The Dictatorship
Here’s how Trump and Musk’s can hurt each other — and us
An explosive breakdown in the relationship between President Donald Trump and his biggest political donor turned part-time employee, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has been foreshadowed since their alliance first took shape. When Trump brought Musk along for the ride as he moved back into the White House, the looming question was always how long the two could possibly stay in sync. After all, neither the most powerful person in the world nor the richest person on Earth is known for keeping his ego in check.
The main thrust of the Trump-Musk feud boils down to who can assert dominance over the other. In the intense back-and-forth that had everyone glued to their screens Thursday, we saw bullies used to getting their way desperately trying to find leverage over each other. But unlike the flame wars of old, where internet trolls would hurl insults at each other across message board forums, Trump and Musk can do serious damage to each other in the real world — and to the rest of us in the process.
The main thrust of the Trump-Musk feud boils down to who can assert dominance over the other
Musk first gained access to Trump through his vast fortune; he donated almost $300 million during last year’s election and hasn’t been afraid to throw his money around in races this year. Though he said in May he would be “spending a lot less” on funding political races, he has also been quick to threaten pumping money into the midterms should lawmakers back the massive budget bill currently working its way through the Senate. And Musk has made clear that he expects a return on his investments, having already snidely claimed on his X platform that Trump would have lost and Democrats would have taken Congress without his backing.
Trump is reportedly more focused on the midterms than he was during his first term, worried that a new Democratic majority would lead to more investigations and/or a third impeachment. While he’s already sitting on $600 million to help hold on to a GOP majority, Musk’s money could throw a spanner in the works, especially if he follows through on his public musing about bankrolling a third party to “represent the 80% of Americans in the middle.” Though Trump has his own social media platform, Truth Social, X remains a much louder microphone to amplify Musk’s messaging to the right, including his supposed “bombshell” about Trump’s presence in the Jeffrey Epstein files. (Musk provided no evidence for the claim and Trump has previously denied any involvement with Epstein’s criminal behavior.)
Trump, in turn, has threatened Musk’s lucrative government contractswhich would include billions of dollars funneled toward his SpaceX companyas well as the subsidies that Tesla receives for its electric car production. Musk responded by warning about cutting off access to SpaceX launcheswhich would potentially cripple NASA and the Defense Department’s ability to deploy satellites. But that would prove a double-edged sword for Musk, given how large a revenue stream those contracts have become.
By Thursday evening, Musk had already backed down from his saber-rattling about restricting access to the Dragon space capsule, but he could change his mind again. That he made the threat in the first place has raised major alarm bells among national security officials. The Washington Post reported Saturday that NASA and the Pentagon have begun “urging [Musk’s competitors] to more quickly develop alternative rockets and spacecraft” to lessen his chokehold on the industry.
Notably, Trump isn’t alone in his fight against Musk, though as ever those wading into the brawl have their own motives. Former White House strategist Steve Bannon took the opportunity to launch a broadside against Musk. “People including myself are recommending to the president that he pull every contract associated with Elon Musk,” Bannon told NBC News on Thursday night. Bannon requested that “major investigations start immediately” into, among other things, Musk’s “immigration status, his security clearance and his history of drug abuse.” There are already several federal investigations of Musk’s companies that have been underway for years, which critics had previously worried might be stonewalled due to his influence with Trump.
Even if the two eventually reach a détente, it’s unlikely to be a lasting peace, not so long as one feels his authority is challenged by the other.
While the extremely public breakup makes for high drama and more than a little schadenfreude, the pettiness masks a deeper issue. The battle Musk and Trump are waging is predicated on both wielding a horrifying amount of unchecked power. In a healthy system of government, their ability to inflict pain on each other wouldn’t exist, or at least such an ability would be severely blunted. Musk being able to funnel nearly unlimited amounts of spending into dark money super PACs is an oligarchical nightmare. Trump using the power of the presidency to overturn contracts and launch investigations at a whim is blatant authoritarianism in action.
In theory, there are still checks to rein each of them in before things escalate much further. Musk’s shareholders have been unhappy with his rocky time in government, and the war of words with Trump sent Tesla’s stock price tumbling once more. Trump needs to get his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed into law and — next year — ensure Congress doesn’t fall into Democrats’ hands. Trump and Musk have incentives, then, to stay in each other’s good graces despite their wounded pride.
Trump made clear to NBC News in an interview Saturday that he has no real interest in patching things up with Musk, warning that there will be “very serious consequences” if his one-time ally funds Democratic campaigns. Even if the two eventually reach a détente, it’s unlikely to be a lasting peace, not so long as one feels his authority is challenged by the other. The zero-sum view of the world that Trump and Musk share, one where social Darwinism and superior genetics shape humanitydoesn’t allow for long-term cooperative relationships. Instead, at best they will return to a purely transactional situationship, but one where the knives will gleefully come back out the second a new opening is given.
Most importantly, there is no protagonist when it comes to the inciting incident in this duel, as a total victory won’t benefit the American people writ large. Trump wants Congress to pass his bill to grant him more funding for deportations and to preserve his chances of staying in power. Musk wants a more painful bill that will slash the social safety net for millions. No matter what the outcome is as they battle for supremacy over each other, we’re the ones who risk being trampled.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for BLN Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.
After President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, he signed a series of executive orders designed to reshape America’s political landscape. The waves of action from the White House deluged the press, put elected Democrats off balance and left liberal groups scrambling to respond. “When you’re winning, it’s like blitzkrieg,” longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon crowed to The Washington Post early last year. The president’s opponents, Bannon said, were “surrendering without a fight.”
By blowing up so many norms and taking on so many battles at once, the Trump administration created the very shrapnel that has slowed its efforts.
A year and a half later, what seemed like a relentless flood from the White House has weakened to a trickle. New reporting from The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan shows that fears of overreach expressed inside the administration proved prescient; the multifront assault has proved vulnerable to counterattack — and in many ways it has been abandoned by the commander in chief. By blowing up so many norms and taking on so many battles at once, the Trump administration created the very shrapnel that has slowed its efforts. The “blitzkrieg” has stalled out.
According to Haberman and Swan, at least one senior staffer worried about a White House strategy reminiscent of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos. Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary and an archconservative lawyer, reportedly had misgivings about efforts within the administration to flex its muscles to further its anti-immigration agenda. Last spring, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller publicly suggested that Trump could suspend habeas corpus for migrants seeking hearings challenging their detention. Later, as protests raged against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s heavy-handed raids, internal debate bubbled up again over whether to invoke the Insurrection Act to shut down the demonstrations.
In each of these moments, Scharf drafted memos to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles explaining the ways that these aggressive moves might well backfire. (MS NOW has not independently confirmed Haberman and Swan’s reporting but has reviewed the memos that the Times published.) The memos themselves resemble anodyne briefing memos that any lawyer could produce for decision-makers. But the carefully worded drafts are a major departure from the bombastic phrasing in legal filings that we’ve come to expect from this administration.
Scharf’s memos express concerns about, as the Times put it, “actions that promised Mr. Trump quick results but kept producing costly entanglements in court.” In a memo written last October, after the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the National Guard to Illinois, Scharf’s warning was remarkably direct. He wrote that while the act provides broad powers to the president, “it is likely that any invocation of the Act would result in vigorous litigation potentially obviating any advantage to be gained in terms of the flexibility that it would provide to the President.”
Trump neither suspended habeas nor invoked the Insurrection Act. But time has shown that Scharf and other skeptics were right to worry about how bold moves could become self-inflicted wounds. The administration already has racked up a wild number of court losses on many of its most daring gambits, and dozens of cases remain open. The departures of thousands of experienced Justice Department lawyers certainly hasn’t helped matters, nor have the unconvincing slapdash efforts to twist the law’s meaning to fit the administration’s preferred narratives.
As the unpopularity of the Trump agenda grew, already bumpy terrain became a major slog, especially after the president launched a war against Iran in late February. The conflict has theoretically ended, but there are no details on what, if anything, has been gained, aside from a clear legacy of higher prices. Focus on the war has likewise sapped any political capital that the White House may have hoped to spend in preserving Republican majorities in Congress in this fall’s midterms.
Any remaining momentum in reshaping the government has ground to a near halt with the president’s focus on his own vanity projects.
Any remaining momentum in reshaping the government has ground to a near halt with the president’s focus on his own vanity projects. Although they’re still corrupt overreaches in their own way, Trump’s plans to gild equine statues around Washington and paint the bottom of the reflecting pool blue don’t rise to the same level as deploying the U.S. Army against protesters. As My colleague Zeeshan Aleem recently noted, “having started a disastrous, failed war of choice and holding record-low approval numbers, Trump has retreated to party planning and interior decorating.”
There are clearly portions of the initial “flood the zone” agenda that are still chugging forward. Mass deportation efforts remain ongoing in the background, though ICE has yet to release updated arrest data since scaling back its more attention-grabbing operations in late January. Likewise, the administration continues to undercut Congress and wage Trump’s retribution campaign against his enemies. Federal departments and agencies out of step with the MAGA ethos remain under threat, as new efforts to downsize the Education Department Tuesday show. And the Supreme Court is still due to weigh in on several cases that could further empower the executive branch.
But the radical period of transformation that those around Trump hoped to foster has not come to pass. There has been simply too much resistance for the administration to fully overwhelm the system. There is no time for Trump’s foes to let down their defenses, however. The retrenchment we’re seeing from the White House ahead of the midterms could precipitate a renewed campaign next year. But rather than simply accept the oncoming storm as inevitable, there is still time to ensure that in the long term Trump’s sound and fury signify nothing.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.
The Dictatorship
Markwayne Mullin’s investments in the kratom industry look like a clear conflict of interest
ByDonald K. Sherman
What do gas station drugs, conflicts of interest and the Trump administration have in common? Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
A New York Times report earlier this week revealed the significant role Mullin has played in an influence campaign advocating for kratom, a supplement commonly sold at gas stations that allegedly relieves pain or boosts energy, but is linked to risk of liver toxicity, seizures and substance use disorder. Kratom has also been found in the system of thousands of people who died of drug overdoses.
As a senator from Oklahoma, Mullin endorsed proposed federal restrictions on kratom’s more potent competitors. He also reportedly urged officials in the Department of Health and Human Services to remove language from the Food and Drug Administration website about the possible dangers of using kratom, both as a senator and as DHS secretary. It is unclear why the homeland security secretary would be involved in such decisions. (Mullin hasn’t commented on the Times’ reporting, but DHS said in a statement that the secretary “follows all ethics and conflict of interest standards and has not lobbied for any individual or company.”)
Mullin has apparently gone out of his way to advocate for a supplement that is not regulated by the FDA and whose effects on the body are not well understood.
What we just learned from Mullin’s financial disclosure paperwork is that the secretary owns an investment worth as much as $1 million in a kratom company, Botanic Tonics. It’s not clear when he acquired this stake, but he has not filed paperwork to say he divested from it. Mullin has said in March that he would divest from dozens of potentially conflicting investments should he be confirmed as DHS secretary. Botanic Tonics does not appear to have been part of that list at the time, but given Mullin’s reported advocacy for kratom as part of the Trump administration, he should certainly divest now.
This looks like a textbook conflict of interest, where it is impossible to know if Mullin is advocating for policies that are best for the public or if he is prioritizing his own bottom line at the expense of public health and safety.
Mullin’s history doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence. He did not come to DHS with an ethically clean slate, having violated the STOCK Act by failing to properly report years of stock and bond trades. Some of his activity involved stock trading closely tied to industries he regulated and may have had sensitive knowledge of. Even if Mullin has a third party managing his portfolio, as he claims, as an officeholder, he is legally responsible for avoiding and remediating his own conflicts of interest.
The public should never have to question whether government officials are using their power for their own benefit, but Mullin’s conduct is particularly galling because President Donald Trump fired his predecessor at DHS, Kristi Noemafter she faced serious ethics issues that often distracted from her critical government role. These included her apparent failure to report outside income from a dark money group earned while serving as governor of South Dakota, and a subcontractor tied to Noem secretly receiving a DHS ad contract, outside of the normal competitive bidding process. (Noem’s lawyer told ProPublica“Then-Governor Noem fully complied with the letter and the spirit of the law; and Noem said she followed proper procedures with regards to the DHS ad contract.”)
While this seemed like a rare moment of accountability and possibly correcting course, appointing and confirming Mullin appears to have been more of the same.
The public should never have to question whether government officials are using their power for their own benefit.
And then, there’s the kratom itself. Mullin has apparently gone out of his way to advocate for a supplement that is not regulated by the FDA and whose effects on the body are not well understood. As part of this effort, he has reportedly tried to downplay health concerns about kratom. The supplement’s health risks can include addiction and withdrawal, liver damage, anxiety, hallucinations and psychosis. (Botanic Tonics, the company Mullin invested in, insists its products are safe and says it “has consistently advocated for regulations that distinguish between authentic kratom leaf products and synthetic derivatives.”)
All of these facts together raise another important question: How can someone who did not proactively divest from an obvious and dangerous conflict of interest, and who could not effectively manage a third-party adviser overseeing his investments to ensure compliance with the STOCK Act, ethically lead a massive agency consisting of more than 260,000 people covering everything from aviation, election and border security, to emergency response?
It’s up to Mullin to start building trust with the public by divesting his interests in kratom, and if he does not, Congress must intervene.
Donald K. Sherman
Donald K. Sherman is executive director and chief counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Before joining CREW, he was an oversight and ethics lawyer in the House, the Senate and the Obama administration. He also was chief oversight counsel to the late Rep. Elijah E. Cummings on the House Oversight Committee.
My father is dying. I suppose we all are, but he is actively closer to death than anyone else I know.
My father began declining in 2020. First, his body started to give up on him. He has Parkinson’s disease. One day he tried to get out of bed and his legs didn’t work, so he fell out of bed, and ended up in the hospital. Another day, his right hand stopped working, so he could barely use his phone or computer, his only points of contact with the outside world (he’s almost entirely lost his ability to write), making him further isolated. A few years after his Parkinson’s diagnosis, my father’s mind started to give out on him, too. He developed dementia, a diagnosis he steadfastly refuses to admit or discuss, which makes taking care of him even more challenging.
As an academic and intellectual, this is a perceived humiliation my father cannot bear. He has fits of anger, confusion, fear, frustration and disorientation. I spoke to him last week while he was in the hospital for yet another issue (a now semi-regular occurrence) and he started shouting, “I don’t know why the hell I’m here! Get me out of here, talk to someone!”
This is an incredibly difficult piece to write — one I almost didn’t.
To make matters more complicated, he now lives in Pakistan, where he is from, while I live in the United States and my mother, who co-caretakes with me, is based in South Africa. He lived in the States for most of his adult life, but we simply could not afford the cost here of the full-time care he needs. Even with the privilege of being upper-middle class, the more than $20,000 a month for full-time care was way more than we could afford, and this is not even for any specialized care.
This is an incredibly difficult piece to write — one I almost didn’t. There are serious ethical implications to consider as I discuss my father’s health. But I have ultimately decided to share my experience because I think it’s important to have conversations about the isolation and inhumanity of the end-of-life care systems that fail us. These are conversations we too often turn away from out of fear and discomfort. The intention here is to honor my father because approaching death with dignity honors the dignity of his life, too.
So, as I watch my father’s body and mind slowly and increasingly fail him, and I see the fear and suffering he endures on a daily basis, I can only hope that the end of his life is not drawn out.
I spoke about this with a dear friend recently, about how excruciating this process has been to witness and partake in, about our caretaker burnout, about the many, many systems that fail the sick and elderly, about how each week there is a new crisis. She gave me Atul Gawande’s book “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.” Gawande’s central argument is that both the medical community and modern society are woefully ill-equipped to deal with mortality in a dignified way and that the most humane thing we can do is to focus on the quality of life of the elderly and terminally ill, rather than longevity.
As I explained to my friend, I’ve been sitting with an intense polarization around how I think about my father’s death: some parts of me wishing the end of his life is not drawn out, while others feel guilt and shame for wishing that my father dies quickly. Gawande’s book has been a profound balm in this process. “Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need,” he writes. “Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.”
Medicine, technology, and strangers. This trifecta now rules my father’s waning life. His full-time carers are strangers to him, and he to them. And some combination of technology and medicine is helping to prolong an existence full of fear and suffering.
What I have ultimately come to realize is that the only true solution here is not a medical one but a spiritual one. Death is too big for the human mind to hold. And grief, when we try to hold it alone, tears away at our lives. The only way any of this becomes manageable, in my experience, is if we hand these over to something bigger than ourselves. My faith is a big part of my life, so, for me, that something is god. For someone else, it might be a different spiritual belief or it might look like surrendering to the present. But the answer is certainly not in the illusion of control that medicine alone can create for patients and their families.
Mortality — our own and that of our loved ones — demands that we meet it with expansiveness in order to stay sane, otherwise our fear (an inherently constricting emotion) of death takes hold. Modern medicine tends to make everything smaller, with its hyperspecialization, its focus on how things are working at a cellular level. My father has a cadre of doctors, each focusing on a different part of his body.
I do not mean to dismiss the miracles of modern medicine, which have saved me and my body in so many ways over the course of my own life. But I invite us, like Gawande, to consider when the most loving thing we can do is to not interfere.
I wonder how different the end of my father’s life would feel to him if everyone around him was focused on offering him spiritual care rather than on the technical measures to keep him alive for as long as possible. I have tried in my own ways to reorient our approach to his care, but our collective resistance to mortality — sometimes my own included — and the concomitant systems that do exist to take care of the elderly make it feel impossible sometimes. And I can see his body and mind desperately attempt to prepare him for death even as parts of him, and everyone around him, resist it. This untended anxiety is leaking out of him. He calls me in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep to apologize for all the ways he failed my brother and me when we were children, his voice scared and desperate as he attempts to clean his fading conscience as much as he can, while he still can.
He calls me in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep to apologize for all the ways he failed my brother and me when we were children, his voice scared and desperate as he attempts to clean his fading conscience as much as he can, while he still can.
Interventions of modern medicine and carers to prevent falling (a common cause of death for people with Parkinson’s) could potentially prolong my father’s life for some time. He is in that precarious place that the elderly often find themselves in, where he could die in six months or in six years. But to what end are we prolonging his life? Our collective approach to end-of-life care is driven by distorted priorities, which come at great personal and financial cost. “The soaring cost of health care has become the greatest threat to the long-term solvency of most advanced nations, and the incurable account for a lot of it,” Gawande notes. “In the United States, 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months that is of little apparent benefit.”
In his book, Gawande anticipates criticisms of his argument, suggesting some might fear that it “raises the specter of a society readying itself to sacrifice its sick and aged.” He aptly responds, “But what if the sick and aged are already being sacrificed — victims of our refusal to accept the inexorability of our life cycle?”
There is a strange paradox to death. It is at once incredibly straightforward and deeply complicated. Maybe this is what separates the act, an uncomplicated one, from the process, which is almost always complex.
And if there is one thing I’ve learned watching my father disintegrate, it’s that our various approaches to end-of-life care are not working. The helplessness and fear is consuming him. It is out of a deep and abiding sense of love that I hope his suffering is minimized and his life is brought to a merciful end.
Noor Noman is a writer focused on culture, race and LGBTQ issues.
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