Marx famously said that men who make history tend to borrow the ‘battle slogans and costumes’ of the past. So Luther put on the mask of St Paul, and the French Revolution ‘draped itself… in the guise of the Roman Republic’. What would he have made of Donald Trump and Elon Musk? Two men who, for good or ill, are making history in 21st-century America, and yet whose favoured historical costume is less Mark Anthony than Mean Girls. Yes, the digital bitchslapping of these two colossuses of the American republic is hilarious, but tell me it doesn’t also speak to an insane disintegration of the political sensibility.
Don’t get me wrong – like every other mortal with emotional needs and an internet connection, I’m enjoying it. It started brewing last week when Musk stepped down as Trump’s state-slashing ‘Dogefather’ in protest against a new tax-and-spend bill. That’s the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It’s designed to ‘reconcile’ government spending. And Musk hates it. As a mad-rich libertarian bro whose idea of utopia is smoking weed on Mars, Musk comes out in hives at the thought of the state doing anything. This is an ‘outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill’ and a ‘disgusting abomination’, he thundered on X this week. Nurse! The doobie’s worn off!
Trump wasn’t best pleased with Musk’s hissy-fitting. Yesterday, in the Oval Office, he declared himself ‘very disappointed’. ‘Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore’, he said. Then all X-hell broke loose. To the great titillation of the world media (and all of us, come on), the pair went at it online like a couple of frenemies after a brunch of bottomless mimosas. ‘Without me, Trump would have lost the election’, Musk bitched, clearly drunk on his self-imagined status as the great kingmaker of the populist moment. ‘Such ingratitude’, he moaned.
Trump cracked his knuckles and got on Truth Social. Musk had been ‘wearing thin’, he said, so ‘I asked him to leave’. He said he took away Musk’s ‘EV Mandate’ that ‘forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted… and he just went CRAZY!’. Indeed, many have clocked the naked self-interest that seems to be fuelling Musk’s voluble meltdown. The Big Beautiful Bill plans to eliminate the $7,500 tax incentive for Americans who buy EVs (electric vehicles). And some predict this could whack Musk’s EV empire, Tesla, to the tune of $3 billion. Musk denies his temper tantrum is a capitalist fit of pique. He says he’s happy for Trump to cut EV credits as long as he also cuts the rest of America’s ‘mountain of disgusting pork’. If you buy that, you’ll buy anything – even a shitty EV.
Then it went really low. Musk got every conspiracist virgin frothing with delight by tweeting: ‘Time to drop the really big bomb: Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.’ That’s the real reason the list of visitors to Jeffrey Epstein’s iffy island was never released, he said. Then his sign-off: ‘Have a nice day, DJT!’ Look, I hate to party-poop everyone’s enjoyment of this claws-out altercation between the world’s most powerful man and its richest. But what Musk is doing here is appalling. He is essentially throwing a huge slab of red meat to the internet’s paedo-obsessed army of loners, those freaks who’ve convinced themselves the political class is a big kiddy-fiddling cult, in the hope they’ll come out batting for him against the president. And they have.
They’re all sharing pics of Trump cosying up to Epstein. In reply, Trump fanboys are sharing an old photo of Musk partying with Ghislaine Maxwell. The moral deterioration on display here is frankly sick-making. Beneath the bitch-fest of the past 24 hours there are serious political and economic differences between Trumpism and Muskism, and yet here it all gets reduced to: ‘No, YOU’RE a paedo.’ Musk’s marshalling of that zombie army of crazed paedo-finders to do his dirty work against Trump speaks to a latent contempt for democracy. Lacking any real social connection to the good people of the United States, he must rely instead on the most anti-social people on Earth. He indicts himself, not Trump, with such degenerate, opportunistic behaviour.
Once we’ve had our fill of mirth over this DC showdown, we need to break down the neo-Bonapartism of Musk’s digital rage against his old friend and leader. This unholy alliance of the world’s richest man and the dregs of the internet, of a chieftain of modern capitalism and the vagabonds of the ethical vacuum that is the Very Online right, is not populism. On the contrary, it is the rearguard rage of a powerful capitalist and his dumb-as-shit minions against a man installed into power by 77million good, working Americans. Neither Trump nor Musk has covered himself in glory in this spat, but Trump has that going for him: he was elected to represent the interests of working Americans, whereas Musk represents little more than his own profit margin.
Musk has done some good things. His restoration of free speech to Twitter / X has been to the benefit of liberty. His war on state waste was good in spirit, if not always in practice: there are reports of government institutions being scarred with ‘drugs, graffiti, roaches and rats’ once Musk’s DOGE auditors were done with them. I guess that’s what happens when you deploy game-theory weirdoes with internet handles like Big Balls to do the serious business of rethinking the priorities of the state. But he let his ego get ahead of the interests of the American people. He came to fancy himself as America’s saviour ‘monarch’, as foretold by such post-democratic ‘prophets’ as Curtis Yarvin. He wanted to be king in a republic. He valued Tesla’s shares more than voters’ concerns, riches more than riff-raff. No, no, no, Elon.
That’s the thing: the Trump-Musk flame war speaks to a profound and inherent tension in the MAGA movement. To a clash between the desires of the working masses who’ve taken a punt on Trumpism and the oligarchs who’ve attached themselves to it for clout and wealth. But it also reveals a crisis of political sensibility, of political language itself, which means that what ought to have been a serious intellectual reckoning between two wings of a movement instead became a cattish quarrel. And all of us find ourselves on the sidelines yelling ‘Go, girl!’ either at Trump or Musk. We are all implicated in the detonation of political depth.
Enough. Humanity’s history-makers must learn to speak for themselves, said Marx, instead of wearing the garb of the past and inviting ‘dead generations’ to weigh ‘like a nightmare on the brains of the living’. Our task is even more pressing: to repair the very mother tongue of political life in order that both the workers of society and the rulers of society might say with honesty what they want, thus permitting the rest of us to choose between them. My view? Populism must urgently liberate itself from the hobbyism of bored capitalists and digital nerds and say, in fresh, clear language, what it is for. The enrichment of working people rather than eccentric billionaires; the dismantling of state waste but the preservation of the state’s safety nets; the centering of the concerns of very offline workers over the obsessions of the very online leisure classes – that wouldn’t be a bad start, right?
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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