Round-up: Trump-Musk break-up. Trump's Biden investigation. The deportation machine.

Your guide to the week's events

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Trump-Musk break-up

It wasn’t hard to predict that the Trump-Musk marriage of convenience would end in tears. In fact, I predicted it on November 10th, less than a week after the election.

Before I get too self-congratulatory though, I would like to acknowledge that this isn’t exactly how I anticipated things coming to an end. I thought that the two men’s egos would eventually become incompatible, but I thought it was more likely that Trump would be the aggressor, not Musk.

In a sense, that is what actually happened. Musk soured on Trump after Trump forced him - not so gently - out of the administration earlier this year. DOGE was politically unpopular and Musk himself became toxic, and so Trump moved on. That was all predictable. But I was a bit surprised that Trump kept treating Musk with kid gloves afterwards - until, that is, Musk went nuclear in his criticism of the administration’s signature piece of legislation.

Of the two men, I thought that Musk was the most rational (not that there’s a lot of competition there). But as reports of his drug use continue to surface and as we look at the evidence of our own eyes, Musk’s erraticism and irrationality has now far outstripped even Trump’s.

Just consider what he’s done to Tesla. First, he shacked up with the far right, alienating his mostly left-leaning consumer base and leading to double-digit declines in sales. Now he’s turned on Trump, who exercises control over the range of grants, contracts and subsidies that Tesla - along with Musk’s other companies - relies on to boost its profitability. He’s burned his bridges at every turn and Tesla is now politically homeless.

And if he thinks that those left-leaning consumers are coming back just because of his spat with Trump, I think he’s got another thing coming.

There are some other things going on here as well. Let’s consider a few:

1. We seem to be witnessing the breakdown of a major part of the MAGA/Silicon Valley alliance. Musk and other Silicon Valley figures seem to have genuinely believed that Trump was open to seeing them apply tech industry-style management techniques to the federal government in order to radically slim it down. But DOGE turned out to be a spectacular failure. That was in large part because the tech bros actually have no idea how the government works, but also because cutting spending is politically unpopular. The right wing of the tech movement has had a sobering run in with political reality, and that will shape their engagement going forward.

2. Musk is now inserting himself in intra-Republican Party politics. As part of his barrage of tweets, he’s called for Trump to be impeached and replaced by Vance - no doubt partly because he sees Vance as more aligned with Silicon Valley goals. In waging a war on Trump and his allies, Musk has two tools at his disposal - his megaphone and his dollars. Neither of those is going to make impeachment happen, but it could make the difference in closely-run primaries.

3. Then there’s the impact on national politics as a whole. Musk’s claim that Trump wouldn’t have won last year’s election without his help is grossly overstated. Trump’s victory in the swing states wasn’t particularly close relative to the amount of money that Musk spent, and there’s little sign that Trump did better where Musk was spending his money. The withholding of that money won’t make a major difference in the future. But if Musk follows through on his threat to fund a third party, that could have an impact on the 2028 race, potentially leeching voters away from the GOP.

4. It would be a major mistake for the Democrats to now embrace Musk, as some are advocating. He was a Nazi-saluting political liability before this spat with Trump and he’s still one after. It’s great that he’s now sowing division on the right. But Democrats are not going to be able to control him any more than Trump could.

5. Finally, we have to consider what will become of Musk personally. He has a host of businesses that are vulnerable to retaliation from Trump, and he also has (from a MAGA perspective) a dicey immigration history - he started his first company before he had the legal right to work in the U.S. Could Trump go after these things if the feud doesn’t calm down? It’s not impossible.

The safest bet seems to be not to count on Musk pursuing any coherent, long-term plan. That seems to be beyond him right now, for whatever reason. Most likely he’s going to continue to thrash around incoherently, doing plenty of damage and generating a ton of sparks along the way.

The Biden Files

Among the controversial executive orders that Trump signed earlier this week was an investigation into any “cover-up” of the decline of Biden’s mental capabilities during his term as president. At first glance this doesn’t look like it’s going to lead to any major legal consequences, but the political ramifications could still be large.