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      Trump news at a glance: Elon Musk rift deepens as president says ‘poor guy’s got a problem’

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      Donald Trump appeared in no mood to patch things up with former top adviser Elon Musk on Friday, doubling down on his new hostility towards the Tesla and Space X tycoon with a number of disparaging statements.The US president appeared to deny reports of a potential peacemaking phone call with Musk, telling ABC News he was “not particularly” interested in talking to his former confidant right now.The president also spoke to CNN, saying: “I’m not even thinking about Elon. He’s got a problem. The poor guy’s got a problem.” Trump told Politico that the relationship with Musk was “going very well, never done better”.Here are the key Trump administration stories of the day:Trump says Musk has ‘lost his mind’ Donald Trump appeared to dismiss a peace overture from his former close political ally Elon Musk, calling him someone who had “lost his mind” as the extraordinary falling out between the two men looked set to continue.The US president and the richest person in the world – who had been tasked with slashing the federal government – fell out in spectacular fashion on Thursday in a series of escalating social media posts that roiled the political world.Read the full storyKilmar Ábrego García returned to US to face criminal chargesKilmar Ábrego García – the man whom the Trump administration mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador in March – returned to the US on Friday to face criminal charges.In a press briefing, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said a federal grand jury in Tennessee had indicted the 29-year-old father on counts of illegally smuggling undocumented people as well as conspiracy to commit that crime.Read the full storyDoge allowed access to social security dataThe US supreme court on Friday permitted the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a key player in Donald Trump’s drive to slash the federal workforce, broad access to the personal information of millions of Americans in Social Security Administration data systems while a legal challenge plays out.The court’s brief, unsigned order did not provide a rationale for siding with Doge. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented.Read the full storyUS jobs market slows amid Trump trade war uncertaintyThe US economy added 139,000 jobs in May, a slowdown compared with recent months as American businesses cope with uncertainty around Donald Trump’s continuing trade war.Read the full storyGOP senator employs aide fired over neo-Nazi imageryA staffer for Missouri Republican senator Eric Schmitt was previously fired from Ron DeSantis’s unsuccessful presidential campaign after making a video containing neo-Nazi imagery, and later peddled far-right conspiracy theories in a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank.Read the full storyOutrage after Republican congresswoman disparages Sikh prayer in US HouseA Republican representative is facing a widespread backlash after saying that a Sikh should not have conducted a prayer in the US House.Mary Miller, an Illinois representative, on Friday published – then deleted – a post saying that Giani Singh, a Sikh Granthi from southern New Jersey, should not have delivered the House’s morning prayer.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Enrique Tarrio, the former national leader of the far-right Proud Boys group, and four other members convicted of orchestrating the deadly 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack are suing the federal government for allegedly violating their rights.

      Russia is at war with Britain, the US is no longer a reliable ally and the UK has to respond by becoming more cohesive and more resilient, according to a former White House adviser.

      Senior US administration officials will meet with a Chinese delegation in London on Monday for the next round of trade negotiations between Washington and Beijing, Donald Trump said on Friday.

      An event by the International Pride Orchestra this week swung from classical Gershwin favourites to choral patriotism to high drag in a rebuff to Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and its subsequent snub of the LBGTQ+ ensemble.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 5 June 2025. More

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      US supreme court rules Doge can access social security data during legal challenge

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      The US supreme court on Friday permitted the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a key player in Donald Trump’s drive to slash the federal workforce, broad access to the personal information of millions of Americans in Social Security Administration data systems while a legal challenge plays out.At the request of the justice department, the justices put on hold Maryland-based US district judge Ellen Hollander’s order that had largely blocked Doge’s access to “personally identifiable information” in data such as medical and financial records while litigation proceeds in a lower court. Hollander found that allowing Doge unfettered access likely would violate a federal privacy law.The court’s brief, unsigned order did not provide a rationale for siding with Doge. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented.Doge swept through federal agencies as part of the Republican president’s effort, spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk, to eliminate federal jobs, downsize and reshape the US government and root out what they see as wasteful spending. Musk formally ended his government work on 30 May.Two labor unions and an advocacy group sued to stop Doge from accessing sensitive data at the SSA, including social security numbers, bank account data, tax information, earnings history and immigration records.The agency is a major provider of government benefits, sending checks each month to more than 70 million recipients, including retirees and disabled Americans.In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that the SSA had been “ransacked” and that Doge members had been installed without proper vetting or training and had demanded access to some of the agency’s most sensitive data systems.Hollander in a 17 April ruling found that Doge had failed to explain why its stated mission required “unprecedented, unfettered access to virtually SSA’s entire data systems”.“For some 90 years, SSA has been guided by the foundational principle of an expectation of privacy with respect to its records,” Hollander wrote. “This case exposes a wide fissure in the foundation.”Hollander issued a preliminary injunction that prohibited Doge staffers and anyone working with them from accessing data containing personal information, with narrow exceptions. The judge’s ruling did allow Doge affiliates to access data that had been stripped of private information as long as those seeking access had gone through the proper training and passed background checks.Hollander also ordered Doge affiliates to “disgorge and delete” any personal information already in their possession.Based in Richmond, Virginia, the fourth US circuit court of appeals in a 9-6 vote declined on 30 April to pause Hollander’s block on Doge’s unlimited access to SSA records.Justice department lawyers in their supreme court filing characterized Hollander’s order as judicial overreach.“The district court is forcing the executive branch to stop employees charged with modernizing government information systems from accessing the data in those systems because, in the court’s judgment, those employees do not ‘need’ such access,” they wrote.The six dissenting judges wrote that the case should have been treated the same as one in which a fourth circuit panel ruled 2-1 to allow Doge to access data at the US treasury and education departments and the office of personnel management.In a concurring opinion, seven judges who ruled against Doge wrote that the case involving social security data was “substantially stronger” with “vastly greater stakes”, citing “detailed and profoundly sensitive Social Security records”, such as family court and school records of children, mental health treatment records and credit card information. More

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      Kilmar Ábrego García returned from El Salvador to face criminal charges in US

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      Kilmar Ábrego García, the man whom the Donald Trump administration mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador in March, returned to the US on Friday to face criminal charges.In a press briefing on Friday, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that a federal grand jury in Tennessee had indicted the 29-year-old father on counts of illegally smuggling undocumented people as well as of conspiracy to commit that crime.“Our government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant and they agreed to return him to our country,” Bondi said of Ábrego García. She thanked Salvadorian president, Nayib Bukele, “for agreeing to return him to our country to face these very serious charges”.“This is what American justice looks like upon completion of his sentence,” Bondi added.In a statement to the Hill on Friday, Ábrego García’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg accused the Trump administration of having “disappeared” his client “to a foreign prison in violation of a court order”.“Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him,” he added.Sandoval-Moshenberg also said: “This shows that they were playing games with the court all along. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished – not after.”Sandoval-Moshenberg said the White House’s treatment of his client was “an abuse of power, not justice”. He called on Ábrego García to face the same immigration judge who had previously granted him a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador “to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent” there.That, Sandoval-Moshenberg argued, “is the ordinary manner of doing things” – and he said that is what the US supreme court had ordered in April.Bondi on Friday maintained that federal grand jurors found that Ábrego García “has played a significant role” in an abusive smuggling ring that had operated for nearly a decade.The attorney general added that if convicted, Ábrego García would be deported to El Salvador after completing his sentence in the US.Ábrego García entered the US without permission in about 2011 while fleeing gang violence in El Salvador.Despite the judicial order meant to prevent his deportation to El Salvador, on 15 March, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials deported him to El Salvador after arresting him in Maryland.He was held in the so-called Center for Terrorism Confinement, a controversial mega-prison better known as Cecot.The Trump administration subsequently admitted that Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”. But it has repeatedly cast him as a MS-13 gang member on television – a claim which his wife, a US citizen, and his attorneys staunchly reject.Ábrego García also had no criminal record in the US before the indictment announced on Friday, according to court documents.On 4 April, federal judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate and effectuate” Ábrego García’s return from El Salvador after his family filed a lawsuit in response to his deportation.The supreme court unanimously upheld Xinis’s order a week later. In an unsigned decision, the court said that Xinis’s decision “properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Ábrego García’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador”. More

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      DC rally protests cuts to US veterans programs: ‘Promises made to us have come under attack’

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      A flurry of red, white and blue American flags fluttered across the National Mall on Friday as more than 5,000 military veterans and their allies descended on Washington to protest against the planned elimination of 80,000 jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the cancellation of hundreds of contracts for veterans services with community organizations.“I hope that in the future veterans will be able to get their benefits,” said David Magnus, a navy veteran who decided to travel from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after his doctor told him she was quitting during a recent mental health appointment. Before Donald Trump returned to office in January, “the VA was good”, he said, but since then medical staff have faced harassment that puts the entire system at risk.“It used to be, you’d call and get an answer,” he said. “Now, so much is going on that they don’t know where to put you.”Organizers said that in addition to the march in Washington, there were more than 200 corresponding actions across the country, from watch parties to vigils held at VA clinics. Many veterans told the Guardian they came to the nation’s capital on their own after hearing about the rally online.The VA secretary, Doug Collins, has said the efforts are designed to trim bureaucratic bloat and will have no impact on veterans’ healthcare or benefits. Reporting by the Guardian last month found the agency, which provides healthcare to more than 9 million veterans, has already been plunged into crisis. Across the nation, appointments have been cancelled, hospital units closed, the physical safety of patients put at risk.View image in fullscreenDemonstrators said the Trump administration is seeking to destroy the VA, the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, with 170 government-run hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics, and replace it with a private voucher program that will provide substandard care.“We’re a generation of service. We volunteered and stepped up to lead. Now we are seeing the promises made to us come under attack,” said Kyleanne Hunter, the chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and a Marine Corps veteran who flew multiple combat missions as an AH1-W Super Cobra attack pilot.The administration’s proposed budget for the VA, released on Friday, slashes spending for “medical services” by $12bn – or nearly 20% – an amount offset by a corresponding 50% boost in funding for veterans seeking healthcare in the private sector.“We’re already being starved,” said Sharda Fornnarino, a Navy veteran and one of about three dozen nurses brought to the rally by the National Nurses United union. Fornnarino, who works at the VA in Denver, Colorado, said that while politicians in Washington debate permanent staff reductions, essential healthcare positions are being left vacant.With fewer staff on the floor, veterans on hospice “are being left to die in their own piss and shit”, said Teshara Felder, a Navy veteran and nurse at the agency’s hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, said.A blue-ribbon commission established by the agency last year found veterans received significantly better care at lower cost from the public system. Private providers operated with little oversight, they wrote, and “are not required to demonstrate competency in diagnosing and treating the complex care needs of veterans nor in understanding military culture, which is often critical to providing quality care for veterans”.The VA says the budget submission “prioritizes care for our most vulnerable veterans, including those experiencing homelessness or at risk of suicide” and “eliminates nonessential programming and bureaucratic overhead that does not directly serve the veteran”.View image in fullscreenThe march was held on the 81st anniversary of D-day, when Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, a decisive turn in the war against Nazi Germany during the second world war. Organizers said their inspiration goes back even further – to the “Bonus Army” march on Washington in 1932 during the depths of the Great Depression, when thousands of first world war veterans gathered on the National Mall to demand promised benefits, only to have the US military deployed against them.Christopher Purdy, an Afghanistan war veteran and organizer of today’s march, said the Bonus Army rally helped set the stage for the New Deal social programs and eventually the GI Bill, which provided higher education, healthcare and home ownership to veterans returning from the second world war.Other speakers criticized Trump’s decision to impose a travel ban on visitors from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, where many of the demonstrators served alongside translators who risked their lives for the US. Shortly after taking office in January, Trump ordered a pause on the US refugee admissions program, putting translators’ safety in doubt.“We all left behind people who are now marked,” said Nadim Yousify, who immigrated to the United States in 2015 after working as a US government translator in Afghanistan and later joined the Marine Corps. More

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      Outrage after Republican representative disparages Sikh prayer in the US House

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      A Republican congresswoman is facing widespread backlash after saying that a Sikh should not have conducted a prayer in the US House.Mary Miller, an Illinois representative, on Friday published – then deleted – a post on X saying that Giani Singh, a Sikh Granthi from southern New Jersey, should not have delivered the House’s morning prayer.Miller at first mistakenly identified Singh as a Muslim and said that it was “deeply troubling” someone of that faith had been allowed to lead prayer in the House and it “should never have been allowed”, Miller posted on X.“America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it,” Miller continued. “May God have mercy.”Miller first edited her post to change Muslim to Sikh – then opted to delete it.Her comments triggered swift outrage, with the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, saying: “It’s deeply troubling that such an ignorant and hateful extremist is serving in the United States Congress. That would be you, Mary.”Similarly, David Valadao, a Republican congressman of California, said on Friday: “I’m troubled by my colleague’s remarks about this morning’s Sikh prayer, which have since been deleted. Throughout the country – and in the Central Valley – Sikh-Americans are valued and respected members of our communities, yet they continue to face harassment and discrimination.”Jared Huffman, another Democratic US House member from California, wrote on X: “I often say that I serve in Congress with some of the greatest minds of the 18th century. With [representative] Miller I may need to take it back a few more centuries.”Meanwhile, the Democratic congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey said on X: “It’s deeply troubling that someone with such contempt for religious freedom is allowed to serve in this body. This should have never been allowed to happen. America was founded as free nation, and I believe the conduct of its legislators should reflect that truth, not drift further from it.”Grace Meng, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, also weighed in on Miller’s tweets, saying: “What’s deeply disturbing is the blatant ignorance and anti-Sikh, anti-Muslim xenophobia coming from my colleague across the aisle. There is no place in our country, and especially the halls of Congress, for this hate and intolerance.”Meng went on to add: “The tweet may have been deleted, but we still have the receipts.”The Congressional Asian Pacific American caucus (Capac) also condemned Miller, saying she had engaged in “anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim bigotry”.“Sikhs and Muslims practice two separate and distinct religions, and conflating the two based on how someone looks is not only ignorant, but also racist,” Capac said in a statement.The Sikh Coalition also responded on X, saying: “To be clear, deleting the tweet is not enough. Congresswoman Miller should apologize for her remarks – to both the Sikh and Muslim communities, because no one should be targeted on the basis of their identity.”Similarly, the Hindu American Foundation said: “Whichever version of the tweet [Miller] was going with, it is racist, xenophobic and plainly un-American to lash out over a Sikh prayer. When you took your oath of office [congresswoman] Miller, you swore to uphold our constitution, whose first amendment prohibits your establishing an official religion or favoring one religion over another.”Miller’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian. More

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      Money can’t buy him love: Republicans give Elon Musk the cold shoulder

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      Elon Musk may believe his money bought the presidential election and the House of the Representatives for the Republicans. But he is discovering painfully and quickly that it has not bought him love, loyalty or even fear among many GOP members of Congress on Capitol Hill.Faced with the choice of siding with Musk, the world’s richest man, or Donald Trump, after the two staged a public relationship breakdown for the ages on Thursday, most Republicans went with the man in the Oval Office, who has shown an unerring grasp of the tactics of political intimidation and who remains the world’s most powerful figure even without the boss of Tesla and SpaceX by his side.The billionaire tech entrepreneur, who poured about $275m into Trump’s campaign last year, tried to remind Washington’s political classes of his financial muscle on Thursday during an outpouring of slights against a man for whom he had once professed platonic love and was still showering with praise up until a week before.“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk posted to his 220 million followers on X, the social media platform he owns – and which he has used ruthlessly to reshape the political agenda.It was a variation on a theme from a man who has repeatedly threatened to deploy his untold millions in funding primary challengers to elected politicians who displease him or who publicly considered blocking Trump’s cabinet nominations.But a gambit that had been effective in the past failed to work this time – and might not be enough to sink the “big, beautiful bill” that Musk this week condemned as a deficit-inflating “abomination”.One after another, Republican House members came out to condemn him and defend Trump, despite having earlier been told by Musk that “you know you did wrong” in voting for what has become Trump’s signature legislation that seeks to extend vast tax cuts for the rich.Troy Nehls, a GOP representative from Texas, captured the tone, addressing Musk before television cameras: “You’ve lost your damn mind. Enough is enough. Stop this.”It chimed with the sentiments of many others. “Nobody elected Elon Musk, and a whole lot of people don’t even like him, to be honest with you, even on both sides,” Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey congressman, told Axios.“We’re getting people calling our offices 100% in support of President Trump,” Kevin Hern, a representative from Oklahoma, told the site. “Every tweet that goes out, people are more lockstep behind President Trump and [Musk is] losing favour.”Greg Murphy, a North Carolina Republican, called Musk’s outburst of social media posts – that included a call for Trump’s impeachment, a forecast of a tariff-driven recession and accusation that the president is on the Jeffrey Epstein files – “absolutely childish and ridiculous”. Musk had “lost some of his gravitas”.There were numerous other comments in similar vein.They seemed to carry the weight of political calculation, rather than principled sentiment.Republicans were balancing the strength of Trump’s voice among GOP voters versus the power of the increasingly unpopular Musk’s money – and most had little doubt which matters most.“On the value of Elon playing against us in primaries compared to Trump endorsing us in primaries, the latter is 100 times more relevant,” Axios quoted one unnamed representative as saying.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother said: “Elon can burn $5m in a primary, but if Trump says ‘that’s the person Republicans should re-elect,’ it’s a wasted $5m.”Trump said on Thursday that he would have won the battleground state of Pennsylvania even without his former benefactor’s significant financial input.But it is also evidence-based. In April, Musk discovered how finite his influence was when a Republican judge he had backed with $25m of his own money lost by 10 percentage points in an election for a vacant supreme court seat in Wisconsin.It was a chastening experience that bodes ill for any hopes he has of persuading Republicans to change their minds on Trump’s spending bill.Yet Musk still has his sympathisers on Capitol Hill, even if they are a minority.With the “big, beautiful bill” still likely to pass through the Senate, Thomas Massie, a senator for Kentucky – who has been labelled “a grandstander” by Trump for his consistent criticism of the legislation – was unambiguous when CNN asked which side he choose between Trump and Musk.“I choose math. The math always wins over the words,” he replied. “I trust the math from the guy that lands rockets backwards over the politicians’ math.”It was a rare case of economics trumping politics on a day when political self-interest seemed paramount. More

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      The Guardian view on the Trump-Musk feud: we can’t rely on outsized egos to end oligopoly | Editorial

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      It would have taken a heart of stone to watch the death of the Trump-Musk bromance without laughing. Democrats passed the popcorn on Thursday night as the alliance between the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest imploded via posts on their respective social media platforms.Less than a week ago they attempted a conscious uncoupling in the Oval Office. Then Elon Musk’s attacks on Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending plan escalated to full-scale denunciation of a “disgusting abomination” – objecting to its effect on the deficit, not the fact it snatches essential support from the poor and hands $1.1tn in tax cuts to the rich.The president said that Mr Musk had “gone crazy” and was angry that electric vehicle subsidies were being removed, claimed he had fired him, threatened to terminate his government contracts, and mocked the billionaire’s recent black eye. Steve Bannon chipped in, suggesting that Mr Musk should be deported.Mr Musk said Mr Trump should be impeached and alleged the government had not released files on the late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein because the president was in them. He threatened to immediately start decommissioning the Dragon spacecraft – now key to Nasa’s programme – and suggested it was time for a new political party. The ultimate insult: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” he wrote.Mr Musk later appeared minded to limit the damage, backing away from the spacecraft threat – not surprising, perhaps, when he had just watched $152bn wiped off Tesla’s value. Each man knows that the other could hurt him, via government fiat or political war chest. Yet both are so unpredictable that the row could still reignite.Two narcissists used to imposing their will were never likely to coexist happily for long, despite the advantages of doing so: this was less a marriage of convenience than of naked self-interest. Mr Trump loathes sharing the limelight; the Tesla boss frequently grabbed it. The president is surely as resentful of as he is dazzled by Mr Musk’s spectacular wealth. He was angered to discover that Mr Musk had arranged private briefings on the Pentagon’s plans for any potential war with China – not only a blatant conflict of interest, but perhaps more upsettingly, a sign of his growing power. Mr Musk’s behaviour has also appeared increasingly erratic. A recent New York Times report alleged he took large amounts of drugs including ketamine while advising Mr Trump prior to the election. Mr Musk has described the story as “bs”.His departure from the president’s orbit is good news. Mr Musk implausibly claimed he would save $2tn annually – approaching a third of the federal budget – by taking a chainsaw to bureaucracy. Wild decisions by the so-called department of government efficiency are mired in the courts. But he has nonetheless caused real damage which will not easily be remedied, gutting agencies and departments which took decades to build. People are dying because of his demolition of USAID.Yet while the bond between the peak of power and the peak of wealth has been severed, politics remains in thrall to money. Mr Trump’s approach is particularly noxious, turning wealth directly into political favours and power, and power into further wealth. This is the new oligopoly. He oversees a cabinet of billionaires, and has directed his real estate tycoon friend Steve Witkoff, a man with no diplomatic experience, to bring peace in the Middle East and Ukraine. But though megadonors are heavily skewed towards the Republicans, Democrats too depend on billionaires. Mr Musk is a symptom of the underlying malaise. Democracy requires better safeguards against the unhealthy marriage of wealth and power than the rampant egos of those who command them. More

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      Musk and Trump are enemies made for each other – united in their ability to trash their own brands | Jonathan Freedland

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      The scriptwriters of Trump: the Soap Opera are slipping. The latest plot development – the epic falling-out between the title character and his best buddy, Elon Musk – was so predictable, and indeed predicted, that it counts as the opposite of a twist. Still, surprise can be overrated. Watching the two men – one the richest in the world, the other the most powerful – turn on each other in a series of ever-more venomous posts on their respective social media platforms has been entertainment of the highest order. X v Truth: it could be a Marvel blockbuster.But this is more than mere popcorn fodder. Even if they eventually patch things up, the rift between the president and Musk has exposed a divide inside the contemporary right, in the US and beyond – and a fatal flaw of the Trump project.Naturally, much of it is personal. That’s why so many declared from the start that this was a star-cross’d bromance, whose destiny was only ever heartbreak. Even as Musk was declaring, back in February, that “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” wiser heads knew it was doomed. The egos were too large, the narcissism too strong, for their love to survive. In the Trump universe, as in the Musk galaxy, there is room for only one sun.In their case, the personal combines with business. On this reading, Musk’s disenchantment began in his pocket, his opposition to Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, or “BBB”, currently before Congress, fuelled chiefly by the legislation’s axing of a $7,500 tax credit on the purchase of electric vehicles. With Tesla sales plunging, Musk needed that incentive to lure potential Tesla customers and was furious with Trump for scrapping it. That’s certainly the story Trump is telling. “I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted … and he just went CRAZY!” Trump posted.The suggestion that Musk’s driving motive was profit seems to have particularly antagonised the billionaire, prompting him to call for his former paramour to be impeached and to claim that Trump is named in the Jeffrey Epstein files, in effect implicating the president in a paedophile ring. Musk wants to present his objection not as self-serving but as ideological, casting himself as the fiscal conservative appalled by Trump’s “disgusting abomination” of a bill because it will increase the already gargantuan US deficit by trillions of dollars.Who’s right? It seems a stretch to argue that Trump’s hostility to electric cars was the problem: as Trump himself pointed out, Musk knew about that when he jumped on the Maga train last year. As for ballooning the deficit, you can see why that would irritate Musk. Adding trillions in red ink makes a mockery of the “cost-cutting” drive he headed up with his so-called department of government efficiency.The billionaire was already smarting from the failure of Doge to cut anything like the $2tn in spending he promised would be easy. All he succeeded in doing by, for instance, feeding the US agency for international development, or USAID, into “the wood chipper” was to take the lives of 300,000 people, most of them children, who had depended on that agency and its grants, according to a Boston University study. Even if you are minded, charitably, to accept Musk’s own estimate, he only shrank the federal budget by about $150bn. To watch as that effort was cancelled out by a $600bn tax cut to people earning more than $1m a year would be a humiliation indeed.Whatever its true cause, the Trump-Musk spat has illuminated a fault line in the right – and not only in the US. Battered and quieted by the Trump phenomenon, there still remain a few old-school conservatives with a vestigial presence in the Senate, for whom fiscal rectitude remains an article of faith. While Democrats oppose the “BBB” because its cuts to Medicaid will deprive more than 10 million Americans of basic health cover, these traditional Republicans are queasy about the Liz Truss-style risks of a massive unfunded tax giveaway. Overnight, Musk has become their champion.Ranged against them are the forces of nationalist conservatism, embodied by former Trump strategist and ex-convict Steve Bannon. They don’t have a libertarian yearning for a minimal state; on the contrary, they quite like muscular displays of state power. Witness Trump’s insistence on a Pyongyang-style military parade to celebrate his birthday, and note Bannon’s response to Musk’s impudence in challenging the ruler – he called for Musk’s businesses, Starlink and SpaceX, to be nationalised. Indeed, nationalist conservatism might not be quite the right term for what Bannon offers: nationalist socialism might be more apt, though something close to that has already been taken.There have been other manifestations of this divide. Musk opposed Trump’s tariffs; Bannon is for them. Musk wanted to see the US remain open to high-skilled, tech-savvy immigrants; Bannon wants to shut the door on them. These, then, are the two camps. (You can see similar faultlines on the British right, dividing Thatcherite Conservatives from Reform UK.) For a while, the anti-woke loathing of DEI policies was strong enough to keep the opposing blocs – free traders and protectionists; deficit hawks and big spenders – together. But that glue, as Trump said of Musk, is “wearing thin”.That has some serious implications for US politics and Trump’s presidency. It is conceivable that Trump won’t have the numbers to pass this bill, his central legislative goal, in its current form: the Republican majority in the House is wafer-thin, and one more defecting Republican could sink the proposal in the Senate. Musk has given would-be dissenters cover. The gazillionaire had promised to spend big to help Republicans in the November 2026 midterm elections. Much can happen between now and then, but Trump may now need to look elsewhere for a patron. Who knows, Musk might even follow through on his threat to fund the president’s Democratic opponents. Even if he does not go that far, he controls a prime platform of the right: X could soon become hostile territory for Trump. The point is, Musk is not your usual Trump antagonist. He has as loud a megaphone, and more money, than the president.It all adds up to a sad tale of two men who once had so much in common – perhaps one thing above all. Each has been lucky enough to find themselves in charge of a brand that once enjoyed global admiration and clout – and each man has systematically set about trashing that brand in the eyes of the world. Musk has done it more than once. He bought what had become an admittedly imperfect meeting place of some of the planet’s most influential people, Twitter, and turned it into a sewer of bigotry and lies, X. He built a company, Tesla, whose most obvious customers were high earners concerned about the planet and repelled them by association with a nationalist authoritarian who wants to “drill, baby, drill”.Trump, meanwhile, has taken the US, once a magnet for talent from across the globe, and done his best to dismantle all that made it attractive: its stability, its protection of free speech, the independence of its institutions, the quality of its science and universities. This week’s moves – the travel ban, the suspicion of overseas students, the war on Harvard – to say nothing of the ongoing hostility to democratic allies and coddling of foreign dictators, are just the latest instances of Trump doing to the US brand what Musk has done to Twitter and Tesla. No wonder Trump and Musk have broken up: they were always far too alike.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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