After Elon Musk, America is never going to be the same

Only certain days qualify as the greatest days in American history: July 4, 1776 will always lead the way, as will the day the Constitution was ratified. So will the day of the Emancipation Proclamation, VE Day, the moon landing and a small handful of others. 

Yesterday, June 5, 2025, will join that select company, because yesterday was the day that the world’s richest man, on a media platform that he owns, accused the President of the United States of Jeffrey Epstein kinds of behavior. As I looked at my phone blowing up, I realized that America was never going to be the same.

Elon Musk, as we all watched in real time over the last few months, made one of history’s most tragic miscalculations. It’s hard for ordinary mortals to know exactly what Donald Trump cares about, but we can make a few guesses. He wants to deport as many illegal immigrants as possible, clearing the decks for native-born workers to do Heaven knows what in imaginary factories, to remove all aspects of elite liberal culture from federal institutions and to enrich his family and friends through questionable cryptocurrency schemes. Add to that a seemingly sincere desire to bring about world peace, and you have the essential motivating basis for a second Trump term.

Musk, who doesn’t explicitly traffic in the arms trade, was fine with the peace, good with the deporting except for certain “high-value” workers on special visas, utterly down to destroy woke culture and more or less indifferent to the crypto stuff. What does he care about Ponzi memes? But Musk’s mistake came in thinking that Donald Trump cares about fiscal responsibility. Trump is a man who bankrupted casinos, who has more lawyers on retainer than he has bodyguards. He’s about a lot of things, but he’s not about balancing the books.

For Trump, DoGE was never about government efficiency. It was about owning the libs. Musk was his prize pig, rooting out truffles of corrupt liberal largesse. The earliest days of the administration were filled with scenes of sobbing bureaucrats carrying their desk plants in boxes as USAID hit the skids. No longer would we fund Peruvian opera companies, send “condoms to Gaza,” or spend federal dollars running experiments on “transgender mice.” “Big Balls” and a team of Monster Energy-charged whiz kids took a chainsaw to government while Musk supervised them 24-7, reportedly mainlining ketamine and sleeping on cots in federal buildings. This was his plan to streamline America. But all Trump really wanted to do was shoot DEI programs out the airlock.

In many ways, Musk and Trump were always at cross-purposes. Musk hates certain aspects of liberal culture: its censoriousness, its priggishness, its intolerance for dissent. But he also advocates for solar power and for a kind of 1950s boy’s Popular Science vision of the future, populated by self-flying electric cars and a multiplanetary human race. Trump is OK with all of that if his name gets to be on the rocketship, but his main concern, as always, is real-estate development. For Musk, the goal is Mars. For the President, it’s Trump Gaza Number One.

Musk thought that DoGE was the ultimate tool for reducing government, for getting rid of the national debt, for saving the US economy before it flies headlong into the abyss. But in reality, Musk was Trump’s tool, or fool, a useful genius to distract the Democratic party and to make its supporters look like clueless, terrified, violent idiots. Trump never sincerely promised to make America small again.

There’s an old adage that Hollywood executives think they’re big stuff until they go to Washington and run up against people with actual power. Musk may not be from Hollywood. (He might be from Mars, or maybe Venus.) But he’s learned the same lesson regardless. He was just a boy standing in front of his President, asking him to love him. But the Falcon flew too close to the sun, and now he must return to his home planet, or at least to Starbase, Texas, never to influence policy in the same way again.