M.A. Hossain,
In a nation that once prided itself on civic virtue, institutional probity, and moral clarity, the public feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk represents something more than just a clash of titans. It is not merely a petty quarrel between an incumbent President and a tech magnate—it is a vivid portrait of what the late stages of a declining republic look like. America today is not governed by its elected officials so much as it is stage-managed by a gilded aristocracy of billionaires. The Trump-Musk feud is not just news; it is a diagnosis.
It began, ostensibly, over legislation in the first week of June 2025. Trump’s proposed tax plan, a boondoggle billed as a "Big Beautiful Bill," drew Musk’s ire for its fiscal recklessness and targeted cuts, most notably, reductions in federal subsidies for electric vehicles. For Musk, this was not a matter of ideology. It was dollars and cents. Tesla, whose balance sheets have long benefited from government incentives, was projected to lose an estimated $1.2 billion. Musk's outrage over federal spending, one suspects, had less to do with the public debt and more with the loss of personal gain.
Yet the broader irony is suffocatingly apparent. Here we have the world’s richest man who owes much of his wealth to the largesse of the U.S. taxpayer through contracts, credits, and subsidies, decrying a system he has gamed masterfully until it turns slightly inconvenient. It’s not a critique of government overreach. It’s a tantrum over a reduced share of the spoils.
Predictably, Trump responded with threats. If Musk was going to criticize his legislation, Trump would revisit the “billions” in federal contracts awarded to SpaceX—contracts essential not just to Musk’s empire but to America’s space ambitions. Musk, never one to pass up escalation, countered by hinting at Trump's alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein, a suggestion both incendiary and unsubstantiated, yet fully calibrated for the post-truth social media circus we now mistake for political discourse.
What emerges from this spectacle is not just dysfunction. It is a farce. Governance, in the hands of oligarchs, has been transfigured into performance art—capricious, theatrical, and often indistinguishable from satire. When tax policy and space exploration hinge not on public deliberation or national interest, but on the egos of two powerful men, we must ask: Is this still a republic, or merely a stage?
To put this in historical perspective, one need not reach for analogies as grand as Rome. The late Gilded Age in the United States offers a closer parallel. Then, too, robber barons wielded disproportionate influence over policy, while elected officials largely served as their enablers. The difference is that figures like Carnegie and Rockefeller, for all their flaws, at least pretended to uphold a certain civic virtue. Today’s oligarchs are more candid and more dangerous in their contempt for democratic norms.
Musk, for instance, has openly boasted that his support helped Trump win the presidency. That is not the language of a political donor; it is the vocabulary of ownership. Meanwhile, Trump seems to believe that loyalty from America’s billionaires is his birthright, a transactional entitlement rather than a matter of shared ideology or vision.
But perhaps the most chilling aspect of this feud is not what is being said, but what is being omitted. Both Trump and Musk remain unflinchingly supportive of U.S. foreign policy in Israel, even as that policy increasingly implicates the United States in what international observers have described as genocidal actions in Gaza. Over 90,000 tons of military aid have been funneled to the Israeli Defense Forces with bipartisan blessings in Washington—yet this humanitarian catastrophe has not managed to crack the Twitter feeds or talking points of either man. Why? Because it offers no transactional advantage. The suffering of civilians in a foreign land does not weigh heavily in a calculus obsessed with market share and media optics.
This is not merely indifference. It is hostility to moral responsibility, a rejection of the very idea that leadership entails sacrifice or accountability. The American elite, of which Trump and Musk are now avatars, is not just morally vacuous; it is increasingly morally antagonistic. Their feud is not about competing visions of America. It is about whose empire of influence will prevail.
This is not to say they are equally powerful. Musk controls key arteries of America’s economic and technological future—satellites, electric vehicles, AI. Trump, by contrast, commands a movement that blends populism with personal cult, and remains rooted in institutional frailty. Yet both are united by a common belief: that democracy is something to be manipulated, not honored.
There are historical precedents for this kind of decay. In Weimar Germany, Italy under Berlusconi, or even the waning days of the British Empire, oligarchic squabbles often masqueraded as politics. They were in fact symptoms of systemic failure. What follows such decadence is rarely renewal. It is declined—or worse.
Nor should we be surprised by the theatricality of it all. Trump, whose critics mockingly use the acronym TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), has a long record of bluster followed by retreat. Musk, for all his bravado, has already begun hedging about pausing SpaceX launches. These are not men of conviction. They are performers, more interested in dominating the news cycle than in shaping history.
And yet their feud matters precisely because it shouldn’t. In a healthy republic, no single man let alone two should be able to leverage space exploration, fiscal legislation, or national prestige as tools in a personal power struggle. In a functioning democracy, billionaires don’t hold veto power over Congress or contracts. The problem is not merely the individuals involved; it is the system that allows them such unregulated sway.
It has reached a stage where national governance resembles a reality show—each episode more absurd than the last, yet bearing real-world consequences for millions. If this is what political power in the United States now looks like—a brawl between a failed demagogue and a techno-libertarian autocrat—then the republic is in far graver danger than either man realizes, or even cares to acknowledge.
Ultimately, the Trump-Musk drama is a grotesque distraction, a manifestation of the deeper rot. What needs examination is not who wins this squabble, but why it exists at all. How has such a system been constructed, so fragile it trembles at the whims of wounded egos? Why do Americans discourse revolve around Twitter feuds, rather than ideas?
The answer, of course, is that Americans have allowed wealth to replace wisdom, clout to substitute for character. The American experiment, once grounded in Enlightenment values and the sober mechanics of Madisonian democracy, has been hijacked by the barons of capital and their sycophants in politics and media.
It is tempting to believe that the solution lies in new leadership, new policies, or even new billionaires. It does not. What is required is something more radical; a cultural revolution in the truest sense—not of violence, but of values. A reassertion that the republic belongs to its citizens, not to its tycoons.
Until that transformation arrives, American citizens will remain spectators in a drama they did not script and cannot direct—watching, with increasing horror, as their democracy is auctioned off by its richest heirs.
So yes, Americans should buckle up. But know this: the road ends in ruin unless deep state or political establishments change course, and soon.
M A Hossain, political and defense analyst based in Bangladesh. He can be reached at: writetomahossain@gmail.com
This article published at :
1. The Nation, Pak : 14 June, 25
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