What started as something like a barroom brawl devolved quickly into a cage fight, which was distressing for those of us who don’t drink and don’t enjoy mixed martial arts.
The symbolism, however, was rich.
Just two months ago, Elon Musk and Donald Trump were ringside in Miami watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship; this week, they were the ones pummeling each other while all of social media watched, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. But Trump and Musk are not the only ones sparring.
Political brawling has broken out across the country in ways that feel unusual, as if we are just a couple of social-media fisticuffs away from bringing back the great American duel, the kind that killed Alexander Hamilton. Dueling, however, has been called “the violence of gentlemen,” so maybe we are safe because gentlemen are scarce in the current political landscape.
It’s not just Trump and Musk. Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin are feuding, so are Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, and we’re not that far past Shapiro’s epic battle with Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s heated drama with Lauren Boebert. There are other battles not suitable for mention in a family publication.
It’s tempting to say that the recent infighting is all within the GOP, and all about divisions between MAGA versus Never Trump, but it’s not. Witness the Democrats’ piling on Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary under Joe Biden, who is about to scorch Democrats in her forthcoming book.
For Republicans, who under Trump have grown accustomed to governing with the gloves off, the infighting may be accelerating because they’ve temporarily lost their chief rival, the Democratic Party. The fortunes of the Democratic Party have fallen so low that they’re spending millions on initiatives designed to win back young men while one of their star contenders for 2028, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, is picking the brains of conservatives on his podcast. Absent a robust foe, Republicans are like a desolate Rocky Balboa with no one to fight, and so have turned on their own tribe.
But what is happening is also a predictable result of when politics turns transactional instead of relational. Once the transactions are over, or once the transactions curdle and sour, there’s nothing foundational to sustain the human relationship. We’ve seen this before with Trump, in his transactional relationship with Mike Pence. Many of us had hoped that there was something deeper there with Musk, with whom Trump seemed to have an almost fatherly relationship.
It was not coincidence that much of the social media discourse about their “breakup” was couched in terms of family — either divorce or estrangement. And while it was, on one level, train-wreck, cringe entertainment, like watching “Housewives” or “Tiger King,” it was also painful since so many of us know what it’s like to have a close relationship implode.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee spoke for many when he posted a photo of both men, with the caption “But ... I really like both of them.”
On his radio show Friday, Glenn Beck urged Trump and Musk to reconcile and to keep sight of their shared mission. It is that mission that is too often a casualty when two formerly aligned parties or individuals fall out, whether in politics or in a marriage.
A mission can be hard to define; it can be too vague or have too many components. “Essentialism” guru Greg McKeown says that a “priority” is one thing, not many, and we risk failure when we set “priorities.”
Maybe that’s part of what happened here. Trump and Musk had priorities, and some were in conflict with each other. It’s much too early to say that the breakup is permanent; the men have mutual alliances and shared friends who presumably will work hard to bring about a reconciliation.
But if the fissure lasts, the relationship that unfolded over the past year — with iconic moments like Musk jumping on the stage at a campaign event and Musk’s son trotting after Trump on the White House lawn — was not really a relationship, but a transaction between two powerful men. And Democrats stand ready to reap the rewards.
