He’d never admit it publicly, but I’m betting Donald Trump is regretting that he relaxed the White House rules about drug testing.
As I predicted last week, Elon Musk’s vow to leave politics behind did not last long. But I confess I had no idea that he would come back to the fold by taking swings at his beloved daddy replacement, Trump. It seems, however, that someone told Musk in recent days how much his businesses, which rely heavily on government subsidies, will be screwed by the president’s already imperiled budget bill. So now the tech billionaire has become fixated on killing the bill. Musk kicked off his crusade Tuesday by tweeting that Trump’s bill is a “disgusting abomination,” and has been on a tear since, rallying his supporters to oppose the bill and making room for more Republicans on Capitol Hill to start pulling back support. As he and Trump snipe at each other publicly, the efforts to pretend this is a friendly disagreement are falling apart.
The atheistic world of pseudo-intellectualism that Musk and his minions come from was always going to have friction with the Christian nationalists who actually run the MAGA-ified GOP.
Even if Musk fails in his efforts to kill Trump’s bill, this battle is exposing a deeper truth that the White House can’t hide: The MAGA coalition is fragile and some of the differences are starting to tear at the seams less than half a year into the second Trump term. Trump’s slim win in 2024 was no doubt due in large part to Musk, and not just the eye-popping quarter-billion-plus Musk spent to push the old man’s orange carcass over the finish line. It’s because Musk and other influential figures, especially those associated with Silicon Valley or who pretend to be former liberals, were able to convince a chunk of more secular, largely male voters to throw their lot in with the Christian nationalist base that is the backbone of the MAGA movement. But while these two groups joined together based on a shared animosity towards racial minorities and women, it was always a far more uneasy alliance than Musk or Trump wanted to admit. And now it’s getting shakier as two narcissistic billionaires are at odds.
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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., lies all day about everything, but he was probably telling the truth when he sneered that “the EV mandate is very important to” Musk. Tesla sales have been crashing since Musk joined the MAGA movement, meaning he needs government subsidies for electric vehicles more than ever. But while I have no doubt Musk is way more concerned about his bottom line than about government spending — his ostensible reason for hating the bill — his anger would be impotent if it didn’t tap into existing tensions between the newfangled technofascist wing of the GOP and more traditional Republicans.
“The Silicon Valley tech world does not like this bill,” Tim Miller of The Bulwark explained on his podcast Wednesday. It’s not just Musk, but many wealthy leaders who are deeply invested in the energy and tech areas that President Joe Biden’s administration invested so heavily in. They stabbed Democrats in the back as a thank-you for that money, and now are shocked they are being similarly betrayed by the Republicans they joined up with.
I don’t think Musk and Trump were actually fighting when Musk ostensibly “left” last week — even as Trump was assuring reporters his billionaire buddy was going nowhere — but there’s no doubt this conflict is disrupting their months of narcissistic codependency. On Thursday, Trump got angry and accused Musk of having “Trump derangement syndrome” on camera. It was during the same event that he lamented that the Allies prevailed on D-Day, suggesting the 78-year-old was in one of his increasingly common moments of uninhibited honesty.
Trump suggest that Elon has “Trump derangement syndrome”
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 5, 2025 at 12:11 PM
This conflict was brewing for reasons that run deeper than Musk and Trump’s competing egos or Silicon Valley’s dependency on government funding, which their leaders disparage. The atheistic world of pseudo-intellectualism that Musk and his minions come from was always going to have friction with the Christian nationalists who actually run the MAGA-ified Republican Party.
The most recent sign I’ve seen that there’s trouble in fascist paradise came late last month, from a YouTube video that, at first blush, seems like it’s not related: Jordan Peterson’s ill-fated effort to “debate” 20 atheists at once. Peterson is a former psychology professor remade into a MAGA culture warrior, and was a huge player in radicalizing a lot of young, secular men to the right for years before Musk got into the game. But he, like Musk, has been feeling pressure lately to fully MAGA-ify by openly embracing Christianity. Last July, Musk and Peterson even did an interview together where they talked up being a “cultural Christian,” creating the space for people who don’t believe in God or Jesus to support Christian nationalists in their theocratic goals.
But Peterson’s stint on the zoo-like faux-debate show “Jubilee” exposed how untenable the Christians-who-don’t-believe stance may be. Initially, it was billed as “1 Christian versus 20 atheists,” but then one of the atheists outed Peterson, by simply asking Peterson a simple question: “Am I not talking to a Christian?”
Peterson started yelling diversions and using other tactics to avoid answering the question. He did it again with another atheist by trying to nitpick what the word “believe” means when asked if one “believes” in God. It’s all very funny, because it’s obvious Peterson doesn’t believe in God or Jesus, but also wants the cultural cachet of being a Christian on the right.
This matters because Peterson is up there with Musk for representing the more secular, nerdy wing of MAGA, which also happens to be comprised of some of the most fairweather Trump supporters. These are those young men who voted for Biden in 2020 and switched to Trump in 2024, helping Trump barely win the election. With the help of Musk and Peterson, they convinced themselves they can buddy up with people who believe in demon possession and think porn should be banned, all without risk to themselves.
Ultimately, the college-educated, secular nerds convinced themselves the rest of MAGA are dumb sheep who are easy to control. They underestimate their new allies, though. On Thursday, Musk complained that Trump was showing “ingratitude,” claiming Trump would have lost the election without his support. (Which is probably true!)
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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 12:48 PM
This budget fight exposes how delusional that “we can handle the sheeple” attitude always was. It’s not about religion, per se, but the culture clash between the Musk fanboys and the Christian nationalist debate is driving much of this. Musk and his acolytes envision a technofascism that sucks all the money out of social services and puts it into the tech industry, even as it pursues goals typically disliked by the Christian right, such as clean energy production. Meanwhile, the Christian right wing of the party, while happy to pass huge cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare, is largely leaving untouched Social Security or Medicare, which their working-class and aging base depends on. The techbro fascists may hate the liberals they live next door to, but at the end of the day, they’re still part of the urban, atheistic, educated class that the MAGA movement demonizes. That difference was not going to be papered over forever.
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