With the Sánchez-Bezos nuptials still many weeks away, TACO-hating Donald Trump had a clear path to victory in last week’s A.W.I. polling. Trump got 47.2 percent of your votes; even the Sussexes were a distant second (20.8 percent). Third place went to France’s eminently shovable president, Emmanuel Macron (12 percent). In the informal subcategory of former British prime ministers, Liz Truss bested Boris Johnson, 8.4 percent to 0.7 percent.
Before we get to The Feud, first this:
“There is no #Joe Biden—executed in 2020.”
—donald trump, reposting a conspiracy theory that Biden is a robotic clone
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
Donald Trump
It was beautiful while it lasted. No one can ever say it wasn’t beautiful. And the president’s week had been going so well! The ongoing, methodical destruction of the nation, judicial orders blithely ignored right and left, finally getting to the bottom of the Biden autopen scandal. And—cherry on top—the unveiling of that seductive new official White House portrait in which he looks half-peeved, half-constipated … but all-presidential.
Then came The Feud. Elon Musk appeared to have started it when he weighed in on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” with “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.” Although Trump’s subsequent claim that he’d asked Musk to exit government because he was “wearing thin,” while presumably a lie, does make one wonder what set Musk off. Trump chose to see it as Musk simply missing the White House (after just six days): “They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour is gone…. They become hostile.”
In any event, the glamour was definitely gone, and the two narcissists were soon scuffling, their painfully conscious uncoupling marked by the usual conflicting emotions—wounded ego, self-pity, scathing blame. Breakups are never easy. “I’m very disappointed in Elon. I helped Elon a lot,” Trump said. “Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore.” Musk, Trump said, “just went CRAZY.” So the president threatened to “terminate Elon’s governmental subsidies and contracts,” which are worth $38 billion.
Oh, and by the way, as far as the thing that supposedly started it all? Musk, claimed Trump, always “knew the inner workings” of that big, beautiful bill.
2.
Elon Musk
“False,” Musk responded, “this bill was never shown to me even once.” And so things devolved into “he said, he said.”
It had also been going so well for Musk—apart from reports about the over-enthusiastic drug use, the free-falling businesses, the disaster of DOGE, the shiner supposedly bestowed on him, upon request, by his five-year-old. Then … The Feud.
The man who just a few months ago had posted “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man” was making accusations about “such ingratitude”—presumably because he spent $300 million to help elect the president and, “without me, Trump would have lost the election”—and dredging up old anti-deficit quotes from Trump to use against him.
Musk supported a post calling for Trump’s impeachment, speculated about forming a new party, and had warnings for Republican politicians in general: “Some food for thought…. Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.”
Also this: Trump, Musk asserted, “is in the [Jeffrey] Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.”
Are there any winners here? With Tesla’s stock sinking 14 percent in one day (a record) and Trump’s Media & Technology Group declining 8 percent, perhaps the only winners are us, if we choose to view the spectacle as pure—if slightly depressing—entertainment.
Can this relationship be saved? The two men are very different—one actually very smart, the other a bona fide dunce—but they nevertheless have much in common: chiefly limitless self-regard and Olympic-class pettiness.
Still, maybe they’ll heed the plaintive calls of their devastated supporters. Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman said the two “should make peace for the benefit of our great country.” Kanye West posted an emoji of two people hugging and the words “Broooos please noooooo … We love you both.” While the Republican congressman and DOGE caucus head, Aaron Bean, said, “My heart aches” to see “two friends fighting,” and hoped that eventually “maybe they can share a Diet Coke together.”
George Kalogerakis, a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL, worked at Spy, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. He is a co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and a co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War
