Trump Threatens to Deport Elon As They Start Fighting Again

Well that truce didn’t last for long. You may have remembered an all-time great internet day last month where Donald Trump and Elon Musk took their world-historic pettiness to the posting public. Trump threatened to take Musk’s government contracts, Elon then repeated Gawker’s reporting from 2015 by claiming Trump is in the Jeffrey Epstein files, then a few days later, Musk apologized in public and came groveling back to Trump.

Like everyone who gets on Trump’s bad side, Musk was persona non grata, and he must have realized at some point over the last couple of weeks that his apology did nothing and he’s no different from Rudy Giuliani or Anthony Scaramucci or any of the other doofuses Trump has used to his own ends and then tossed away. Musk reignited his criticism of this horrific bill the GOP is about to pass because it is going to explode the deficit and potentially wreak havoc among the business community Musk is trying to ingratiate himself back into. Musk has sniped at Trump and this bill on Twitter quite a bit in the last few days, and today, someone asked Trump if he is going to deport Elon Musk. In typical Trump fashion, he trolled Elon while smirking and musing about a thing he’s likely not going to do.

Reporter: Are you going to deport Elon Musk?

Trump: We’ll have to take a look. We might have to put DOGE on Elon. You know what DOGE is? The monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies.

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) July 1, 2025 at 6:28 AM

Speaking of things people aren’t going to do, Musk is again threatening to start his own political party, a project that he has already acknowledged is likely to ensure Democratic electoral victories. Really what this conflict is all about are two guys who think they are entitled to own America’s conservative party, and it has degraded into a dick measuring contest live on Fox News.

What’s far likelier to happen is what has historically happened to revanchist reactionary movements like this, and that’s a circular firing squad forming around a power vacuum. Trump and Musk are battling for control over the GOP, and Musk’s endorsement of Thomas Massie today, Trump’s least favorite member of the Republican House who is the only Republican to oppose this bill from the start, is what this pissing contest is likely to look like in the future. The entire party is beholden to their cult leader, but Elon Musk has a lot of money and could make some noise in Republican primaries, especially with candidates who are not attached with Trump at the hip.

This is the Balkanization of the GOP unfolding in real time. They have no organizing principle other than doing whatever daddy Trump wants, and with this horrific bill they are likely to pass this week, many Republican members, as Thom Tillis pointed out after announcing his retirement, are going to get caught in a lie to their constituents. They are taking their health care away and no amount of “fake news” bleating will change that core fact about Trump’s bill that members of Congress will be on the front lines defending at this same time next year going into the midterm elections.

The key thing to watch going forward once this horrific bill is passed is how low Trump’s approval rating will go. If Trump is in the mid to high 40s or higher, Republicans will have no problem inventing their own reality to claim they did not take health care away from their constituents so their wealthy donors could get a gargantuan tax cut, but if Trump’s approval slips into the 30s like it already has in some polls this year, those are the seeds of chaos sown for someone like Musk to come in to try to throw his weight around. As I wrote when Musk apologized, this is likely not the end of this saga between the two pettiest and most self-conscious humans alive, and the further Trump’s approval rating falls in the coming years, the more potential chaos Musk can unleash in the GOP–assuming Trump doesn’t deport him first.