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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Trump’s omnipotence in the GOP means Musk’s political threats ring
hollow
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated:
12:00 AM EDT, Wed July 2, 2025
Source: CNN
Politics isn’t rocket science.
If it were, President Donald Trump might have something more to worry
about in his with his estranged “first buddy” Elon Musk.
But nothing in the explosive and of the world’s richest man with
politics suggests he has the magic touch to spark the kind of creative
disruption in the Republican Party that he set off in the orbital and
electric vehicle industries.
Musk’s first-among-equals status as head of the Department of
Government Efficiency at the start of Trump’s second administration
is .
He’s so livid over Trump’s debt- and deficit-inflating “,”
which on Tuesday, that he’s threatening to primary every GOP lawmaker
who votes for it and to set up a new political party.
Musk does wield considerable political weaponry. His enormous fortune
means he can spend vast sums on favored candidates and issues. Trump
knows this well, as a prime beneficiary of the Musk threw at the 2024
election.
And as the owner and an obsessive user of X, Musk can call up online
mobs against lawmakers and even Trump himself – though he’s been
careful, , not to single out the president directly over the bill.
Musk is the dominant force in the American space program. If Americans
reach Mars, they’ll probably get there on one of Musk’s Starships.
And technologies such as Musk’s Starlink are vital on the battlefield
– as the war in Ukraine shows.
Yet for all his enormous power, Musk has not shown much political
dexterity, nor, apparently, created his own base of support that could
dominate the GOP.
The at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year was meant
to symbolize his slashing of costs in the US government. Looking back,
it’s a better metaphor for the severing of his relationship with the
president over Trump’s MAGA megabill.
Musk’s big, bad move
Once, Musk’s alliance with Trump seemed a master stroke – opening
an inside track that promised even greater benefits for his firms than
his already vast array of federal contracts. Trump even did a stunning
on the South Lawn of the White House – and bought one of the electric
vehicles himself.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that – and then goading him into a
social media war of words – turned out to be a political and
financial loser for Musk. Their new antagonism may expose his empire to
presidential retribution.
Trump on Tuesday that “DOGE is the monster that might have to go back
and eat Elon.” This is a staggering statement for several reasons.
First, it highlights the extent of the fracture between the patron and
the man who he made the most powerful private citizen in the country
only months ago. Second, it’s a snapshot of an extraordinary time.
Here is a president to ruin a private citizen and businessman. This
would seem to fit most definitions of an impeachable offense, but it
feels almost unremarkable in an administration that has shattered every
norm of presidential behavior.
Musk’s dalliance with Trump also hurt him in other ways. It alienated
many of his most enthusiastic customers, , where his electric vehicles
were popular and the market value of his companies plunged.
And Musk’s most prominent individual foray into electoral politics,
aside from his alliance with Trump in 2024, . His vehement rhetorical
and enormous financial support for a conservative candidate in a
Wisconsin Supreme Court race backfired: the more liberal candidate .
The race might have been closer had Musk and his political baggage
stayed at home. And the contest became an unexpected lesson that
sometimes money isn’t everything in American politics.
Trump’s GOP power base is impregnable
But here’s the biggest impediment to Musk becoming a political power
player: Trump is indisputably the most significant figure in American
political life in the first quarter of the 21st century.
The president has dominated the GOP . He’s squelched the political
aspirations of pretenders to his crown. Trump has a decadelong bond
with the party base. He’s already pulled off the kind of disruptive
transformation of the GOP that Musk seems to be envisioning.
“My feeling is that Donald Trump is the one that has the huge
following,” Lee Carter, a strategist and pollster who studies
voters’ emotional reactions to candidates, said on “CNN News
Central” on Tuesday.
“And Elon Musk certainly helped Donald Trump in the election,”
Carter continued. “There’s no question about it. It gave him
credibility. It gave him some voters that were on the fence – but it
wasn’t Elon Musk who was center-stage and I don’t think that
we’re going to see people follow Elon Musk in the same way that we
saw (with) the MAGA movement.”
Musk is a recent convert to Trumpism, and while his star shined with
blinding intensity late in last year’s election and he was ubiquitous
during the early months of the new administration, his break from Trump
has shown that almost all power in the MAGA movement is reflected off
its figurehead.
Vice President JD Vance was the most visible barometer of this power
dynamic. When the big break-up happened, he was forced to choose
between Trump, who is responsible for his current prominence, and Musk,
who could be a useful ally in a future presidential primary campaign.
He picked the president.
Who is Musk’s base?
Another key question is whether Musk has his own political base.
CNN’s Aaron Blake last month that showed surprisingly comparative
polling data among Republicans for Musk and Trump – at least before
their latest bust-up.
But beyond the tech world, where he used his rock star status to funnel
young, disaffected male voters toward Trump, it’s not clear that Musk
has a broader constituency.
By siding with the Republican Party’s anti-debt wing, Musk now seems
a natural ally of libertarians such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who
voted against the president’s bill. But fiscal hawkishness and
breaking with the GOP spending crowd isn’t a reliable route to power
– as the failed presidential campaigns of Sen. Paul and his father,
former Rep. Ron Paul, demonstrated.
Still, Musk’s pledge to support Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who was
lambasted by the president for his opposition to the bill and who ,
could be significant. In a single race, Musk’s wealth could be
important, individual campaign contribution limits notwithstanding.
It would be harder for the Tesla tycoon to go national. For one thing,
he’d have to recruit primary candidates willing to take on lawmakers
supported by Trump, the most powerful major party leader in
generations.
But Musk has grand ambitions.
He promised that if the “insane spending bill passes, the America
Party will be formed the next day.” He wrote on X, “Our country
needs an alternative to the Democrat-Republican uniparty so that the
people actually have a VOICE.”
Barriers to creating a third political force are daunting. For one
thing, it would require shattering the emotional and historical
allegiances of millions of voters.
Musk’s best bet may be to wait out Trump – after all, he’s a much
younger man. If conservatives end up disillusioned with the
president’s legacy and politics more broadly, the CEO may find
fertile ground for a third way.
It’s happened before. In the 1992 election, Ross Perot’s
on-again-off-again-on-again candidacy rooted in a populist call to
balance the budget won 19% of the vote, even though the Texas tycoon
didn’t win a single state. At the time, Republicans blamed Perot for
eating into President George H.W. Bush’s support and helping to elect
Bill Clinton. Three decades on, political scientists are still arguing
about what really happened.
Musk would need a surrogate. Unlike Perot, he can’t run for
president, since he is a naturalized foreign-born citizen.
But if he could somehow break the stranglehold of the two major parties
on US elections, he’d accomplish something like the political
equivalent of his improbable invention of a rocket booster that
scorches a spacecraft into orbit and then returns to the launchpad to
be captured by two giant mechanical arms.
Even Trump thought that was amazing.
“Did you see the way that sucker landed today?” Trump said at an
October campaign rally. But that was in the first blush of his Musk
bromance.
On Tuesday, a senior White House official told CNN’s Kristen Holmes:
“No one really cares what he says anymore.”
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