Analysis: Trump's omnipotence in the GOP means Musk's political threats ring hollow

CNN

16 hours ago

Politics isn't rocket science.
If it were, President Donald Trump might have something more to worry about in his reignited feud with his estranged 'first buddy' Elon Musk.
But nothing in the explosive and now-soured flirtation of the world's richest man with politics suggests he has the magic touch to spark the kind of creative disruption in the Republican Party that he set off in the orbital and electric vehicle industries.
Musk's first-among-equals status as head of the Department of Government Efficiency at the start of Trump's second administration is now a memory.
He's so livid over Trump's debt- and deficit-inflating 'big, beautiful bill,' which passed the Senate on Tuesday, that he's threatening to primary every GOP lawmaker who votes for it and to set up a new political party.
Musk does wield considerable political weaponry. His enormous fortune means he can spend vast sums on favored candidates and issues. Trump knows this well, as a prime beneficiary of the nearly $300 million Musk threw at the 2024 election.
And as the owner and an obsessive user of X, Musk can call up online mobs against lawmakers and even Trump himself – though he's been careful, this time, not to single out the president directly over the bill.
Musk is the dominant force in the American space program. If Americans reach Mars, they'll probably get there on one of Musk's Starships. And technologies such as Musk's Starlink are vital on the battlefield – as the war in Ukraine shows.
Yet for all his enormous power, Musk has not shown much political dexterity, nor, apparently, created his own base of support that could dominate the GOP.
The chainsaw he wielded on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year was meant to symbolize his slashing of costs in the US government. Looking back, it's a better metaphor for the severing of his relationship with the president over Trump's MAGA megabill.
Once, Musk's alliance with Trump seemed a master stroke – opening an inside track that promised even greater benefits for his firms than his already vast array of federal contracts. Trump even did a stunning sales pitch for Tesla on the South Lawn of the White House – and bought one of the electric vehicles himself.
So perhaps it's no surprise that falling out with Trump – and then goading him into a social media war of words – turned out to be a political and financial loser for Musk. Their new antagonism may expose his empire to presidential retribution.
Trump on Tuesday warned darkly that 'DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.' This is a staggering statement for several reasons. First, it highlights the extent of the fracture between the patron and the man who he made the most powerful private citizen in the country only months ago. Second, it's a snapshot of an extraordinary time. Here is a president threatening to use executive power to ruin a private citizen and businessman. This would seem to fit most definitions of an impeachable offense, but it feels almost unremarkable in an administration that has shattered every norm of presidential behavior.
Musk's dalliance with Trump also hurt him in other ways. It alienated many of his most enthusiastic customers, including in Europe, where his electric vehicles were popular and the market value of his companies plunged.
And Musk's most prominent individual foray into electoral politics, aside from his alliance with Trump in 2024, was a disaster. His vehement rhetorical and enormous financial support for a conservative candidate in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race backfired: the more liberal candidate won by 10 points. The race might have been closer had Musk and his political baggage stayed at home. And the contest became an unexpected lesson that sometimes money isn't everything in American politics.
But here's the biggest impediment to Musk becoming a political power player: Trump is indisputably the most significant figure in American political life in the first quarter of the 21st century.
The president has dominated the GOP for 10 years. He's squelched the political aspirations of pretenders to his crown. Trump has a decadelong bond with the party base. He's already pulled off the kind of disruptive transformation of the GOP that Musk seems to be envisioning.
'My feeling is that Donald Trump is the one that has the huge following,' Lee Carter, a strategist and pollster who studies voters' emotional reactions to candidates, said on 'CNN News Central' on Tuesday.
'And Elon Musk certainly helped Donald Trump in the election,' Carter continued. 'There's no question about it. It gave him credibility. It gave him some voters that were on the fence – but it wasn't Elon Musk who was center-stage and I don't think that we're going to see people follow Elon Musk in the same way that we saw (with) the MAGA movement.'
Musk is a recent convert to Trumpism, and while his star shined with blinding intensity late in last year's election and he was ubiquitous during the early months of the new administration, his break from Trump has shown that almost all power in the MAGA movement is reflected off its figurehead.
Vice President JD Vance was the most visible barometer of this power dynamic. When the big break-up happened, he was forced to choose between Trump, who is responsible for his current prominence, and Musk, who could be a useful ally in a future presidential primary campaign. He picked the president.
Another key question is whether Musk has his own political base.
CNN's Aaron Blake assessed polling earlier last month that showed surprisingly comparative polling data among Republicans for Musk and Trump – at least before their latest bust-up.
But beyond the tech world, where he used his rock star status to funnel young, disaffected male voters toward Trump, it's not clear that Musk has a broader constituency.
By siding with the Republican Party's anti-debt wing, Musk now seems a natural ally of libertarians such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who voted against the president's bill. But fiscal hawkishness and breaking with the GOP spending crowd isn't a reliable route to power – as the failed presidential campaigns of Sen. Paul and his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, demonstrated.
Still, Musk's pledge to support Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who was lambasted by the president for his opposition to the bill and who may now face a primary challenge, could be significant. In a single race, Musk's wealth could be important, individual campaign contribution limits notwithstanding.
It would be harder for the Tesla tycoon to go national. For one thing, he'd have to recruit primary candidates willing to take on lawmakers supported by Trump, the most powerful major party leader in generations.
But Musk has grand ambitions.
He promised that if the 'insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day.' He wrote on X, 'Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat-Republican uniparty so that the people actually have a VOICE.'
Barriers to creating a third political force are daunting. For one thing, it would require shattering the emotional and historical allegiances of millions of voters.
Musk's best bet may be to wait out Trump – after all, he's a much younger man. If conservatives end up disillusioned with the president's legacy and politics more broadly, the CEO may find fertile ground for a third way.
It's happened before. In the 1992 election, Ross Perot's on-again-off-again-on-again candidacy rooted in a populist call to balance the budget won 19% of the vote, even though the Texas tycoon didn't win a single state. At the time, Republicans blamed Perot for eating into President George H.W. Bush's support and helping to elect Bill Clinton. Three decades on, political scientists are still arguing about what really happened.
Musk would need a surrogate. Unlike Perot, he can't run for president, since he is a naturalized foreign-born citizen.
But if he could somehow break the stranglehold of the two major parties on US elections, he'd accomplish something like the political equivalent of his improbable invention of a rocket booster that scorches a spacecraft into orbit and then returns to the launchpad to be captured by two giant mechanical arms.
Even Trump thought that was amazing.
'Did you see the way that sucker landed today?' Trump said at an October campaign rally. But that was in the first blush of his Musk bromance.
On Tuesday, a senior White House official told CNN's Kristen Holmes: 'No one really cares what he says anymore.'