The Bromance Is Over
- Liam F.
- 5 days ago
- 15 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
(!) All views expressed here are the author’s own and should not be attributed to any institution, employer or future legal defense fund.
After a poetic relationship comes to a “mutual close," Person A comes out and takes responsibility for Person B’s biggest accomplishment, even going as far as to call them ungrateful for their assistance. Person B does not like that, and calls Person A crazy.
Person A calls Person B a liar and a hypocrite. Person A begins to pull receipts of every example of Person B’s hypocrisy – some dating back well over a decade ago.
Then Person A, completely unwarrantedly, implies that Person B was involved in a multi-billion dollar global sex trafficking ring.
And no, that wasn’t a Hinge situationship that took place in the West Village between a trust fund kid and an Instagram influencer. That was the world’s richest man (for now) and the world’s most powerful man (for now), trading blows with each other on their own social media platforms.
Elon Musk and President Donald Trump during Musk's Oval Office "sendoff" on May 30th, 2025. | KEVIN DIETSCH / GETTY IMAGES
Yes, both relationships, or romances if you would go so far, can only take place in the year 2025.
So what are the implications of all of this? What happens when the world’s richest man goes head-to-head with the President of the United States? For one, this can be looked at as a massive win for President Donald Trump. Since his grandiose entrance down the escalator at Trump Tower -- now almost ten years ago to the day -- the name of Trump’s game has been division.
The Policy of Division
Within Trump’s first breaths in his announcement speech, he claimed Mexico was “laughing at us, at our stupidity.” Claiming that “they are not our friend” and “killing us economically.” He continued by proclaiming he would build a wall. Because “nobody builds better walls than me.”
Trump signed Executive Order 13769 within a week of taking office, effectively banning immigration from several majority-Muslim nations. No one from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen could enter for “at least” 90 days. After those 90 days, a list of ADDITIONAL nations would be added to that list.
My personal favorite form of Trump’s divisiveness is his use of the term “fake news,” which effectively claimed that America’s oldest and most trusted news organizations are intentionally lying to and misleading their viewers to further their own agendas. Opposite of Trump’s intentions with his Muslim bans and border walls, this idea has permeated borders.
World leaders including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, among others, have all continuously called for the crackdown of “fake news.” In 2018, President Lukashenko’s cabinet drafted and passed a bill that required online users to identify themselves, holding website owners accountable for comments posted by users. Granted the power to the government to block or close websites that violate those regulations and required websites to store the information of users and provide access to that data to the government upon request.
If that sounds less like protecting people from fake news and more like authoritarianism, it’s because it is.
Then in March of 2020, Hungary’s Viktor Orban was locking down his own political power. Within a couple of weeks, a law had been drafted, passed and signed by Orban, giving him the power to suspend laws and prop up others for as long as the COVID emergency lasts. Elections? Never heard of them. That law suspended elections and referendums on the local and federal level. Thinking about publishing “false” or “distorted” facts? Get ready to spend up to five years in prison. Anyone who breaks quarantine orders faces up to eight years in the clink.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in 2020.
If you noticed, the publishing of false and distorted facts and quarantine examples are in the present tense. Five years removed from a pandemic that was deemed “over” by President Biden in November 2022, those two laws are still on the books in Hungary. After the initial emergency period ended in June 2020, a “Transitional Act” made many of those “emergency powers” into ordinary old laws. They still hold the authority to impose quarantines and enforce non compliance penalties. They still hold the power to arrest and imprison anyone who publishes “fake news.”
Benjamin Netanyahu has been using the “fake news” term for almost eight years. He sure has gotten mileage out of the term since then, especially recently. Anyone who calls a spade a spade (or in this case, calls a war crime a war crime) is part of the “fake news” industry.
While Trump has made it more difficult for American brands or ideas to spread to other nations including our allies, the “fake news” narrative is one that goes against the grain. The only problem is that the people and leaders adopting this narrative are usually ones that end up on the wrong side of history. See above where an elected Prime Minister used his power to enact authoritarian laws under the guise of “public safety."
We can continue with President Trump’s own response during COVID-19, which gave the world a much needed sporting event: the American president and America’s top doctor sparring in the press briefing room about masks and lockdowns. Or we can go into his response to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, where he defended people protesting alongside white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Trump's comments following 2017's events in Charlottesville are a feature in a long list of polarzing statements from the President.
“You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists… The press has treated them absolutely unfairly. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”
And that was only his 2016 campaign and first term. Not including his claim of a “rigged and stolen” 2020 election, his role in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capital, amplifying conspiracy theories surrounding the Clintons and the “Deep State” running the show. (Despite being the president with a Republican Senate majority for all four years and a House majority for two)
The Second Go Around
Since taking office in January, some of Trump’s most blatant forms of division have come in his attack on DEI initiatives (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). Perhaps the most jarring came on the tenth day of his second term.
The night before, a Bombardier CRJ700 operated by PSA Airlines (a subsidiary of American Airlines) was making its final approach to Reagan National Airport in Washington D.C. when a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with it. All 64 onboard the plane, including 28 people associated with the Team USA Figure Skating team returning from a competition in Wichita, were killed. 11 of those 28 being children between the ages of eleven and sixteen, along with 13 parents and 4 coaches. Three U.S. service members onboard the Black Hawk helicopter were also killed.
The helicopter/plane crash at Reagan National Airport in D.C. on January 29th, 2025, albeit a tragedy, offeed opportunity for President Trump to open his second term with a strong showq of leadership.
Before all of the bodies were pulled out of the water, Trump stood in the briefing room, with an opportunity to have a moment. To present a sense of leadership.
The reality was a different, more accurate representation of where the leadership actually stands. Less than three minutes into his address, in which he was reading not from his signature teleprompter but instead from a packet laid on his presidential podium, Trump rounded the corner he’d been signaling towards miles before reaching the intersection.
(Full Speech Transcript Available HERE)
“We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas. I think we’ll probably (probably?) state those opinions now. Over the years I’ve watched as things like this happen (a commercial airline crash had not happened in the United States since 2009) and they say ‘Well we’re always investigating’ and then the investigation three years later we announce ‘We think we have some pretty good ideas’ but we’ll find out how this disaster occurred and will ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. The FAA and the NTSB and the U.S. military will be carrying out a systematic and comprehensive investigation and our new Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, his second day on the job when that happened, its a rough one.”
If that read like an incoherent mess, that’s because it sounded like an incoherent mess.
“We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system. I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary. You remember that. Only the highest aptitude. They have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers. That was not so prior to getting there.”
The standards Trump was talking about surrounds a change Obama made during his second term. It created a “Biographical Assessment”, which was a questionnaire on personality and life experiences. It also ended a requirement that said all applicants must graduate from an FAA accredited air traffic control program, better known as the Collegiate Training Initiative, or CTI. Lots of that was reversed during the Trump administration between 2018 and 2019.
“And then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before. I put safety first, Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first and they put politics at a level that nobody's ever seen because this was the lowest level.”
The Biden administration didn’t go so far to completely return to Obama-era standards. However, Biden did reinstate DEI initiatives. Biden kept the Biographical Assessment out of the hiring process and also made sure that the CTI remained a primary factor in hiring.
“The FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency's website. Can you imagine?”
As an act of due diligence, we can check the FAA’s website. Even more diligently, we can go back to a 2019 posting (spoiler alert: Trump was in office) on the FAA’s website that ironed out a new hiring focus. Let’s play a game!
What is the headline on the FAA’s April 2019 announcement?
Is it…
A) FAA Introduces a New Hiring Process to Better Equip our Skies
B) FAA Provides New Opportunities to Aspiring Air Traffic Controllers
C) FAA Provides Aviation Careers to People with Disabilities
D) Trump Administration Announces a New Direction for our Skies
If you picked FAA Provides Aviation Careers to People with Disabilities, you would be correct.
Trump's comments in front of the press following the military helicopter/American Airlines plane mid-air crash were troubling on a number of fronts, but no premise was more concerning than steering blame towards 'DEI' initiatives. | ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
So to get back to the point… (of course the thing that took me off my train of thought is a story about planes...) the breakup of Musk and Trump’s bromance is a welcoming occasion for the President. He was given almost $300 million to his campaign by Musk alone, found a brand new batch of Silicon Valley tech bro supporters and even got to parade around the idea that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would help eliminate “trillions” of dollars of “waste, fraud and abuse.”
Perhaps and most importantly, Trump gets all of the attention again.
The Ecstacy of Attention
The man lives for the optic. He wants you to notice him so badly he paints himself orange. He gold plates everything he owns because he wants the outward look of wealth and power. The reality is the gold plating itself, it’s all for the spectacle. The inside is likely a much cheaper, less attractive metal like copper or nickel.
It was obvious he viewed Musk as a threat. After hosting a black-eyed Elon in the Oval Office to present a gift he reserves for only “very special people, (a gold plated key presented in a box likely commissioned on Etsy) he then only days later proclaimed he kicked him out, instead of going with the first story that Musk chose to leave.
Trump reportedly asked aides if DOGE was “all bullshit” – and once that hit the headlines, the shit hit the fan.
It took Musk a few days to grow the pair to begin firing back, but on June 3, Elon came out of his k-hole and began to see the light.
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” had become an “outrageous, pork-filled” and “disgusting abomination.”
Elon kept going, firing off tweet after tweet (it will always be a tweet) calling for Americans to “KILL the BILL” by calling their Senators and Representatives. Trump fired back on June 5 in the Oval Office. Sitting on the same chair with his feet on the same ground where he and the Vice President had ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy three months prior, he told reporters that he could have won the election without Elon.
Musk replied a little over an hour later stating “Without me, Trump would have lost the election. Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.
BOOOOOOOM. Shots fired.
From that moment on, Elon tweeted 23 times in 111 minutes, quoting statements made by the Senate Majority Leader John Thune in 2020, House Speaker Mike Johnson in 2023, and a myriad of quotes from Trump which all criticized government spending and increasing the nation’s debt. His call for the formation of a new centrist political party got over 5.6 million votes. (80.4% of which were yes votes ((97% of which were probably bots)))
To return the volley, Trump responded with a couple of posts (I will not call them truths) of his own.
“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
What’s up with all of those capitalizations???
He then went on to claim Musk was “wearing thin” and that he “asked him to leave”. Trump claimed that Musk’s opposition to the bill was the elimination of the EV Mandate created by the Biden Administration. Trump claimed “nobody else wanted” these “Electric Cars” (again with the capitalization), although the White House parking lot still has his red Model S in it.
Oh yeah, remember when Trump held that Tesla infomercial on the White House lawn in March? Pepperidge Farm remembers, and it went like this. Trump got behind the wheel of the car, proclaimed he’d buy it for “full price”, (somewhere in the range of $80,000-$110,000) which he evidently did. Trump even bought his 17 year old granddaughter a Cybertruck, because apparently he hates her, but also called it a “”cool design”. (My sources ((I have none)) say that it reminded the President of his own vehicle’s prototype sketched on a McDouble wrapper)
It really escalated when Musk dropped (in a since deleted post) “the big bomb." That the Epstein files were never released because Trump’s name was in it.
Images that AI could never replicate:
BUH BUH BUH BUH BUH BUH BUH BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.
Trump ignored it, admitting he “doesn’t mind Elon turning against” him. Just minutes after that, Musk moved another piece, this time with some potentially large implications.
Musk announced the decommissioning of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. We no longer live in the America of old, where we can send our own rockets into space. Instead we must rely on a private company. When that goes south, our options move to buying seats from foreign nations.
Musk has since gone back on the Dragon decommissioning, but the reality is still the world’s most prosperous and powerful nation cannot make it to space without the help of a billionaire.
This whole flip-flopping in ideals was bound to end eventually. Musk catering to Republicans was not a good branding idea. Only 18% of Republicans told Pew Research Center that they would purchase an EV. Up 5% from the year prior, but still down from 2022’s high of 23%. In the process, he’s alienated the only population that would previously buy Teslas in masses (left leaning environmentalists)
But Elon was, and still is, completely lost. That’s how he ended up in this mess.
It doesn’t take a shrink to tell that a man who has hoarded hundreds of billions, has had at least 14 children with at least 4 different women, including a conservative influencer that filed a paternity suit earlier this year, is probably not in the strongest of mental states. Not to mention the New York Times’ reporting that Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama on Trump’s Campaign Trail. It all goes back to someone searching for purpose, searching for their “wolf pack.”
Maybe that’s why he bought Twitter and turned it into a device to crowdsource his self-esteem. For a moment, he found his home within the MAGA cult. But like all moments they come to an end.
The Next Steps…
For Trump
For Trump, he can either brush this all under the rug and ignore it, or, he could point his Justice Department to Musk’s musk. Opening investigations on his alleged drug use while working as a government employee, his well documented run-ins with the SEC and potential securities violations, labor violations relating to Tesla and SpaceX employees.
The list can go on, and with an apparent insider trader as the nation’s top cop, Pam Bondi will listen to what the president suggests she should do. Like on “Liberation Day,” where she sold between $1-$5 million worth of Trump Media stock before it dropped 13% in value.
Does the Attorney General get a crystal ball once they’re sworn in? Government officials trading stocks at all is shady. The Attorney General trading at least one million dollars worth of stock the morning of one of the largest market sell offs in history, is pretty fucking shady.
Especially when you’re in the inner circle of the root of the sell off.
Trump will continue to threaten and pull back on tariff threats, making sure his buddies make a couple of bucks on the market’s reaction to the news, until he can’t. Which may be coming sooner than we think.
The market is no longer reacting to his threats the way it did the last couple of months. Which means something else is on the horizon.
For Musk
Musk’s future is slightly more complicated than that. Tesla stock fell 14% on June 5, wiping out $150 billion worth of market value. It was the 11th largest single day drop in history, essentially happening in five or six hours.
Elon has some other alternatives. Obviously there is still SpaceX, Twitter (or X) and xAI, his “public benefit” Artificial Intelligence company. In addition to those he has Neuralink, which has implanted three brain-chips into humans. A quadriplegic and most recently, a non-verbal ALS patient who now is able to speak through a computer using a voice created by using AI and old recordings of him.
Starlink, which operates under SpaceX, is a satellite powered internet service that has been a godsend for the people of Ukraine. Within 48 hours of the Russian invasion in 2022, Starlink had been deployed and had over 150,000 daily users by mid-2022. Starlink now has almost 6 million subscribers in over 130 countries.
So on the outside looking in, Musk has a very diversified portfolio. It includes some of the most recognizable companies of the last ten years with a lot of opportunity for growth. That, as long as Musk has the ability, figuratively, financially and literally.
The Reality
The New York Times dropped a bombshell report about Musk’s drug use on the campaign trail. His cocktail included ketamine, adderall, ecstasy and mushrooms. (Not just portobellos.)
God forbid a man has hobbies. All of this can easily be explained! He’s prescribed a low dose of ketamine for depression, does adderall to help him work hard, ecstasy to help him play hard and mushrooms, because they're awesome. “Good morning, Nathan.”
Except recreational use of hard drugs is usually frowned upon when you're holding a position of great power. Especially when you’re forcing hundreds of thousands of people to either retire, accept buyouts or pack up their things and accept a decent severance package. Especially when you slash jobs at the FAA (you don’t say…), forced over almost two dozen VA hospitals to close.
Elon infamously hit a blunt during a 2018 taping of the 'Joe Rogan Podcast', which led to a significant drop of his Tesla shares. He has since transitioned to regular use of "harder" drugs.
Especially – and most nauseatingly – cut USAiD funding that has already been responsible for over 300,000 deaths already, 200,000 of those being children. The PEPFAR Impact Tracker indicates that (at the time of this writing) almost 60,000 adults and over 6,000 children have died of HIV or AIDS as a result of the cuts since January 24.
If you lived up to your promise, saved the country trillions of dollars while getting rid of the “waste, fraud and abuse” that “runs rampant in our government," I may be in the minority, but I would be okay with him doing as many drugs as humanly possible! Even to the point of pissing himself!
But none of that occurred. Lives were ruined or ended. Jobs destroyed, departments shut down. All of it to pad the egos of the shot callers, disguised as a service to the nation.
The drugs will kill Elon if he doesn’t get his act together. Until then, Tesla stock will likely see a massive correction, mostly since they haven’t put a decent car out in years. Elon’s promise of self-driving capabilities have fallen short time and time again and competitors are catching up.
Elon wants to make it to Mars. It has been well documented throughout the years. He cannot do that without the help of Trump, government funding and contracts.
As for Elon’s next wolf pack? Who knows. He can retreat into the shadows of his X-ochamber, or try to cater to the left again. But until he’s in the good graces (or good enough graces) of the president, he might be stuck in the middle.
And until he gets his drug problem solved, we may witness the world’s richest man spiral into someone you’d avoid on the subway.
To Wrap (about damn time)
Although they are in very different circumstances, their main source of concern must be the same thing.
Money.
If Elon goes bankrupt, he is toast. If America goes bankrupt, not only is Trump toast, but possibly the world. If the American stock market crashes, and the deficit grows to uncontrollable levels, triggering an economic tailspin that brings its people down with it? Even the most hardcore MAGA fans will turn their back to their leader.
Elon’s story is proof of that. His financial growth was jeopardized by the spending bill and, yes, “lashed out”. Americans began to lash out after the April 2 tariff announcement, but Trump, chickening out, brought the tariffs down significantly.
We’re about 10% into the Trump presidency. Markets have rebounded for now – but the uncertainty remains. Remember the insider trading we spoke of before. Now that the announcement of tariffs doesn’t move the market the way it did, Trump and his goons will need to find a new way to capitalize off of the losses of American people.
Whether it’s Peter Navarro or ChatGPT coming up with that next scheme is anybody’s guess. Only time will tell if it will cause the fall of the American empire.
(!) The views and opinions expressed in this piece are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Recess Bell, its staff, any affiliated organization or the author's employer. All content is intended for informational and commentary purposes only and should not be interpreted as an endorsement, factual assertion, or any official position on any individual, company or public figure referenced.
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