I imagine that in many parts of the world, yesterday’s Musk-Trump blow-up reminded people of the events of two years ago and the so-called Wagner Group Rebellion in which erstwhile oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin got increasingly cranky and finally started a military drive on Moscow before standing down at his moment of apparent but perhaps illusory strength. Two months later, Prigozhin died in a plane crash.
We’ve clearly clarified that the Elon-Trump feud is real. I assume you’ve seen or heard about the back-and-forth social media salvos in which Trump has threatened to terminate Musk’s companies’ contracts. Musk has claimed responsibility for Trump’s election and claims Trump is in the “Epstein Files.”
Musk has now at least shown that he’s serious about this, not just whining about the “Big, Beautiful Bill” which the White House and the Hill mainly didn’t care about. This is a truly sui generis situation in the sweep of American history, in large part because we’ve never had a U.S. President who is governing in the way Donald Trump is or willing to do the things he’s willing to do. We’ve also not really — though here history’s analogs are less certain — had a plutocrat with Musk’s scale of wealth and hold over multiple critical industries. There are even fun side questions: who gets custody of Katie Miller? (Google it.)
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Musk’s big loser energy, Joni Ernst’s generational gaffe and the unprecedented corruption of the Trump regime.
We seem to be moving toward a bit more real animus between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Musk keeps attacking Trump’s budget bill on Twitter. Trump has now stopped saying they’re actually best buds. In comments today he’s saying, albeit very tepidly, that the friendship seems to be over. I remain agnostic on where this dispute goes and whether it will amount to anything. What I see mostly is that Musk just looks incredibly small and diminished at the moment. The response from Republican members of Congress seems like a general, “Thank you so much for sharing your views” kind of thing.
I hear from the D.C. publications that Republican electeds are on edge. But they don’t seem on edge. They don’t seem afraid of Musk. Or perhaps it’s better to say they’re much, much more afraid of Trump, which amounts to the same thing. But even his criticisms, while notionally biting and intense, feel sulky and ineffectual.
I wanted to flag your attention to this Dave Weigel piece in Semafor. It’s about an event (“WelcomeFest”) put on by a centrist PAC called WelcomePAC, which is presenting itself as a kind of latter-day Democratic Leadership Council or punchy and centrist group focused on picking fights with the party’s left wing. It’s a kind of set piece for a lot of stuff that’s going on among Democrats right now. The big push is to defang the power of “the groups” and then, on a secondary level, get the party away from various litmus tests and speech policing. Then there’s a secondary push for “abundance” politics. They brought together several centristy members of Congress — Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY), Rep. Jake Auchincloss (MA), Sen. Elissa Slotkin (MI) — and then commentator Matt Yglesias, data influencer David Schor and former Senate staffer Adam Jentleson, among others.
As Weigel reports, moments after Torres starts his remarks, this happens …
If you’ll remember, back in March we ran a number of stories on the DOGE takeover of the U.S. Institute for Peace. The USIP is a unique entity, publicly funded but not part of the government. Certainly not part of the executive branch. That contention was the centerpiece of the legal case that unfolded. DOGE tried to take it over on orders of the President. It was rebuffed. It eventually threatened the Institute’s private security contractor into switching sides, threatened criminal investigations out of Ed Martin’s corrupt rule of the DC U.S. Attorney’s office, and, on March 17th, succeeded in taking control of the Institute by force. This involved the still-not-fully-explained involvement of the DC police force, the MPD. So DOGE won.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Eventually, the expelled leadership of the USIP won in court. And it wasn’t one of these small-bore incremental wins we’ve seen so many of over the course of the Spring. They completely won — though their victory is still on appeal. But they fully won in the sense that a judge ruled the entire takeover was unlawful and undid all of it. They retook control of the Institute and the building it owns and what’s left of its budget. And they’re now in the process of trying, at various levels, to clean up the mess DOGE created, literal and figurative, and get the Institute back on its feet.
Yesterday, I talked to George Foote, longtime lawyer for the Institute and, as luck would have it, a longtime TPM Reader as well. He walked me through some of what has happened since all the fireworks earlier this spring.
What the Trump-Elon blowup means for the legislation Musk chose to target.
A look into Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R-SC) dirty stalling tactics that helped her ultimately block Democrats on the House Oversight Committee from subpoenaing Elon Musk this week — even though not enough Republicans were initially present to override the effort.
Some thoughts on the creator of Succession’s new, satirical movie Mountainhead, and what it tells us about our current cultural moment, as the Fox News echo chamber, social media and AI merge to create a society in which reality is elusive.
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