Sometimes you’re better off letting the children fight. That was President Donald 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.
That was then: Elon Musk embraces Donald Trump during a campaign rally in October.Credit: Getty Images
Their venomous digital smackdown fulgurated on their duelling social media companies, flashing across the Washington sky.
In March, Trump showed off Teslas in the White House driveway and bought a more than $US80,000 red Model S. Now, he says he’s going to sell it.
Thursday was the most titillating day in the US 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 Earth.
On Friday, Trump tried to convey serenity. “I’m not thinking about Elon Musk,” Trump said aboard Air Force One. “I wish him well.” But Trump then jumped on the phone to knock Musk, 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 New York Times.
As Raheem Kassam, one of the owners of Butterworth’s, the new Trumpworld boite on Capitol Hill, assured Politico, “MAGA will not sell out to ketamine”.
The Washington Post reported on 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 imperilling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.”
On Truth Social on Thursday, Trump threatened to take away government contracts that have handsomely enriched Musk even though, as Leon Panetta pointed out on CNN, “some of those contracts, particularly on SpaceX, are very important to our national security.”
Musk 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.
