Sometimes you’re better off letting the children fight.
That was President Trump’s callous wisdom on looking the other way as the Russians and Ukrainians continue to kill each other. But it might better be applied to Trump’s social media spat with Elon Musk. It’s hard to think of two puer aeterni who are more deserving of a verbal walloping.
Their venomous digital smackdown fulgurated on their dueling social media companies, flashing across the Washington sky.
In March, Trump showed off Teslas in the White House driveway and bought an over-$80,000 red Model S. Now, he says he’s going to sell it.
Thursday was the most titillating day here since the sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” when a spaceship landed an alien to warn human leaders to stop squabbling like children, or the aliens would destroy the Earth.
On Friday, Trump tried to convey serenity. “I’m not thinking about Elon Musk,” Trump said aboard Air Force One. He added, “I wish him well.” But Trump then jumped on the phone to knock Elon, telling ABC’s Jonathan Karl that Musk has “lost his mind” and CNN’s Dana Bash that “the poor guy’s got a problem.” Trump had to know that would be seen as a reference to the intense drug use by Musk chronicled by The Times.
As Raheem Kassam, one of the owners of Butterworth’s, the new Trumpworld boîte on Capitol Hill, assured Politico, “MAGA will not sell out to ketamine.”
The Washington Post reported Friday: “Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.”
On Truth Social Thursday, Trump threatened to take away government contracts that have handsomely enriched Elon even though, as Leon Panetta pointed out on CNN, “some of those contracts, particularly on SpaceX, are very important to our national security.”
Elon tried to tie Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, offering no evidence. He shared a post on Epstein that said Trump should be impeached. Trump reposted a message from Epstein’s last lawyer, saying the smear was “definitively” not true.
Musk did, however, expose Trump and Republican lawmakers as hypocrites, using his online bullhorn to shame them about their broken promises to reduce the debt. The big domestic bill is a dog’s breakfast of Republican proposals that could add more than $3 trillion to the debt to make the rich richer, while cutting health care coverage for the poor. Republicans are the ones who always claim they’re fiscally responsible, even while they keep exploding the debt.
Musk reposted Trump’s old tweets on X, such as this one from 2012: “No member of Congress should be eligible for re-election if our country’s budget is not balanced — deficits not allowed!”
Musk sneered: “Where is the man who wrote these words? Was he replaced by a body double!?”
As the weekend began, Trump seemed to be winning the fight, as Musk grew quieter and Fox commentators had pleaded with their parents to get back together.
Trump has exposed Musk’s naïve streak — something I saw back in 2017 when I reported that another tech lord had to explain to Elon that he couldn’t get away from A.I. by going to Mars; it would just follow him there.
Just because Elon hung in the Oval and Mar-a-Lago and debated moving into the Lincoln Bedroom, it didn’t mean he understood politics or power — or Trump.
Trump didn’t care about the potential conflict of interest in having the SpaceX chief pick the head of NASA. But he did care that Musk’s candidate had donated to top Democrats — and about the aborted plan for Musk to attend a briefing about military strategy against China at the Pentagon, and about Musk’s barbed public trashing of Trump’s “beautiful” tariffs and “beautiful” bill.
When I studied Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in graduate school, I was struck by how much the 1818 novel by a teenage girl reminded me of the bros in Silicon Valley.
The brilliant scientists with their edgy experiments, too high on their own supply to consider the ramifications of A.I. What if your creation grows stronger than you and comes back to haunt you?
Musk posted that Trump was ungrateful because the nearly $300 million he spent on Republicans is what made Trump president. Musk created the monster!
But Trump created a monster, too. He gave Elon free rein and enormous power over a world he knew nothing about and people for whom he had no empathy. And in the end, of course, Elon’s demon mode came out and Trump’s monster turned on him.
“Elon was ‘wearing thin,’” Trump acidly posted, knowing how to hit a narcissist where it hurts. “I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”
For all his macho swagger, Trump sure loves a catfight.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook
The post Clash of the Bilious Billionaires appeared first on New York Times.
