Our Best Stuff From the Week of the Breakup

Hello and happy Saturday. On Wednesday, Alex Demas and I were putting the finishing touches on a deeply reported story he had written about Elon Musk’s satellite internet company, Starlink. Countries had signed contracts with Starlink and acknowledged they were doing so to curry favor in tariff negotiations, and the Commerce Department had announced it was considering changes to a federal initiative to expand broadband access to make it easier for states to choose satellite internet providers. There are obvious conflicts of interest given Musk’s nine-figure donations to Trump’s reelection effort and his stint in the Department of Government Efficiency, but at the same time, Alex reported, Starlink is an industry leader at the forefront of an important new technology and has few competitors. Anyhow … read the whole thing. It’s great. 

Alex had begun his reporting before Musk departed government service, and before Musk criticized the reconciliation bill being taken up in the Senate. We addressed those developments before getting into the meat of the piece, and then wrote, “the White House has said that Musk and Trump remain on good terms and that the Tesla CEO will continue to advise the president in an unofficial capacity.”

Well, dear readers, it was true when we published it Thursday morning. I suppose you’ve heard what happened later that day. In an Oval Office interview, Trump said that he would have won the election without Musk’s assistance. Musk tweeted that Trump wouldn’t have, Trump then threatened to cancel Musk’s companies’ federal contracts, and it escalated to the point that Musk alleged that Trump was named in the Jeffrey Epstein files and Trump ally Steve Bannon suggested that Musk was an illegal immigrant and should be deported. 

In Friday’s Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio wrote about the spectacle, noting that it was the rare story that was at home on the front pages of both the New York Times and celebrity gossip site TMZ. He indulged in a chuckle or two about the sheer ridiculousness of it all, but then got more serious. 

The Trump era clearly represents the “bread and circus” stage of American decline but yesterday’s circus felt especially grotesque. Instead of watching gladiators battle, the mad emperor and the wealthiest man in Rome entered the arena to do battle themselves. And instead of using conventional weapons, they used the right-wing political weapons of the age—threats of government retaliation in one case, casual accusations of pedophilia in the other. The special blend of ruling-class lunacy and populist grandstanding made the stench of imperial collapse overpowering.

Jonah Goldberg pulled back a little for a wider view in his Friday G-File, pondering what he described as the “most powerful politician in the world and the richest man in the world flinging poo at each other like the last two survivors of a spider monkey clan war” might mean for the conservative moment. He predicts that Trump’s second term will bring about a “MAGA crack-up.”

The thing that holds together “the movement Trump leads” is Trump. … And it is certainly the case that Trump believes—and operates from the belief—that the party is all about him. That’s why he assumes that any disagreement is driven not by conviction but by Trump hatred. Indeed, the way Trump insists that undermining him politically is treason speaks to how he views his role as president as a kind of monarchical absolutism. 

The point I’m getting to is that a coalition built around a personality is destined to crack up far faster than a coalition built around ideas and interests. This is true of any coalition.

On that note, I will leave you to the other great content we had this week. Thank you for reading and have a wonderful weekend.