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At the height of the juvenile flame war on Thursday between the world’s richest man and its most powerful one, Donald Trump posted a barely veiled threat on his website Truth Social. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
All the tech oligarchs and business titans who’ve thrown in with Trump, apparently deciding that strongman politics are good for business, should think carefully about that post. In it, you can see the transition to a new kind of American regime.
Until approximately six months ago, business leaders did not have to worry that voicing their opposition to an American president could tank their enterprises. Now, it’s widely understood and even tacitly accepted that the president will wield the power of his office to crush his enemies. That’s why stock in Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, plunged while he fought with Trump, losing, astonishingly, about $150 billion in market value on Thursday.
It’s true, of course, that in Joe Biden’s administration, Democrats regulated big tech in ways that industry honchos resented. But Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and Gary Gensler, former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, were motivated by policy goals, not personal vendettas. It’s also true that many of Musk’s customers turned on him over his lurch to the far right, which hurt Tesla’s business. But there is a profound difference between ordinary people rejecting a brand that doesn’t align with their values, and a president using the levers of the state to enforce loyalty.
Musk could say whatever he wanted about Biden without risking the government contracts of his company SpaceX. Perhaps he attributed that freedom to his own power and indispensability. In fact, he owed it to liberal democracy and the very bureaucratic, technocratic structures that he’s spent the last few months trying to destroy.
It’s still too early to know whether Musk’s rift with Trump will be permanent. As I write this, Musk has backed off his online attacks; in response to a social media post by the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman urging a rapprochement late Thursday, Musk wrote, “You’re not wrong.”
Nevertheless, the last 24 hours should be a lesson to both him and all the other billionaires who lined up with Trump. In trying to liberate themselves from regulation, they’ve trapped themselves in a posture of deep, even existential submission. When the rule of law gives way to the cult of the leader, there are lots of opportunities for personal enrichment, but only for those who stay in the leader’s good graces.
“Americans tend to think that being rich makes you powerful,” the political scientist Jeffrey Kopstein, co-author of “The Assault on the State,” told me recently. “In fact, what the Trump era is showing is that being powerful makes you rich.”
In the world Musk and his Silicon Valley allies have helped usher in, supplication is as important for major entrepreneurs as innovation. Musk, perhaps, deserves to have to live in this world. The rest of us don’t.
A recent headline The Times has run about the Elon Musk-Donald Trump breakup includes the phrase “Trump Has No Plans to Call Musk, Officials Say.” I guess they’re at the no-contact point, after many hours of dramatic public scrapping on social media. Trump is threatening to sell his Tesla.
There’s been a variety of responses from the greater MAGAverse. While the majority of people appear to be siding with the president, there are a few who are on the fence, like the far-right influencer Jack Posobiec, who posted on X:
Some of y’all cant handle 2 high agency males going at it and it really shows
This is direct communication (phallocentric) vs indirect communication (gynocentric)
I understand you aren’t used to it
This view of masculinity is fascinating to me. Historically, “phallocentric” communication was that you walked over to a guy and punched him in the face, or asked him to step outside. Even in professional wrestling, which involves histrionic male rivalries and is revered by Trump world, enemies eventually hit each other over the head with a folding chair (even if it’s for show). I’m not saying it’s the best way to work out differences, but that’s the cowboy stereotype.
Hurling epithets over social media with your friends as Trump and Musk have spent much of the last 24 hours doing is not behavior that I think of as traditionally male; if anything, it’s passive-aggressive and female coded. It’s Season 2 “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” Taylor versus Demi. It’s any given season of “Real Housewives,” where the women divvy their loyalties up behind whoever is the reigning alpha. I half expect Andy Cohen to moderate the MAGA reunion, if he could even get Trump and Musk in a room together.
In The Atlantic earlier this year, Jill Filipovic called this version of manhood “The Adolescent Style in American Politics.” I called it “Toxic Immaturity” in 2023. This style of masculinity rejects the old-fashioned notion that being a man means being a provider, a moral exemplar or a protector. That’s been replaced by disruption and edgelord posturing without any accountability to other people. If that’s what passes for aspirational masculinity these days, men and boys are in more trouble than I thought.
It is said that the night is darkest just before dawn, and if that holds for warfare, then the brutal slugfest that preceded the second round of direct talks between Ukraine and Russia was about as dark as it gets. And about as audacious a success for Ukraine as it’s had in this war.
There’s always an element of wishful thinking in trying to find a glimmer of hope in something as terrible and intractable as the Ukraine war. But let’s try.
The first round of talks in Istanbul in mid-May was preceded by a furious round of posturing and confusion, much of it apparently intended by each side to persuade President Trump that it was the other that was blocking his push for peace. The talks produced only a prisoner exchange and frustration in the White House but also plans to meet again.
Then before Monday’s second round, Russia unleashed one of the biggest drone and missile attacks on Kyiv to date and opened a front in northeastern Ukraine. But it was the Ukrainian feat that garnered all the attention. In an extraordinary operation code-named Spider’s Web, Ukraine launched 117 drones from deep inside Russia and knocked out a whole bunch of strategic bombers, the kind Russia has used to fire cruise missiles at Ukraine.
The ingenuity and audacity of the operation were jaw-dropping. Over 18 months, dozens of the small quadcopters armed with explosives had been smuggled into Russia and then transported to far-flung bases by Russian drivers who thought they were carrying prefabricated cottages. The boxes were remotely opened, and the drones flew to the nearby air bases. Ukraine claimed 41 warplanes were hit and at least 13 destroyed; Moscow said only that some planes were damaged.
The question is whether the exchange of blows and the demonstration of Ukraine’s resourcefulness can help end the conflict. Military wisdom holds that combatants come to the negotiating table when they’ve concluded there’s nothing more to gain on the battlefield, but Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the aggressor, shows no sign of seeing things that way.
The conditions Russia offered in Istanbul for ending the war were manifestly unacceptable, and the second round of meetings was as fruitless as the first, though again with an agreement to exchange more prisoners.
Trump, who initially showed keen interest in the Istanbul talks and even proposed dropping in at one point, sent no one to the second round. But he seemed to be coming around to the realization that it was not President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine who was dragging his feet but Trump’s erstwhile buddy Putin. Last week, after a heavy Russian barrage against Kyiv, Trump declared on social media that Putin had “gone absolutely CRAZY,” and Trump said he was considering more sanctions.
None have come. But there was no sign that Trump was pulling out of the process, as he had threatened to do. More important, in these cycles of fury and talks, the Russians and Ukrainians are scheduled to meet again.
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Joni, Joni, Joni. You have been in the Senate for a while now. You should know one of the top rules of damage control is that when you’ve done something stupid, you shouldn’t prolong the drama by drawing attention to it. Unless your last name is Trump. But yours, Senator Ernst, clearly is not.
So when a snarky exchange from a recent town hall went viral — your constituents yelling that the Medicaid cuts Republicans are pushing will cause people to die and you firing back, “Well, we all are going to die” — the smart move would have been to let it lie. Sure, some of Iowa’s 3.2 million residents, over 700,000 of whom receive Medicaid assistance each year, might have taken offense. But hey, forget ’em if they can’t take a snarky joke, am I right?
Instead you panicked and put out a video “apology” that was way worse than your original comments. Not because it was too mean. We’re all pretty much used to that these days. But because you were trying so hard to be clever and witty and you failed.
Generally speaking, your awkward mishmash of insulting sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek proselytizing would have been tough even for someone very funny to pull off. But there you were, look of faux distress on your face, claiming to “sincerely apologize” for not realizing that some people at the town hall didn’t understand that we are all going to “perish from this earth” — nice hat tip to Abe Lincoln, by the way — and that “those who would like to see eternal and everlasting life” really should “embrace my lord and savior Jesus Christ.” Toss in a snarky remark about the tooth fairy, wrap it all up by setting the entire performance in what appears to be a cemetery, and voilà! So cringe.
Like Ernst, I get that we are in an era of never-back-down politics, where brutality is seen as strength and regret is for losers. But Donald Trump is the ultimate showman. He delivers his hateful rhetoric with a dash of panache. He keeps his insults simple. Most important, he never looks as though he’s trying too hard.
This shtick is harder to pull off than most people realize — or can ever hope to achieve. But if you’re going to embrace the childish nihilism of MAGA, Senator Ernst, you really need to up your game.
Less than five months. That’s how long it took Washington to slap down the richest man in the world.
Having bought himself a presidential buddy in last year’s election, Elon Musk came bebopping into the nation’s capital, with his “tech support” T-shirt and SpaceX sneakers and grand vision of ruling as an unelected co-president. The power! The pomp! The sweet shout-out at President Trump’s first joint address to Congress! Who wouldn’t drop nearly $300 million to get that kind of rush if they could afford it?
But on Wednesday we learned that the Trump-Musk bromance has evolved. Musk’s time as a special employee of the administration is ending, with offboarding already underway. This “quick and abrupt” decision was made at “a senior-staff level,” according to Reuters.
Translation: Thanks for all the support, pal, but you’re getting on people’s nerves.
For all the drama and trauma he wrought, driving out federal workers and hollowing out agencies, Musk found himself unable to achieve anywhere close to the $2 trillion in savings he had so confidently promised, or even the $1 trillion he later suggested. Instead, he ran smack into a Washington wall not dissimilar to those encountered by the many would-be disrupters who came before him. Musk got his kicks cosplaying with a chain saw. But Congress and especially the courts have entire systems devoted to curbing overexcited demolition artists.
Musk grew frustrated. Washington was thwarting his will, even as his political dabbling was taking a blowtorch to his global reputation and the value of his private businesses. He spent millions in a Wisconsin judicial race and lost unceremoniously. Trump stopped posting about him. He began whinging, privately and then more publicly, particularly about tariffs.
Musk’s star had been sinking internally for a while, but it’s notable that the news of his official separation from the administration came one day after he pointedly slagged the Trump-backed “one big, beautiful bill” now before the Senate.
Not that Musk’s official departure will free us of his destructive meddling. DOGE grinds on. More important, Musk remains brain-numbingly rich. In a lower-profile capacity, he remains useful to Trump — and vice versa. (Musk’s companies do love their government funding.) So odds are he’ll continue popping up at Mar-a-Lago and around Washington, ego unbowed. Though hopefully he’ll leave the “tech support” shirt at home.
At the White House on Tuesday, President Trump unveiled the broad contours of his plan to construct a missile defense system around the United States — the first step in what would be a staggering undertaking.
The most interesting parts of the program, now known as Golden Dome, have yet to be determined: what the system would look like, who would build it, how it would be controlled and whether it would reliably protect Americans and the homeland from an ever-changing range of missile threats from around the world.
What we do know is it wouldn’t come cheap, easy or soon. It’s sure to be a yearslong, multibillion-dollar effort involving systems in the air, land, sea and space. Trump put the total cost at $175 billion, but a Congressional Budget Office review estimated that the space elements alone could reach as much as $542 billion to deploy and operate over the next 20 years.
In a sign of the coming sticker shock, Congress set aside $25 billion for Golden Dome in next year’s defense budget. American military contractors and rocket companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are already strategizing about how to win competitions for contracts to construct the system. For perspective: The U.S. government has doled out roughly $300 billion on missile defense systems over the past four decades.
A new generation of radars, sensors, interceptors and associated systems would be required under Golden Dome to detect, track and blast apart adversaries’ missiles before they strike. That is, Golden Dome isn’t a singular program. It would probably consist of 100 or more programs to be stitched together for a coast-to-coast, border-to-border shield against aerial attacks. Once those components are built, the military will need a way to orchestrate it all through a command-and-control system.
Trump said it would be completed within three years, but industry officials and analysts expect the space-based elements to take much longer. The president also mentioned that Canada wanted coverage under Golden Dome and that the country’s leadership wanted to play a role, but he didn’t elaborate.
Trump is hoping to replicate at home what he sees as the successes of missile defenses abroad. In January his initial executive order called for replicating Israel’s Iron Dome system in the United States. As I wrote then, Israel is the size of New Jersey, and the missiles fired into Israel are often unguided, slow-moving projectiles lobbed from nearby — not the world-spanning missiles U.S. military planners fear most.
The Defense Intelligence Agency last week illustrated the advancing threats facing the United States from countries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea in an unclassified assessment titled “Golden Dome for America.” The graphic depicted a diverse assortment of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, land attack cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons capable of reaching speeds more than five times the speed of sound.
There’s little doubt the United States is at risk from missile attacks, but it’s unclear whether Golden Dome could eliminate that vulnerability with modern technology. And even if the system is proven through testing, Congress would be required to continue the flow of funding to the tune of billions of dollars per year.
Trump said he was “completing the job” that President Ronald Reagan began in the 1980s with his unrealized space-based missile defense program, derisively nicknamed “Star Wars.” The program was canceled after technological challenges proved too difficult to overcome, despite years of effort and billions of dollars in federal spending.
To oversee Golden Dome’s development, Trump named Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, now serving as the U.S. Space Force’s vice chief of space operations. He draws on decades of experience in space acquisitions, missile defense and operations. He probably knows better than anyone else the challenges he’s up against.
