The Trump-Musk Split Is a Gift to the Left

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to comment on this strange, bizarre, surreal, sudden fallout—or was it so sudden—between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump.

All of a sudden, Elon Musk started to attack the “big, beautiful bill” that’s now in the Senate because he said it spent too much money and it was contrary to all the work that he had done with his Department of Government Efficiency team. They were cutting spending. And yet, this was too generous, I suppose. It may increase the deficit, if the economy is not stimulated, as the bill intends.

But the point is that Donald Trump then said he was kind of bizarre, that he has a very thin margin in Congress and he was kind of surprised that his friend and ally would attack him that way. And then that started a cascade.

So, in the next 48 hours, we heard from Elon Musk that Donald Trump owed his victory to his efforts in Pennsylvania. He won the Electoral College, remember, beyond Pennsylvania. It was critical. But it was not sine qua non. He could have won without Pennsylvania, given the Electoral College margin.

And then he said, in addition, that Donald Trump might look at impeachment. That’s a little scary because if the Democrats win the midterms, that’s the first thing they’re going to do. So, that was kind of eerie. He also mentioned the Epstein files. He said he was going to disconnect his SpaceX Dragon component from the national space effort. I don’t think he’s going to do that. That would be nihilistic. And then Donald Trump replied that in kind but not nearly as intense as Elon Musk.

So, what was it all about? People have given all sorts of different explanations. One of them is that the new big, beautiful bill will phase out subsidies for all electric vehicles. And given Tesla’s attacks on—people attacking stations, chargers, dealers, individual drivers, the bad publicity the Democrats ginned up, he can’t afford that right now. He was very upset.

Maybe it was his nominee, he thought, to head NASA that the Trump people felt was—correctly—that was a Democrat and too far left.

And then there were Cabinet secretaries that said that Elon Musk was not just advising them where to cut but sort of demanding.

So, there was always a tense relationship that grew out of an unnatural relationship, in the sense that rarely—we haven’t seen anything like this since President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, who was a personal adviser to FDR. Unlike Musk, he moved into the White House and basically crafted the whole detente with Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, as a leftist himself.

So, it was a relationship that was very, very close in an unusual way and it was bound to have these tensions.

Then Musk said, you know, he started making these threats. But he can’t go anywhere because, remember, the California Coastal Commission, left-wing Coastal Commission, tried to stop additional rocket flights. The Left demonize him. They hate him for what he did with DOGE. He’s under assault on Tesla. His whole philosophy is entrepreneurism, lower taxes, less deregulation—not what the Left has. So, he’s frustrated because he knows he can’t go back to the Left. And yet, he’s angry about this bill. And then, when Trump sort of brushed it off, he went DEFCON 1.

Is there a hope to this relationship being healed? I think there is because it was historically rare to have a private citizen so close with the administration. But if you take that away, you can see they have the same enemies—the Left are delighted right now and they’re fueling this.

They have the same enemies and they have the same friends. They’re not perpendicular, they’re parallel. They have the same eventual visions of what America should be. They want less government, less deregulation, fewer taxes, a cultural counterrevolution, unleashing of entrepreneurial talent, a meritocracy, instead of DEI, closed border, legal-only immigration. So, they’re almost synonymous.

So, what happens to heal this rift? I think we all know what has to happen. Donald Trump is the most powerful man in the world. But unlike Elon Musk, he doesn’t run a private company or even a public-held company by fiat. Even though he has majorities in the House and Senate, he has to compromise. It’s like herding cats. He can’t get the bill he wants or his advisers want. So, this beautiful bill has elements on border security, on defense that are good. And it’s the beginning, not the end.

So, Musk needs to see that, as a CEO, he can rule by directive. He can rule by fiat. And in some ways, he has more power over his domain than Donald Trump—or any president does—over his. So, he has got to appreciate that.

The other thing that he has to appreciate, I think, is that Donald Trump is now in negotiations with three of the meanest SOBs in the world: Xi Jinping, the head of China; Vladimir Putin; and whoever the lunatic theocrats are running things in Iran.

He can’t afford to back down in a private dispute with an individual American, even one that’s the richest man in the world, because it would send a message to these three characters that if you press Donald Trump, you get him angry or you do something, he will back off. And the Left has been already using that mim.

So, what needs to happen is intermediaries come forward and they spell out the new relationship. It will not be as intense. It will not be as close. It will not be as frequent. And therefore, it will avoid these disruptions. But it will be based on mutual admiration, respect.

But more importantly, Elon Musk needs Donald Trump for the space exploration, for a fair shake on his business deals. And Donald Trump is aided by Elon Musk, especially the SpaceX. So, it’s a mutually beneficiary relationship, not just for both of them, but for us, the American people.

And make no mistake about it, the Democratic Party may be neutered, but it is not inert. It is waging potty-mouth videos, congressional disruptions, attacks on Teslas, huge donor-supplied lawfare going after the Trump agenda in these lower district courts. It is all geared up and frenzied for the midterms.

Now is the time for unity, not disunity. And the quicker these two very talented and powerful people can form a new relationship based not as intensely as the past but on mutual respect, the better it is for the country at large.

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