Is the Current Quarrel Between Trump and Musk Staged?

Perhaps, the current quarrel between Trump and Musk may be a well-staged performance. It flared up again at the right time — after the reconciliation reached three weeks ago.

Right now, the decisive battle is unfolding in the US Congress over the “Big Beautiful Bill”, which — if Trump wins — will give him powerful financial levers to implement the “Make America Great Again” program. Much depended on today’s vote in the Senate, which at some point, due to the defection of three Republican senators, hung by a thread and was ultimately decided in favor of the president only after the intervention of J.D. Vance (the vice president also has a vote in the Senate).

Now it’s up to the House of Representatives, which recently voted for the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB), but will not necessarily automatically support it again — too many amendments were introduced by senators. Even among Trumpists, not all support the bill — some out of fear that voters will not approve of cuts to social programs, others, on the contrary, because of disagreement with insufficiently strict measures to reduce spending on supporting the poor.

And the main threat comes from the latter — from conservatives from the Freedom Caucus, who call themselves “budget cutters.” It was to them — Congressmen Andy Harris from Maryland and Chip Roy from Texas — that Elon Musk publicly challenged.

“How can you call yourselves the Freedom Caucus if you vote for a DEBT SLAVERY bill with the largest increase in the debt ceiling in history?” he wrote on the X network, tagging these two legislators.

It seems that in such a simple way Musk — on his own initiative or by agreement with Donald Trump — is pushing hesitant Republican conservatives to support the “Big Beautiful Bill.” After all, he himself is far from an authority for the Republicans. His rapprochement with the Elephant Party began only in 2022, shortly after he acquired Twitter — before that, he had been a staunch Democrat for many years.

And Musk only started making large public contributions to the party before the elections last November. So his exhortations could play the exact opposite role — and those Republicans who were still hesitant about supporting the BBB, after the intervention of the upstart billionaire, will make the decision that pleases Trump.

And if the BBB does pass between the Scylla of moderate Republicans and the Charybdis of conservative “budget cutters,” then it is possible that soon after that, relations between Musk and Trump will improve again, and everyone will safely forget about the threats to deprive the billionaire’s company of state funding and send him back to South Africa. As well as about the prospects for creating a third party in the United States.