Why the Trump-Musk bromance won't last

There'll still be plenty of corruption along the way

A lot of things worry me about a second Trump term. I’m worried about mass deportation. I’m worried about a disastrous foreign policy. And I’m worried about the pressure about to be put on America’s democracy.

But you know what I’m not particularly worried about? Elon Musk.

As you’ve probably noticed, Trump and Musk have got very close all of a sudden. Musk spent quite a lot of money trying to elect Trump. Never mind that Musk’s get out the vote scheme probably had no impact on the result - it seems to have won Trump over. After he won, he published a “family” photo which included Musk along with his young son.

Most eye-poppingly of all, Musk then joined a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.

I’ve studied Trump long enough to know what’s going on here. Trump craves validation, particularly from the very rich. He loves shiny objects. And as the richest man in the world, Musk is the shiniest of them all. Putting him on a call with a prominent world leader is Trump’s way of showing off - to both Musk and Zelensky.

What Musk wants is also clear. Although he seems to have been genuinely sucked into the fantasy world of the far right, he also has very concrete business interests at play here. The return to power of a climate change-denying Republican Party is an enormous threat to a man with an electric vehicle empire. He’s trying to change Trump’s mind about how to approach the industry, and there are initial signs of success.

Beyond that, Musk has an enormous amount of business which is affected by the federal government. It’s not just that he sells Starlink and SpaceX services to Washington - it’s also that Washington has 19 known regulatory or legal probes outstanding against Musk’s businesses. Musk wants those to go away, and it’s hard to believe that he won’t get his wish.

We saw a lot of sickening corruption like this in Trump’s first term. Trump treats the executive branch like some rival business he’s acquired in a hostile takeover. It exists to serve his personal and financial interests and those of his family.

I’m sure Musk will benefit from some corruption like this along the way, especially at the start of the administration. But I don’t see his bromance with Trump lasting.

The whole thing is based on shallow and bizarre assumptions. Musk is supposedly going to run a new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, through which he claims he’ll shave $2tn off federal spending. That’s more than the entire discretionary part of the budget, including defense. It’s over two times the defense budget.

In other words, anyone bandying that figure around has no idea what they’re talking about. Like Trump, Musk has little to no understanding of the federal bureaucracy.

And let’s not even get started on the naïveté of thinking you’re going to achieve great changes through something called the Department of Government Efficiency, much less in an administration headed by Donald Trump. That’s like a The Simpsons joke-level understanding of how government works. It has been tried and failed, many many times.

And what does Musk actually have to offer Trump, except for the fawning praise of the richest man in the world? Very little. He made Twitter into a far-right swamp, but he’s hardly going to hand it back over to the libs. And Trump is an incredibly transactional person, one who loves the power of the presidency and hates the idea that people are taking advantage of him. Ultimately, he’s going to get tired of Musk and move onto the next shiny thing.

There will also be lots of people around Trump who will ultimately begin to undermine Musk. Trump runs his White House like a medieval court, with various advisors and sycophants always rising and falling in his favor. J.D. Vance, Don Jr., Susie Wiles, and a dozen others will have reason to stab Musk in the back. They’ll almost certainly point out to him that Musk’s campaign help was probably useless. And Trump, who wants to believe that his own genius alone carried him to victory, will be ready to believe it.

In Trump’s first administration, pretty much the only people who were there at both the beginning and the end were his family members. Everyone else was disposable, and it gave Trump visible pleasure to dispose of them when the time came. Appearing in one photo at Mar-a-Lago doesn’t make Musk family, and that means he’ll be disposable too.

It’s also not clear why Musk would really want to actually get involved in something like a government efficiency drive. He’s not about to put aside his businesses in order to pore over the org chart of the National Parks Service.

He’ll be there for the corruption, sure. In fact, he’s already said that one of the aims of his Department of Government Efficiency will be to make it easier to get driverless car permits, a big boon for Tesla. But beyond helpful abuses of power, why bother getting mired in the utter trainwreck of Trump administration policy-making and personal feuds?

Even though Musk and Trump’s relationship won’t last, it still represents all of the worst things about Trump’s last time in office - the chaos, the corruption, and the favoring of the interests of economic elites. Musk will come and go, but those things will still need to be combated - and doing so gives Democrats the opportunity to puncture the myth that people like Trump and Musk are out for anyone but themselves.

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Interested in what policies Trump might pursue in a second term? We’ve got you covered? Below are a few of our dissections of Trump’s policies from the campaign trail - and more are coming soon.