Elon Musk comes for the king and misses

The news, in brief…

• Biden calls Trump probe “ridiculous”

  Former President Joe Biden took offense at President Trump’s planned investigation into his mental acuity during his term. “I made the decisions during my presidency," he said on Thursday. “Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false."

• Mahmoud Khalil speaks on his detention

  Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil offered insight into his time in a Louisiana detention facility in newly filed court documents. The Columbia graduate detailed missing the birth of his son which he called “devastating.”

• Raskin threatens Hegseth with $400M in fines over Qatari jet

  Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could be
  “on the hook” for more than $400 million in fines if he doesn’t return a luxury jetliner gifted to the Trump administration from the Qatari government.

• Trump institutes travel ban, again

  The president blocked travelers from 12 countries from entering the U.S. "We cannot continue to allow the Trump administration to write bigotry and hatred into U.S. immigration policy,” Sen. Ed Markey wrote of the action on X.

• Trump admin hires 22-year-old to oversee terrorism prevention

  Thomas Fugate, just one year out of college and with no relevant experience, is in charge of the federal government’s main terrorism prevention

Today’s top story …

The war of the DOGEs

Elon Musk has more money than anyone else on Earth and he’s blown a significant chunk of it trying to convince people that that fact makes him the least bit interesting.

He overpaid for the social media app that was then known as Twitter, in part so that he could crown himself King of the Posters. One look at his feed of flop sweat and white nationalism puts the lie to his claim to the throne. Scrolling through his sea of blue-checked sycophants, who have all paid $8/month for the opportunity to compliment his stolen or half-assed jokes, will have the average X user ready to go Richard III. (We have to admit the image of Musk being locked in a tower with spotty cell service warms the heart.)

When Musk realized that he couldn’t buy being funny or liked, he tried to glom on to one of most effortlessly funny and beloved people in the country: Donald Trump. Trump is a man who has changed the way many of us speak without ever trying. His trademark “weave” has infected the American lexicon with phrases like “many such cases” and “I’ll still keep drinking that garbage.” Trump has an actual claim to the posters’ throne and he doesn’t even seem to want it.

This tension between the casually adored MAGA mastermind and the world’s most over-compensated tryhard was held in check so long as the pair could work together. Once Musk exited the Oval Office through a k-hole, it was only a matter of time before the resentments of the man who attempted to contort his body into the shape of a social media platform boiled over on the man who doesn’t even need to post.

Musk spent days taking shots at Trump on X, calling for the formation of a new political party, encouraging his followers to vote out their Republican representatives and generally having a normal one before Trump bothered to respond. The president took to his own social media site only after Musk accused Trump of appearing in the case files of the late accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump’s terse posts suggested cutting off government contracts to Musk’s SpaceX, hitting the CEO in the wallet at a time when Tesla stocks are cratering. He went on to say that Musk was throwing a tantrum because he plans to take away federal programs that “forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted.”

The return of the king was heralded in all corners of Trumpworld. Steve Bannon crawled out from his underground lake in the Misty Mountains, fish heads still clutched to his chest, to say that Musk should have his citizenship investigated and his companies seized. The rapper formerly known as Kanye West took a break from crafting hypebeast Uruk-hai to tell Trump and Musk to hug it out.

We know what this spat will mean for Trump. Outside of a certain election that he doesn’t like to talk about, Trump has rarely lost in any meaningful way. Bans from various social media platforms did nothing to loosen the iron grip that Trump has had on American politics and the daily news for the past decade. The kingdom of the phone-addicted will simply have to wait on Musk’s sentence for attempted regicide.

What do you think? Will the Musk-Trump split have any real world consequences? Is Trump’s base likely to care that he’s in the Epstein files, given that their friendship has been known for decades? Sound off in the comments.

Make me smarter …

The incredible shrinking president

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Before you go …

Historian Federico Finchelstein: Trump's "abuse of the law fits an old autocratic pattern"

The fascism expert told Salon that we’ve seen Trump’s type before. Read more.