Since taking office in January, President Trump has faced almost no meaningful opposition.
Congress has been acquiescent and conspicuously uninterested in oversight. He has bulldozed past the courts to impose his will on immigration policy and exact retribution on law firms and universities. Conservative media outlets have backed him and his agenda, and some mainstream news organizations have been cowed.
But now Mr. Trump is not just confronting a powerful foe for the first time this year — he is going toe-to-toe with an angry rival in Elon Musk, who has the capacity to sustain a fight and shares the president’s go-for-jugular instincts and willingness to scorch the earth to achieve even short-term advantage.
It is a new challenge for Mr. Trump, who has always had a knack for cowing and humiliating rivals and using social media and the soft and hard powers of the presidency to steamroll any opposition.
Mr. Musk, who owns X and has 220 million followers, can match or arguably exceed Mr. Trump’s volume on social media, given the limited reach of Truth Social, the president’s own platform.
Mr. Trump may be a billionaire, but Mr. Musk is the world’s wealthiest man and among its most successful entrepreneurs and technology visionaries.
If it were a matchup of schoolyard bullies or cinematic monsters, it would be a real fight.
“It really is like Godzilla versus Kong,” said Costas Panagopoulos, a professor of political science at Northeastern University.
But for all the irresistible allure of watching two of the world’s most powerful men savage each other, there is much substance at stake.
Their battle comes at a moment when Mr. Trump is engaged in a delicate dance on Capitol Hill to get his signature legislation, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, passed through Congress. At the same time, he is trying to negotiate the end to foreign conflicts that are proving much more intractable than he predicted.
It is not clear how long their feud will continue, at least at the level of intensity on display on Thursday. And Mr. Musk, the owner of SpaceX and Tesla, has much to lose from a protracted fight against Mr. Trump, whose hold over the Republican Party has been unshakable and whose powers to harm Mr. Musk’s interests are extensive.
But their rift has for the first time brought into the open vulnerabilities for Mr. Trump that had largely been papered over.
The president’s big-spending habits have long rankled a small group of libertarian-minded lawmakers who often raise concerns about the growing national debt but are frequently pressured into submission. Now, with Mr. Musk taking up their cause, they have added firepower, further endangering the passage of the legislation carrying Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda, which include billions in tax cuts, funding for the border wall and restrictions on Medicaid — but also a hike in the debt ceiling.
The Trump-Musk feud could also serve as a major distraction as the administration tries to carry out tricky negotiations across the world on matters of trade, war and peace, including with Russia, Iran and China. Mr. Musk suggested on Thursday that Mr. Trump’s tariff strategy could drive the United States into recession later this year, surfacing a concern that some economists share.
There is also the matter of Mr. Musk’s substantive work in aerospace through his company SpaceX, which the federal government heavily relies on. After Mr. Musk attacked the president, Mr. Trump threatened to pull his contracts. The billionaire businessman said he would begin decommissioning a capsule used to take astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station. (Mr. Musk then said he would not follow through with the threat.)
Todd Belt, the director of the political management program at George Washington University, predicted that if the two men did not patch up their differences, they could end up backing different candidates in Republicans primaries in 2026.
“Elon Musk is a person who likes to take risks, and his businesses are so deeply invested in government, you can’t see him really getting out of politics,” Mr. Belt said. “So I think ultimately, what we might really see is Musk primary candidates and Trump primary candidates in 2026.”
Mr. Trump rose in politics in part because of his knack for sizing up his target’s weaknesses, and then relentlessly mocking them. His one-liners, like “Low-Energy Jeb” Bush and “Little Marco” Rubio, helped end rival campaigns and either drive his opponents out of politics altogether or convince them to bend the knee.
But now in Mr. Musk, he has met an opponent with social media prowess and a propensity to punch below the belt.
Throughout the day on Thursday, the two men traded blows on their respective social media platforms: Mr. Trump disparaging Mr. Musk on his Truth Social site, suggesting his opposition to the legislation was motivated by greed and a desire for elective vehicle subsidies for Tesla; and Mr. Musk bad-mouthing the president on his much larger site, X, formerly known as Twitter.
Although Mr. Trump’s feud with Mr. Musk began as a policy dispute, it was Mr. Musk who quickly took it into the gutter, suggesting the president might be implicated in the sex-trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, a multimillionaire who hanged himself in a federal jail in New York in 2019.
He then endorsed the impeachment of Mr. Trump and vowed to outlast him in politics.
“Trump has 3.5 years left as president,” Mr. Musk wrote on X, “but I will be around for 40-plus years.”
The president, who started off with rather mild criticism that he had been “disappointed” in Mr. Musk, was soon declaring that the billionaire had gone “CRAZY!”
Mr. Trump’s allies took up the fight and rallied to his side: Stephen K. Bannon, one of the president’s former advisers, called for Mr. Musk to be deported. Mr. Musk’s supporters, in turn, have railed against the president online, even on the president’s own platform.
“Trump has always governed with chaos, but I think anybody who thought that a second term in office was going to be disciplined and steady, this disabuses them of that notion,” said William G. Howell, the dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Government and Policy. “And still, even when you know what’s coming, it’s hard not to repeatedly, continually be surprised at the level of vitriol and just how public and sudden it is. It’s really extraordinary.”
On Capitol Hill, Republicans have been wary about saying a cross word about either man and seem to be hoping they will be able to wait out the war of words without having to take a side. They have long been fearful of crossing Mr. Trump, and this week, as Mr. Musk railed against the president’s legislation, they found themselves scrambling to mollify the billionaire even as he threatened to unseat them if they supported the Trump agenda.
Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, summed up the awkward spot G.O.P. lawmakers found themselves in, like a child choosing which parent to stay with after a divorce.
“But … I really like both of them,” Mr. Lee wrote on X.
Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
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