The fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk may just result in right-wing audiences, who have been shielded from reality by Fox News et al., learning a few inconvenient truths.
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This may sound paradoxical, but the winner in the spat/blood feud between Donald Trump, perhaps the greatest liar in human history, and Elon Musk, the most prolific non-state spreader of misinformation, may just be the truth.
Huh?
Before we explain, let’s briefly recap what happened (and, no matter when you read this, things will almost certainly have escalated already, so this is just an overview): After leaving his position in the Trump administration last week, Musk called for the GOP’s massive reconciliation bill to be defeated.
Things quickly spiraled out of control, which is a bit of an understatement. On Thursday, both of them went for the jugular.
Musk said that Trump only won the election because of him, that Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession, and that the president appears in the Epstein files.
Trump responded that nobody wants to buy Teslas, and that the easiest way for the government to save billions of dollars would be to terminate Musk’s subsidies and contracts.
In other words, they each hit the other where it hurts.
Where will it end?
It’s anybody’s guess.
However, it stands to reason that the two of them have a lot of dirt on each other… and the (hurt) egos that compel them to share it in order to “win” this fight.
And that brings us back to the original point.
They each know things about each other that the public deserves to know.
Of course, in many cases, these are things that half of the public is already aware of.
For example, it’s no secret that Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were acquainted, and the president has hinted at knowing about the latter’s preference for women “on the younger side.”
It’s also well-known that Musk stood to gain financially from backing Trump, not just in terms of government contracts, but also in terms of halting investigations into his business dealings and opening up new markets for his products.
However, these things are only well-known to people who don’t get all of their information from the vast right-wing propaganda network that ensures that MAGA supporters live in an alternate reality.
It is really difficult to pierce that bubble, because any news that does not mesh with their worldview is either dismissed as “fake” or doesn’t reach them in the first place.
However, with the two leading MAGA personalities now feuding, it is impossible to keep this information from conservative audiences. And, in this case, it is not delivered by “the liberal media,” but rather from inside of that bubble and by their heroes themselves.
It is also impossible to tune out this fight because Trump, through the presidency and his Truth Social platform, and Musk, through X, own the world’s largest bullhorns with which they can shout at each other.
And that means that millions of GOP voters will finally be exposed to some realities, for example the cost of that reconciliation bill, that Trump knew Epstein well, and that Musk is getting rich off the government while he tries to destroy it.
It stands to reason that, after hanging out for months in Mar-a-Lago, they have a lot more material that they could share.
After all, it’s not as though either of these men has been living scandal-free lives.
Obviously, the smartest thing for both of them would be to end this fight right now because the term “mutually assured destruction” comes to mind.
However, in light of their outsized egos, that seems unlikely… and we are all better off for it.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
