2 months ago
53 ARTICLE AD
It’s been two weeks and two days since Election Day. In that time, Elon Musk has camped out at Mar-a-Lago, inserted himself endlessly in Donald Trump’s meetings and calls with world leaders, and openly bragged about how he delivered the swing states for Trump. During that same time, Trump’s people have been briefing about how much they hate Musk and how he’s a big, weird creep. The Trump-Musk alliance is not built to last. In fact, according to Rolling Stone, the Trump people were fully prepared to lose the election and hang the loss entirely on Musk. Some highlights from this funny and frightening piece:
Trumpers were ready to burn Elon Musk: Had Donald Trump lost the 2024 election, several Republicans close to him, GOP lawmakers, and conservative megadonors would have been quick to blame his top billionaire surrogate: Elon Musk. In fact, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, a number of these sources — including one senior Trump campaign official — said they were each willing to go on the record with Rolling Stone about how furious they were at Musk and his America PAC operation for comically botching the Trump ground game in the battleground states, thus blowing the presidential race for Trump. The catch was: These sources were only willing to vent, with their names attached, if Trump actually lost. And some of these Republicans were indeed anxious that he would.
Musk is a loser: “What a loser,” said a source close to Trump, who agreed to allow their quote to be used anonymously for this story, to show what they would have publicly said of Musk, had Vice President Kamala Harris won the election. “Donald Trump was right to call Elon a ‘bullsh-t artist’ … A tenth-grader could have run a better [operation] in the swing states.” The Trump campaign official went as far as to concede to Rolling Stone that “we never should have outsourced” so much of the ground-game operations to that “very strange man.”
Things are worse now that Trump won: Yet the embattled former president nevertheless came out on top — and now Musk is more firmly embedded within the MAGA and GOP elite than ever, to the frustration of some of the president-elect’s longtime advisers. They are, at least for the time being, stuck with him, due to a victory that many in the MAGA upper crust see not as the result of Musk’s efforts, but in spite of them. At this moment, he is a protected man in Trumpworld, in the good graces of key members of the Trump family, Tucker Carlson, and other MAGAville luminaries, and the president-elect — even though a few short months ago, Trump was privately trashing Musk as “boring” and awkward.
Not built to last: There are numerous sources close to Trump — big donors, incoming administration officials, lawyers, even some who like Musk — predicting that the Trump-Musk bond is not built to last. This is largely based on Trump’s tendency to loathe sharing the national spotlight, as well as the inevitable friction you get when two titanically large egos — both of whom came into this 2024 alliance with wealth, fame, and political muscle — become so intertwined. There are some Republican figures who predict Musk might just get bored and bail.
There’s also stuff about how Musk apparently got into a public confrontation at Mar-a-Lago’s dining hall with one of the senior transition people. It’s sort of funny to me that all of the beefs are between Musk and Trump’s people, and not Trump himself. In some ways, it seems like Musk’s larger scheme has paid off – at some point this year, Musk plainly decided that there was an opening to “run” Trump and get Trump elected and then make Trump into the guy he wanted. The thing is, Musk has a childlike understanding of the government and how to wield power. The same is true of Trump.
There’s also a section of this RS story where Republicans were absolutely panicked in the final month before Election Day because Musk’s America PAC was so poorly organized and the campaign had basically outsourced all of their ground game to Musk. Which reminds me, yet again, of how f–king weird it is that Trump won all of those states with basically no resources on the ground.
Also: please enjoy a photo of Musk with a wig-free Donald Trump??
Elon loves Diet Coke pic.twitter.com/uApjU2jJGO
— Dima Zeniuk (@DimaZeniuk) November 17, 2024
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images, Instagram.
