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Russia's Response to Trump/Musk Sounds Like They're All in High School [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-07
Donald Trump does not do bromance well. (Along with everything else.) His affair with Vladimir Putin (talk about an abusive relationship!) was showing signs of coming apart back in February (Russia Is 'On the Brink of a Breakup' With the US Following Trump's Claims About 'Good Relationship' With Putin: Kremlin) and is now pretty much on the rocks: Is Trump Falling Out of Love With Putin?
So it’s perfectly understandable — to any teenager, that is — that Putin’s Russia couldn’t resist chortling over Trump’s breakup with Elon Musk.
Russian officials delight in Trump-Musk rift, offer mediation, asylum
In Russia, as elsewhere, the internet was transfixed as Trump and Musk, the man who claimed he had gotten the president elected, traded threats and insults. Comments both wry and mocking flooded social media. As the brawl turned nastier, and Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon called for Musk to be deported as an illegal immigrant and for Trump to seize his company SpaceX, some Russian officials ironically suggested that Musk could seek asylum in Russia, joining the likes of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and Wirecard fugitive Jan Marsalek, who according to British prosecutors is a Russian spy.
It’s really easy to portray this as two girls fighting over the same boy, then getting together to dish on him after the boy has dumped them both. (Even though comparing Trump to a teenager is giving him too much credit.)
AOC (who is closer to her high school days than I am), seems to have spotted this first: “Oh man, the girls are fighting, aren’t they?” (even though she meant Trump and Musk).
But, back to Russia. Another analogy for Putin’s breakup with Trump is Putin as the scheming cheerleader who couldn’t get what she wanted from the football captain and now loves watching him get humiliated.
Russia’s informal troller in chief Dmitry Medvedev, who held the presidency for Putin from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, also chimed in on X with a horrified-face emoji. “We are ready to facilitate the conclusion of a peace deal between D and E for a reasonable fee and to accept Starlink shares as payment. Don’t fight, guys!” he posted Friday, referring to Musk’s satellite internet network.
And this offer, possibly tongue-in-cheek:
But easily the most provocative offer came from Musk’s onetime rival in spaceflight, Dmitry Rogozin, former head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos. The two sparred publicly for years on Twitter. On Thursday, Rogozin, now an official in occupied Ukraine who heads a special technical military combat battalion, BARS-Sarmat, invited Musk to flee the United States and join in the war on Russia’s side.
On a more serious note, the WaPo story does lay out the unnerving similarities between the threats Trump has made against Musk and the threats, all too often carried out, that Putin makes against any oligarch who falls out of favor (which sometimes leads to falls out of windows). Putin, though, is subtle enough not to make such threats openly, but then he doesn’t need to.
Though I’m sure WaPo didn’t actually intend to put the Trump/Musk and Trump/Putin feuds in the context of a high school spat, the article does end with this revealing snippet from 2022:
[A]fter Russia invaded Ukraine, Musk tagged the Kremlin calling for one-on-one combat with Putin to decide the war. “I hereby challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat. Stakes are Ukraine,” wrote Musk. “Do you agree to this fight?” he added in Russian. There was no known response.
That sounds like an invitation to an after-school hair-pulling fight. Except that Putin has a black belt in judo. Musk, so far as I know, has only his ketamine addiction.
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