No! Hell no! Never! The enemy of your enemy is still a corrupt plutocrat who wants to destroy democracy.
Donald Trump’s second term has often been a time of soul-crushing despair for liberals and leftists, so it was natural that there was a great deal of delight in a rare bit of good news: the very public and extremely nasty breakup between the president and his chief plutocratic ally, Elon Musk. The Trump/Musk rift was long predicted, since both men are arrogant narcissists prone to messy public divorces with both their romantic and business partners. But the separation happened more quickly, more viciously, and more hilariously than expected.
After a mere 114 days, Musk left his White House job (where he had so firmly planted himself in the administration that he slept in government offices and brought his 4-year-old son, named X, to presidential meetings). Suddenly, last Thursday, Musk and Trump went from being tight buddies to foes. Musk accused Trump of economic mismanagement and promoting a tax-and-spending bill that is a “disgusting abomination.” He also claimed that Trump “is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” Trump responded by asserting, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
While the entertainment value of the spat is invigorating, its actual political consequences are more ambiguous. The feud undeniably strengthens the anti-Trump opposition. As medieval folk wisdom teaches us, “When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own.” Trump and Musk, who ganged together to loot the government for their own enrichment, are certainly thieves on a paramount scale. Their falling out benefits the honest.
But should the honest (or at least the less thievish) align themselves with one of these two miscreants? That’s an idea that has been floating by some prominent Democrats who want to recruit Musk to join a grand anti-Trump popular front. On Friday, Representative Ro Khanna told Semafor, “Having Elon speak out against the irrational tariff policy, against the deficit exploding Trump bill, and the anti-science and anti-immigrant agenda can help check Trump’s unconstitutional administration. I look forward to Elon turning his fire against MAGA Republicans instead of Democrats in 2026.”
Khanna is a bit of an anomaly in staking out this position, since he’s one of the most progressive members of Congress. His progressivism is sometimes in tension with the fact that he also represents Silicon Valley and has been eager to mend the broken alliance between the Democratic Party and Big Tech. Until the 2024 election, Silicon Valley strongly leaned toward the Democratic Party, but the broader shift to the right by some prominent billionaires such as Musk frayed this relationship.
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Aside from Khanna, most of the other advocates for a Democratic Party rapprochement with Musk have been centrist or even conservative Democrats. Anthony Scaramucci, himself a brief-serving Trump adviser who was quickly fired and is now a Trump critic, suggested that if Democrats abandoned their left-wing policies and tacked to the center they could “bring Elon Musk back into the fold as a prodigal son.” The pundit Mathew Yglesias, a centrist Democrat who was closely aligned with the Biden administration, offered similar advice on X: “I feel like [Hakeem] Jeffries and [Chuck] Schumer should give Elon Musk a call and tell him about the Democratic Party’s longstanding interest in electric cars, solar panels, space exploration, and balanced deficit reduction.”
These arguments are all examples of crackpot Machiavellianism—superficially clever, but actually deeply self-destructive. The logic here is the common one of realism: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But in this case, the enemy of your enemy (Musk) is as bad as, if not worse than, your enemy (Trump). Both Musk and Trump are plutocrats intent on plundering the office of the presidency and degrading democracy, but Musk’s great wealth makes him a greater long-term danger. In a tweet, Musk threatened Republicans by writing, “Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.” This menacing message should scare not just the GOP but all Americans: The world’s richest man is warning that for the next four decades or more, he’ll use his vast wealth to be a puppet master pulling the string of primaries and general elections.
As David Weigel noted in Semafor, “Some Democrats believe that Musk could have stayed in their coalition, had they paid him a little more respect—specifically, had Joe Biden invited Musk to the White House electric vehicle summit early in his presidency.” This is a very shallow interpretation of Musk, whose wild shift to the right is shaped by a variety of interwoven causes. Musk has become the most prominent advocate of hard-right policies because of a sense of racial superiority rooted in his background as a white South African, a commitment to gender norms that makes him both eager to procreate on a mass scale and angry about the gender transition of one of his children, and the natural proclivity of the ultrarich toward Social Darwinist economics. Musk’s embrace of the racist myth of a “white genocide” should itself make clear that he is not a mistreated centrist but an ardent, ideological right-wing extremist.
The writer Kat Abughazaleh, who is running in a Democratic congressional primary in Chicago, summed up the case against aligning with Musk well by writing, “I can’t believe any Democrat would THINK of allying with Elon Musk. I won’t take money from the guy who does a Hitler salute.”
In The New Republic, Greg Sargent expanded upon this basic point by noting that the Trump/Musk feud is really a battle between two competing versions of hard-right policy, with Musk supporting the more radically pro-austerity and anti-welfare position:
In the end, Musk would use deficit fears to gut the state more thoroughly than Trump would, while Trump seems more focused on dramatically reducing the tax burden of the wealthy and slashing the safety net to pay for it. They are at odds, but mainly because they merely fall at different places on the same spectrum of impulses. And those impulses all tilt toward the same place—toward making our society a less egalitarian, more unequal, meaner, crueler, and much more savage place.
For Democrats to align with Musk, they would have to do more than shift to the center; they would have to shift to the far right. Any suggestion of an alliance with Musk is based on the premise that the only way to fight Trump is to attack him from the right. This is a natural instinct among elite Democrats (as evidenced not only by the 2024 elevation of the Cheney family as Democratic Party surrogates but also Chuck Schumer’s recent lambasting of Trump for trying to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran).
It’s possible to oppose both Musk and Trump, as Bernie Sanders did on Friday in a post:
Trump’s right: The easiest way to save money is to eliminate the “Billions and Billions” in corporate welfare Elon Musk has received. Musk’s right: Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” is a “disgusting abomination” that must be defeated. Let’s do both. It’ll be a win-win for America!
The Democrats are divided not just about Musk but also about billionaires in general. There’s a hope among centrist Democrats that the party can win the support of “good billionaires” to fight the bad billionaires. But leftists and many progressives don’t buy the concept of good billionaires as a class worth winning. They want the Democrats to win back the working class. Becoming buddy-buddy with Musk is a sure way to convince everyone that Democrats are unprincipled and uphold the status quo at all cost.
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