BREAKUP! Did anyone really believe that Trump and Musk were a match made in heaven? [But the make-up sex...]

Heather Cox Richardson, June 5, 2025, Letters from an American.

It started so well...

But Musk overstepped boundaries and overstayed his welcome even as his antics hurt sales of his signature car, the Tesla, inspiring Trump to do a car commercial for him on the White House grounds. Just a week ago, Musk officially left the White House on the same day that an article in the New York Times documented his heavy drug use on the campaign.

Then, on Tuesday, June 3, he took a public stand against the omnibus bill Trump desperately wants Congress to pass, posting on X: “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.”

And with that, the falling out began.

This morning, Trump told reporters he was “disappointed” in Musk. Ron Filipkowski of Meidas followed the saga from there.

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House, and the Republicans would be 51–49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote. “Such ingratitude.”

Trump then suggested that “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

Musk promptly said he would begin decommissioning SpaceX’s spacecraft, which supply the International Space Station.

The two men continued to go back and forth, with Musk saying that “Donald Trump is in the Epstein files,” a reference to the records compiled by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Trump was friendly. Musk also said Trump's tariffs will cause a recession, and agreed with another poster who suggested that Trump should be impeached and replaced with Vice President J.D. Vance.

Trump responded to that attack far more weakly than one would have expected, simply turning back to the omnibus bill and insisting it “is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”

Musk’s behavior is erratic in its own right, but if there is anything but pique behind it, it appears he is threatening Trump by making a play to control the Republican Party. In response to a post by conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer suggesting that Republican lawmakers are unsure if they should side with Trump or Musk, Musk wrote: “Oh and some food for thought as they ponder that question: Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.”

Losses on both sides:

Kylie Robison and Aarian Marshall of Wired noted that TrumpCoin lost more than $100 million in value during the fight. Tesla stock lost $152 billion of value from its market capitalization, prompting Filipkowski to note that the total came to about $9 billion per tweet.

How things have changed. Eighty-one years ago

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944, and had good news for the American people. The day before, on June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said.

The president pointed out that it was “significant that Rome has been liberated by the armed forces of many nations. The American and British armies—who bore the chief burdens of battle—found at their sides our own North American neighbors, the gallant Canadians. The fighting New Zealanders from the far South Pacific, the courageous French and the French Moroccans, the South Africans, the Poles and the East Indians—all of them fought with us on the bloody approaches to the city of Rome. The Italians, too, forswearing a partnership in the Axis which they never desired, have sent their troops to join us in our battles against the German trespassers on their soil.”

This group of ordinary men from many different countries had worked together to defeat the forces of fascism.

And so began the end of World War II. There's more at the link.

Ambush in the Oval Office, Zelinsky’s out, Putin’s in

Heather Cox Richardson, February 28, 2025, Letters from an American, March 1, 2025.

Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office—his attendance at such an event was unusual—in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.

In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a “mob hit,” spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was “disrespectful” of Zelensky to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.

Zelensky maintained his composure and did not rise to the bait, but he did not accept their pro-Russian version of the war. He insisted that it was in fact Russia that invaded Ukraine and is still bombing and killing on a daily basis. His refusal to sit silent and submit meekly to their attack seemed to infuriate them.

Trump appeared to become unhinged when Zelensky suggested that the U.S. would in the future feel problems, apparently alluding to the new U.S. relationship with Russia. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that,” Trump erupted. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”

Things went downhill from there. After Zelensky had left the room and Trump ranted at a reporter, the meeting ended:

After unloading on the reporter, Trump abruptly ended today’s meeting, saying it was “going to be great television.” Shortly afterward, he asked Zelensky and his team to leave the White House.

This afternoon, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) posted: “Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day—when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”

I have no idea where this is leading, nor does anyone else. What does Trump want? Does he even know?

Does he want to divide the world into three sectors: Trump and his America, Putin and his Russia, and Xi and his China? But that won’t work if Trump doesn’t give up American hegemony. I can’t see him doing that.

I think moving beyond hegemony would be a good idea. Hegemony is expensive, exhausting, and in the end it doesn’t work very well, as America’s wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan made abundantly clear. But Trump lives in a zero-sum, us-against-them, world. He has no choice but to preserve, maintain, and strengthen American hegemony. That’s why he wants Greenland, for example. He doesn’t see it as a hedge against Paraguay, Angola, Sri Lanka, or the Maldives. It’s a buffer against Russian, Putin’s Russia.

This makes no sense.

BTW, there's more at the link.

The “Battle” of Wounded Knee

Heather Cox Richardson, December 28, 2024, Letters from an American.

On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.

As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.

Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.

As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.

What haunts me is the night of December 28.

On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.

In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

There's more at the link.

Cage Match of the Century: MAGA vs. MAGA, "Two enter, one leaves"

Heather Cox Richardson, December 27, 2024, Letters from an American.

Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans. On the one side are the traditional MAGAs, who tend to be white, anti-immigrant, and less educated than the rest of the U.S. They believe that the modern government’s protection of equal rights for women and minorities has ruined America, and they tend to want to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world. They make up Trump’s voting base.

On the other side are the new MAGAs who appear to have taken control of the incoming Trump administration. Led by Elon Musk, who bankrolled Trump’s campaign, the new MAGA wing is made up of billionaires, especially tech entrepreneurs, many of whom are themselves immigrants.

During the campaign, these two wings made common cause because they both want to destroy the current U.S. government, especially as President Joe Biden had been using it to strengthen American democracy. Traditional MAGA wants to get rid of the government that protects equality and replace it with one that enforces white male supremacy and Christianity. New MAGA—which some have started to call DOGE, after the Department of Government Efficiency run by Musk and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—wants to get rid of the government that regulates business, especially technology, and protects American interests against competition from countries like China.

Their shared commitment to the destruction of the current government is about the only overlap between these two factions.

With the campaign over, traditional MAGA and DOGE are ripping apart. Trump sparked the fight when he announced on Sunday, December 22, that he would appoint Musk associate Sriram Krishnan, who was born in India, as a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence.

On Monday, MAGA activist Laura Loomer criticized Trump’s choice of Krishnan. Loomer was in Trump’s inner circle until three months ago, when her anti-immigrant tirades made Trump campaign staff worry she would cost Trump votes and forced her out of his public schedule. Loomer noted that Krishnan wants to remove the cap on green cards for workers from certain countries.

There's more at the link. See also, David Brooks, Why the New Fight Inside MAGA Matters fo Much, NYTimes, Dec. 27, 2024.

Is Trump serious about DOGE or is it just a dodge so he can throw $$$$ to rich buddies?

Heather Cox Richardson, December 21, 2024, Letters from an American.

In the end, Congress passed a bill much like the one Musk scuttled, but one of the provisions that Congress stripped out of the old bill was extraordinarily important to Musk. As David Dayen explained in The Prospect, the original agreement had an “outbound investment” provision that restricted the ability of Americans to invest in technology factories in China. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) had collaborated on the measure, hoping to keep cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, as well as the jobs they would create, in America rather than let companies move them to China.

As Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) explained, Musk is building big factories in China and wants to build an AI data center there, even though it could endanger U.S. security. McGovern charged that Musk’s complaints about the spending in the bill were cover for his determination to tank the provision that would limit his ability to move technology and business to China. And, he noted, it worked. The outbound investment provision was stripped out of the bill before it passed.

In The Prospect, Robert Kuttner explained this huge win for Musk, as well as other provisions that were stripped from the bill before it passed. After years of fighting, Tami Luhby of CNN explained, Congress agreed to reform the system in which pharmacy benefit managers act as middlemen between pharmaceutical companies and insurers, employers, and government officials. The original bill increased transparency and provided that pharmacy benefit managers would be compensated with flat fees rather than compensation tied to the price of drugs. The measures related to pharmacy benefit managers were stripped out of the measure that passed.

That lost reform shows another line that will stretch into the future: Trump’s team is working for big business. As Kuttner puts it, Trump, who is allegedly a populist leader, tanked a bipartisan spending bill in order to shield the Chinese investments of the richest man in the world and to protect the profits of second-largest pharmacy benefit manager UnitedHealth Group, the corporation for which murdered executive Brian Thompson worked.

There's much more at the link.

Heather Cox Richardson on the current Republican Party & its vision of rule by wealthy white men

Heather Cox Richardson, June 24, 2022, Letters from an American.

Reflecting on 2 things:

At yesterday’s hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, we heard overwhelming proof that former president Trump and his congressional supporters tried to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 presidential election and steal control of our country to keep a minority in power.

Today, thanks to three justices nominated by Trump, the Supreme Court stripped a constitutional right from the American people, a right we have enjoyed for almost 50 years, a right that is considered a fundamental human right in most liberal democracies, and a right they indicated they would protect because it was settled law.

Promoting and protecting the rule of law by a few wealthy white men:

The Dobbs decision marks the end of an era: the period in American history stretching from 1933 to 1981, the era in which the U.S. government worked to promote democracy. It tried to level the economic playing field between the rich and the poor by regulating business and working conditions. It provided a basic social safety net through programs like Social Security and Medicare and, later, through food and housing security programs. It promoted infrastructure like electricity and highways, and clean air and water, to try to maintain a basic standard of living for Americans. And it protected civil rights by using the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the U.S. Constitution in 1868, to stop states from denying their citizens the equal protection of the laws.

Now the Republicans are engaged in the process of dismantling that government. For forty years, the current Republican Party has worked to slash business regulations and the taxes that support social welfare programs, to privatize infrastructure projects, and to end the federal protection of civil rights by arguing for judicial “originalism” that claims to honor the original version of the Constitution rather than permitting the courts to protect rights through the Fourteenth Amendment.

But most Americans actually like the government to hold the economic and social playing field level. So, to win elections, Republicans since 1986 have suppressed votes, flooded the media with propaganda attacking those who like government action as dangerous socialists, gerrymandered congressional districts, abused the Senate filibuster to stop all Democratic legislation, and finally, when repeated losses in the popular vote made it clear their extremist ideology would never again command a majority, stacked the Supreme Court.

The focus of the originalists on the court has been to slash the federal government and make the states, once again, the centerpiece of our democratic system. That democracy belonged to the states was the argument of the southern Democrats before the Civil War, who insisted that the federal government could not legitimately intervene in state affairs. At the same time, though, state lawmakers limited the vote in their state, so “democracy” did not reflect the will of the majority. It reflected the interests of those few who could vote.

State governments, then, tended to protect the power of a few wealthy, white men, and to write laws reinforcing that power.

Hey, let's get rid of regulation while we're at it:

We are still waiting on another potentially explosive decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, in which the court will decide if Congress can delegate authority to government agencies as it has done since the 1930s. If the court says Congress can’t delegate authority, even if it waters that argument down, government regulation could become virtually impossible. Having taken the federal government’s power to protect civil rights, it would then have taken its power to regulate business.

And yet, just yesterday, the court struck down a New York state law restricting the concealed carrying of guns on the grounds that history suggested such a restriction was unconstitutional. In fact, in both the Dobbs decision and the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court used stunningly bad history, clearly just working to get to the modern-day position it wanted. Abortion was, in fact, deeply rooted in this nations history not only in the far past but also in the past 49 years, and individual gun rights were not part of our early history.

The court is imposing on the nation a so-called originalism that will return power to the states, leaving the door open for state lawmakers to get rid of business regulation and gut civil rights, but its originalism also leaves the door open for the federal government to impose laws on the states that are popular with Republicans.

There's more at the link.