Di Leo: The Trump-Musk Spat of June 2025

American Free News Network ^ | Monday, June 9, AD 2025 | John F. Di Leo

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After joining President Trump on the campaign trail, providing inestimable service in the election, followed by brilliant work leading a modernized Grace Commission this spring, Elon Musk seemingly turned on Donald Trump, but not only on the President, but the MAGA movement and the Republican Party as well, during the first week of June, as his time as a special temporary consultant for the administration came to an end.

Elon Musk attacked the GOP leadership in Congress, attacked the Big Beautiful Bill now waiting on the Senate, and even personally attacked President Trump with an Epstein-related slur.

What are we to draw from this fight?

Well, there are all sorts of accusations flying around, as media personalities try to analyze it – some believable, and some not.

Some are claiming that Elon Musk only faked being a supporter in order to get White House access and power.

I frankly think that’s insane, considering what he had to lose by joining the movement in the first place, since the majority of Musk’s potential business clientele is violently anti-Trump. Musk has done a number of personally heroic things – in buying Twitter and thereby restoring free speech on the Internet, and in exposing the Biden regime’s illegal censorship and fascist control of social media through releasing “The Twitter Files.” He has spent immense political and financial capital by supporting so many Republican election projects over the past two years, that I simply cannot believe he didn’t do those with the honest conviction that he totally believed in it at the time.

And yet we have Steve Bannon and others claiming that Elon Musk must be a Chinese communist asset, which I frankly could have believed 10 years ago, but not today. It just doesn’t make sense.

I have never personally met either Mr. Musk or Mr. Trump. So this is just from what I know of certain types of people, and especially, what I know of the naivete of most people:

What I think is most likely, especially considering Musk’s known drug use and occasionally erratic behavior from being “a guy on the spectrum,” as they say, is that Musk has probably had a more extreme reaction over the past two months to everything that’s happened in this administration, and he blew his top last week – and temporarily gave up on the movement.

We have all know friends who’ve put someone on a pedestal – a personal hero, or a group they’ve joined, or a charity they’ve supported, or a person they’ve dated – and they were shocked and depressed when reality hit and they saw the person or group’s flaws. The first time you see a date drunk, the first time you see a brilliant investor make a stupid investment, the first time you see a calm father figure lose his temper.

Whether it’s happened to our friends or to ourselves, we all have experience with seeing someone or something suddenly fall from grace. How we handle that discovery – how much of impact the realization has on us – tells us something about ourselves, as well.

Consider this: While Elon Musk has been a corporate giant on his own, he has never been heavily involved in American politics before, and now all of a sudden he was thrust on the scene at the absolute pinnacle of American politics.

I’m betting he thought everything was going to work out perfectly, now that he was in Washington, given all this apparent authority. He’d find obvious savings, and they’d be implemented. He’d find crimes, and they’d be prosecuted. He’d find overstaffing, and they’d be laid off. He’d find corrupt gifts to foreign countries, and the boondoggles would be terminated.

I believe Elon Musk assumed that all his work on DOGE would be immediately codified by Congress. He assumed that the Trump victory would mean that the Big Beautiful Bill would have massive spending cuts in it. He assumed that because he is a friend of the president, he would have free access to the leaders of all the cabinet departments with the authority of a chief of staff.

He moved ahead for several months with such speed, such 24/7 attention, that he didn’t have time to absorb the fact that, while he was indeed making a dent, he wasn’t going to have 100% success with any of this.

And when he finally took enough of a deep breath, last week, for everything to hit home, he finally realized that his high expectations simply weren’t reality, not in today’s Washington. Congress is still Congress, their bills will still have to be filled with pork in order to pass; legislation is never perfect and it is always going to be a compromise of good things and bad things. This all hit him like the proverbial ton of bricks.

Elon Musk was likely very suddenly demoralized and depressed – and perhaps he even felt betrayed personally, especially when 100% of the DOGE savings were not codified in the bill as he had irrationally expected them to be.

I think that what we saw last week was simply a man who had his expectations raised, and all of a sudden, they were dashed to the ground.

It’s just reality. The rest of us – who spend our lives paying attention to government and media, not building billion dollar businesses – are used to all this from Washington DC. We’re happy if we get 25% of what we tried for. Elon Musk didn’t come into this with such tempered expectations; he thought this was going to be different.

I think, as he settles down in the weeks to come, he will return to the fold, hopefully with a bit more calm, and a bit more of a realistic viewpoint.

Is the Big Beautiful Bill perfect? Of course not. It’s massive, and so it is full of massive spending. That’s just Washington.

But it does include making a number of tax cuts permanent that we desperately need to be permanent.

It does include a number of additional tax cuts that we also desperately need.

It does include a lot of the specific policy points that we all demanded of this term, from border security to the reduction of bureaucratic restrictions to a pendulum shift in the culture war.

There are things about this bill that are worse than in the last administration, primarily where spending is concerned.

But more importantly, there are things about this bill that are much better than in the last administration. And they are things we can ONLY get now, in this bill. If this bill fails, we’ll lose all those victories, and we likely won’t have a chance again for generations.

The vast majority of President Trump’s agenda is codified in this bill. Massive spending cuts are not, but the agenda we voted for is.

So yes, we need the bill passed in the Senate. No doubt about it.

And I totally understand Elon Musk blowing his top last week when all this reality came crashing down around him. But I think we can and should forgive him. He’s a good man who has already sacrificed a great deal to try to help this country. We should give him a break.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

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