh*t? We’re not doing that,” said the comedian Sam Hyde in a livestream dedicated to Ramaswamy. “You’re getting called a slur.”
Musk, who had taken Ramaswamy’s side in the argument, kept his role in the administration. He was publicly supportive of moves taken to cut grants for Ivy League schools. But as he exited DOGE, and the administration ramped up efforts to bar foreign students from those schools, Musk did not weigh in.
“I think we want to stick to the subject of the day, which is spaceships, as opposed to presidential policy,” he told CBS News last week, when reporter David Pogue asked about the foreign student crackdown.
David’s view
Musk’s MAGA self-deportation isn’t a total victory for any political faction. The Department of Government Efficiency remains in place; Democrats and liberal groups are still suing to undo its work. And the Musk/DOGE effort to demolish USAID fulfilled a basic nationalist project, pulling back resources for noncitizens and giving the money to Americans. (The agency’s offices are being refitted for Customs and Border Protection.)
But the long-term Trump project, which has been succeeding all year, is transforming the Republican Party from Reaganite national greatness to nationalism — more like Viktor Orban’s Fidesz than George W. Bush’s GOP. As progressives and ex-Republicans fret about foreign scientists fleeing the country, as they quote Emma Lazarus and Martin Niemöller, Trump’s Republicans are raising tariffs and funding more border wall construction.
How far would Trump go to punish Musk? Maybe not as far as Bannon, who wants the government to seize SpaceX and his citizenship. The punishment matters less than the policy, which is to stop seeing the national debt as an existential threat, and understand immigration as an existential threat. Who wins if Trump-endorsed Republicans run on that, and candidates backed by a Musk PAC talk about cutting the deficit? The ending to that story is even more predictable than the ending of this one.
The View From Democrats
California Rep. Ro Khanna, a personal friend of Musk, believed that he could be brought back to the Democratic Party after his fight with Trump. Few Democrats agreed, even though some were using Musk’s “disgusting abomination” language against the OBBBA.
Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said that the donors and voters who helped beat Musk’s candidate in the state’s supreme court race “drove a chisel into a crack in the Republican Hoover Dam,” and got a “historic villain, who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people,” to slink out of politics.
“A few months ago, politicians in both parties were terrified about crossing Trump, because they thought Musk might fund a primary campaign against them,” Wikler told Semafor. “He was Trump’s No. 1 enforcer. Now, he’s been pushed out of the palace, and he’s responding by trying to burn the whole thing down.” Musk’s approval rating with Democrats, he said, was “somewhere between anthrax and the bubonic plague.”
Notable
- Oren Cass, whose American Compass hosted Vice President JD Vance this week, predicted the Musk story’s ending back in February. “The good news is that Trump has historically shown himself highly attuned to what is politically achievable and what is politically unwise, and he seems unlikely to allow DOGE to run wild beyond the point of diminishing returns,” he wrote. “Musk has shown no such judgment. Which likely puts an expiration date on his time in the president’s favor.