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Trump's fight with Musk reveals MAGA's biggest delusion
Trump's fight with Musk reveals MAGA's biggest delusion
The president accused Elon of having "Trump derangement syndrome"
By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published June 6, 2025 6:00AM (EDT)
(Salon) He'd never admit it publicly, but I'm betting Donald Trump is regretting that he relaxed the White House rules about drug testing.
As I predicted last week, Elon Musk's vow to leave politics behind did not last long. But I confess I had no idea that he would come back to the fold by taking swings at his beloved daddy replacement, Trump. It seems, however, that someone told Musk in recent days how much his businesses, which rely heavily on government subsidies, will be screwed by the president's already imperiled budget bill. So now the tech billionaire has become fixated on killing the bill. Musk kicked off his crusade Tuesday by tweeting that Trump's bill is a "disgusting abomination," and has been on a tear since, rallying his supporters to oppose the bill and making room for more Republicans on Capitol Hill to start pulling back support. As he and Trump snipe at each other publicly, the efforts to pretend this is a friendly disagreement are falling apart.
Even if Musk fails in his efforts to kill Trump's bill, this battle is exposing a deeper truth that the White House can't hide: The MAGA coalition is fragile and some of the differences are starting to tear at the seams less than half a year into the second Trump term. Trump's slim win in 2024 was no doubt due in large part to Musk, and not just the eye-popping quarter-billion-plus Musk spent to push the old man's orange carcass over the finish line. It's because Musk and other influential figures, especially those associated with Silicon Valley or who pretend to be former liberals, were able to convince a chunk of more secular, largely male voters to throw their lot in with the Christian nationalist base that is the backbone of the MAGA movement. But while these two groups joined together based on a shared animosity towards racial minorities and women, it was always a far more uneasy alliance than Musk or Trump wanted to admit. And now it's getting shakier as two narcissistic billionaires are at odds.
....(snip)....
This conflict was brewing for reasons that run deeper than Musk and Trump's competing egos or Silicon Valley's dependency on government funding, which their leaders disparage. The atheistic world of pseudo-intellectualism that Musk and his minions come from was always going to have friction with the Christian nationalists who actually run the MAGA-ified Republican Party.
....(snip)....
This budget fight exposes how delusional that "we can handle the sheeple" attitude always was. It's not about religion, per se, but the culture clash between the Musk fanboys and the Christian nationalist debate is driving much of this. Musk and his acolytes envision a technofascism that sucks all the money out of social services and puts it into the tech industry, even as it pursues goals typically disliked by the Christian right, such as clean energy production. Meanwhile, the Christian right wing of the party, while happy to pass huge cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare, is largely leaving untouched Social Security or Medicare, which their working-class and aging base depends on. The techbro fascists may hate the liberals they live next door to, but at the end of the day, they're still part of the urban, atheistic, educated class that the MAGA movement demonizes. That difference was not going to be papered over forever. ...............(more)
https://www.salon.com/2025/06/06/fight-with-musk-reveals-magas-biggest-delusion/
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
The odd couple relationship between magats and tech bro's was not only fragile, but fissionable like plutonium.
Trump got his hacked vote totals, and a red carpet entry to the mega-scam world of crypto
Tech bro's are elitist. Trump is old style mafia. When he couldn't rob parking meters, he was gifted a new scam.
Magats! Tech bro's! Nazi's! What do you get from Trump now that you kissed his ass?
