02b U.S. Politics – Progressive

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While the mainstream media has been consumed with the Trump and Musk breakup, I have been much more interested in how Democrats would respond to Donald Trump losing his biggest donor.

So far, Democrats have asked Musk to testify before Congress and launched an investigation into the X owner’s claims about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

Just because Elon Musk has been kicked out of Trump’s party does not mean that he will be welcomed back into the Democratic camp.

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Rep. Jimmy Patronis (R-Fla.) said President Trump and Elon Musk’s feud wouldn’t last for long, noting that the Republican Party and the president’s allies are all a part of “one big family.”

Musk in recent days has criticized the president’s budget bill over its effects on the national debt, which the tech billionaire says “undermines” the work he completed at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The fight reached a fever pitch this week, with the two exchanging harsh words on social media.

But as the spat continues, Patronis said he believes the two will soon reconcile.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Donald Trump throw [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [(R-S.C.)] out by the side of the street and say the guy’s crazy. But then you know what? The next week they’re playing golf together. This is no different,” Patronis said during a Friday appearance on NewsNation’s “The Hill,” referencing the president’s sometimes fraught relationship with the South Carolina lawmaker.

“Trump knows that sometimes you’re going to have falling out with those that you trust, you like, that you’re friends with. It happens with us in D.C. all the time. So again. Mark my words. About a month from now, these guys will be hanging around again,” he added.

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Amid the messy ongoing divorce between the president and the world’s richest man, this much is already clear: Donald Trump has sole custody of the House GOP.

Republican lawmakers are making clear that, if forced to choose, it’s Trump — not Elon Musk — they’re sticking by as leaders race to contain the fallout for their “one big, beautiful bill.”

Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who helms a House panel inspired by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, blasted Musk’s public attacks on Trump as “unwarranted” and criticized his “lashing out on the internet.”

“America voted for Donald Trump on Nov. 4, 2024 — every single vote mattered just as much as the other,” Greene said in a brief interview. “And whether it was $1 that was donated or hundreds of millions of dollars, the way I see it, everybody’s the same.”

Like many Americans, GOP members watched Thursday’s online exchange with a sense of car-crash-like fascination. Many shared that they hoped Musk and Trump could somehow patch things up. But many — including some of the former DOGE chief’s biggest backers on Capitol Hill — were wholly unsurprised to see the billionaire suddenly cut down to size after months of chatter about who was really calling the shots at the White House.

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President Donald Trump and adviser Elon Musk celebrated their efforts to slash federal spending before Musk stepped away from his White House work. Musk wore a black DOGE hat over a bruised right eye that he blamed on his young son’s punch. That was May 30 in the Oval Office. Days later, the two billionaires were punching at each other on social media platforms they own.

Their fight began over federal tax and spending legislation, with Musk calling a Trump-backed bill “a disgusting abomination” and Trump saying he was “very disappointed” with Musk. Soon, Musk claimed credit for Trump and Republicans winning in 2024 and Trump threatened to cut off Musk companies’ federal contracts.

The public display of animosity called into question the fate of months of Department of Government Efficiency work. 

Under Musk’s oversight and with Trump’s approval, DOGE axed billions of dollars in grants for state health departments and scientific research. It gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers. It all but shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, the decades-old department that provides food and health care to people in other countries.

Still, as Musk ended his work with DOGE, it was clear that the group’s cost cutting achievements fell short of Musk’s goals. A week before Trump won his second term, Musk said he expected to cut “at least $2 trillion,” without identifying a timeframe for doing it. He later lowered that to $1 trillion.

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Hill GOP leaders are in full-on damage control as they scramble to save their megabill — and themselves — from the blast radius of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s breakup.

But Musk doesn’t seem interested in sparing any part of the GOP trifecta from his wrath on his way out of Washington. The president’s new enemy attacked both Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Thursday over the cost of the party’s sweeping domestic policy package. Thune brushed it aside.

Johnson, however, is mounting a multi-front rebuttal as he aims to keep Musk from hurting the megabill’s prospects. He’s questioning the tech mogul’s motives for opposing the bill and challenging his claims about its impact on the deficit. Johnson already had to reassure hard-liners concerned about the bill’s spending in order to squeeze the bill through the House last month.

“I’m the same guy that’s always been a deficit hawk, and now I’m the speaker of the House, and I’m working on a multi-step plan to reverse the fiscal insanity that has haunted our country,” Johnson told reporters Thursday. “We have to get the big, beautiful bill done.”

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Elon Musk just launched a war against the GOP. Now the party’s hopes of holding onto power are at stake.

Musk has gone from helping Republicans take total control of Washington — spending nearly $300 million to become the single biggest known donor last year — to attacking the highest-ranking leaders of the party and daring the rank and file to cross him.

“Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years,” Musk said on X.

The post was an unambiguous warning from the world’s richest man, who has the power to single-handedly reshape elections with his wealth. It was not long ago that Republicans hoped Musk could pour cash into their efforts to help maintain control of Washington. Instead, he’s becoming their public adversary.

Musk spent Thursday online attacking President Donald Trump over Republicans’ massive tax-and-spending bill, which Musk says does not cut enough government spending.

He’d already threatened to challenge Republicans who support the megabill; on Thursday, he blasted House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, took credit for Republicans winning trifecta control in November, and floated the idea of launching a third party.

“This is a massive crack in the MAGA coalition,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and a former Trump administration appointee. “This town is historically built on Republican versus Democrat, and this seems to be crazy versus crazy. It is asymmetric and it seems, for the first time, President Trump seems to be out-crazied.” 

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Ye is hoping to prevent the unraveling of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s relationship.

The controversial rapper formerly known as Kanye West waded into the white-hot feud between POTUS and the one-time head of DOGE, encouraging them to call a truce in a post to X.

“Broooos please noooooo,” he wrote. “We love you both so much.”

Musk and Trump’s tiff began last week, when the former Trump adviser told CBS News last week that he was “disappointed” with Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” Musk continued to whale on this week, calling the bill a “disgusting abomination and encouraging voters to oust any Republicans who supported it.

The spat got worse on Thursday after Trump made his first public comments on Musk’s critiques, saying he was “very disappointed in Elon.” In a post to Truth Social, Trump speculated about the end of his relationship with the billionaire, saying that Musk “just went CRAZY!” The president then threatened to terminate Musk’s contracts with the federal government.

“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.

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The Trump/Musk situation is being described as escalating, and White House aides are considering potentially reviving the investigations into Musk that the Biden administration initiated.

Rolling Stone reported:

This week, two Trump administration officials tell Rolling Stone that the government may not be above revamping investigations into Musk’s business empires — probes that carried over from the Biden era and ones that Musk was extremely adamant he wanted to see a second Trump administration crush, if the Tesla billionaire helped elect Trump.

“THIS ADMINISTRATION COULD ALWAYS START THE INVESTIGATIONS AGAIN,” one senior Trump appointee messaged in all-caps.

A source with knowledge of the matter says that Trump White House staff have already begun the process of making phone calls and sending messages to prominent allies of both Trump and Musk, saying they need to pick sides and that, basically, it’s the easiest choice they’ll ever make in their lives.

Musk basically annoyed and ticked off a lot of people around Trump in the White House, and now that the split has come, those people are looking for revenge on Elon Musk.