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The Up Side of the War Between Trump and Musk

By John Zmirak Published on June 10, 2025

A benevolent narcissist and an autistic genius walk into a bar …

Okay, I won’t finish that joke because the ugly, public conflict between President Donald Trump and Tesla/X overlord Elon Musk isn’t funny. It took both Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., joining the Trump campaign to squeeze out a win over Kamala Harris. For all her personal flaws and general incompetence, Harris had the help of our entire media, all our elites, lax election laws, and corrupt voting machines — not to mention elements in the Secret Service and FBI who took their duty to guard Trump’s life more as a suggestion than an order — working in her favor.

The Democrats in the crucial 2026 Congressional midterm elections will still have most of those advantages. They’ll also be able to point, with perfect truthfulness, to the most do-nothing Congress in American history. (The hapless Continental Congress under the useless Articles of Confederation in 1787 had more to brag about.) If Trump doesn’t finally cross the Rubicon and defy the lawless federal judges who’ve crippled the executive branch of government so far, his opponents will be able to crow that he accomplished little, too. 

A Feud None of Us Needs

So the last thing patriotic Americans need is the ugly feud between President Trump and Mr. Musk over the “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) now in Congress. I watched it erupt in real time, staying awake halfway across the world to see how bad it would get. And the answer is: really bad. Rightly frustrated that the model U.N. we call the Republican Congress wouldn’t codify the cuts DOGE has sweated to identify, Musk denounced the crucial bill.

Trump responded badly, falsely suggesting that Musk only opposed the flawed reconciliation package because it cut subsidies to electric vehicle makers, such as Tesla. In response, Musk falsely implied that Trump was in on Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile enterprise. It only got worse from there, with reports of past nastiness now emerging.


There have been rumors, on and off, of a conciliatory phone call scheduled between the two, even as Musk tweets about challenging dozens of Republican incumbents in the primaries (a first-rate idea), and funding a third party (an imbecilic, unpatriotic plan).

The Perfect as Enemy of the Good

There’s truth on both sides of the policy argument, but the point is not to take sides. The battle isn’t really about the policy anyway, but a question of personalities, influence, and egos. The BBB is no worse on its fiscal merits than pretty much every such bill passed in the decades since Congress abandoned single-subject bills and dumped the whole national budget into pig-in-a-poke reconciliation bills. In crucial ways, it’s actually better.

The current bill funds the border wall, pays for deportations, and defunds Planned Parenthood. Those three things alone ought to win it our support. If this bill fails, it’s categorically certain that what will come to replace it will break the budget and inflate the national debt by almost as much, without addressing the immigration invasion or the lives of unborn Americans. 

Wonky White House heartthrob Stephen Miller, who has been the most articulate champion of the budget deal, explains its importance bluntly:


So everyone who loves this country ought to be praying good and hard that two of the brilliant, flawed men who love it too can bury their foolish hatchets and work together again. Pray as if your children’s future depended on it, since it does. Unless you want to see the mobs of LGBTQ activists and race communists currently attacking ICE officers in blue cities to open the borders to another 10 million illegal aliens (including Hamas supporters, human traffickers, and cartel members) after the next election, that is.

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So what’s the “up side” of the Trump/Musk feud the title of this article promised to reveal? Just this: The quarrel between these two men, right down to its personal nastiness, is nothing strange or new. In fact, it’s normal politics in a fallen world, of the sort we saw among our Founding Fathers and all through U.S. history. Men with justifiably robust self-esteem have always butted heads, wrestled with, and defamed each other. At least here there’s no prospect of a duel with pistols at dawn, like the one between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. 

If you find yourself on a fainting couch reaching vainly for smelling salts over this dust-up, it might mean that you’ve set your political thermostat by the status quo of just the past 20 years, when Democrats kept issuing escalating demands for revolutionizing our country and Republicans put up a tepid, pathetic pretense of opposing them. You’ve been watching the Washington Generals lose gracefully to the Harlem Globetrotters every single game, and that’s just what you’re used to.

By contrast, neither Trump nor Musk cares what anybody thinks of them (each other included, alas). Each is dead serious about saving this country, and each is partly right. The rough and tumble between them is sincere — and normal for a political party controlled by fallen humans.

Goosestepping into Jonestown

You know what isn’t normal, though? The lockstep, totalitarian unanimity of the Democrats, who march like little Hitler Youth in Nuremburg toward a brave new godless world. It has been positively chilling to see the cult-like obedience those on the Left have to their leaders, and the absolute willingness of those leaders themselves to ignore the nation’s best interests — even in the face of political common sense.

Rallying for gangbangers, human traffickers, jihadis, and convicted murderers demanding free sex-change surgery? I almost want to channel James Carville here and ask these people what they’re smoking.

But I know the answer. It’s brimstone. There’s no this-worldly answer that can explain the Left’s frenzied, self-righteous pursuit of national suicide. Interview someone currently rioting on the streets of Los Angeles, if you like, about his motives and future plans. He won’t have a coherent answer; the supernatural forces driving such activities, using humans as their vehicles, are not logical beings. You won’t see righteous feuds between the principalities and powers that write the bills and execute the policies of our Leftist fellow citizens. They’re filling their cups of Kool-Aid with an eerie, dispassionate calm, and offering them with a smile.

I’ll take our two rough-edged weirdos, thank you very much. And I’ll go on praying for them, white-knuckled but hopeful.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.