Chronicle of A Divorce Foretold
Elon Musk may be even more infantile than Donald Trump
I don’t have enemies. Neither, so far as I know, do most of my male friends. I tend to think that women have more enemies than men, for the same reason that they have more real friends–because they demand more from a relationship. But there’s a special phenomenon that seems to belong almost exclusively to powerful men–enemies without friendship.
The spectacular detonation of whatever it was that Donald Trump and Elon Musk had maintained over the first months of the new presidency opens a window on to this distinctive form of human barrenness. Though the relationship between the two was always described as Washington’s leading bromance, in retrospect it was plainly something more like a marriage of convenience between two completely self-interested actors. I’m reminded of the “no limits” friendship between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, which could dissolve tomorrow if either concluded that the supposed alliance no longer served his interest.
If it did, however, Xi wouldn’t post that Putin was shacking up with teenage girls. What has made the Trump-Musk breakup must-see TV is the way each has taunted the other like an adolescent sticking out his tongue. “I took away his EV Mandate,” Trump wrote, and Musk threw a hissy fit. Oh yeah?, Musk responded. “Time to drop the really big bomb”--Trump “is in the Epstein files.” Sez who? Etc. Xi and Putin are figures of terrifying self-control; the two most powerful men in America are petty, petulant and vain. Who’s likeliest to win the struggle for global supremacy?
Is Trump More Like Richard Nixon–Or John Gotti?
Maybe Elon Musk has friends; I suppose I could find out by reading Walter Isaacson’s 688-page biography, but I’d rather eat a live chicken. We know about Donald Trump. You can’t have friends if, like him, you regard others only as means to your own ends. He does seem to care about his children, to whom he is biologically linked, and perhaps his wife; everyone else has use value. And there will be no limit to the number of enemies you have if you insist on dominance and require absolute loyalty from the dominated. That’s why the alliance with Musk was doomed from the start: neither can abide the equality that makes friendship possible. The only surprise was that Musk broke off with Trump rather than the other way around, though we now know that Trump started the whole thing by cashiering Musk’s candidate to run NASA.
We may think that that’s just politics. Didn’t Harry Truman say, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog?” Actually, no. In fact, the typical professional politician of yore was a genial if extremely ambitious type who liked other people. Quite a few of them had friends but no enemies. I wrote a biography of one of them–Hubert Humphrey. But the same could be said of George Bush senior and junior, Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower. Of course we’ve had world-class haters in the White House, none greater than John Adams, who managed to hate on principle both Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, two men whose principles were mutually irreconcilable. But Adams was an intemperate man who also knew how to love. (His son, John Quincy, inherited the gift for principled hatred without the warmth.)
The one president who Trump superficially resembles in this regard is Richard Nixon, a lonely man who so cherished his enemies that he actually compiled a list of them. Nixon’s hatred was personal and visceral. One could say the same for Rudy Giuliani, another lonely figure who regarded himself as a sort of scourge of God, a fighting saint at loose in a world of iniquity. But the comparison only points up the difference with our president. The people Trump genuinely hates are the ones who have tried or even threatened to bring him to justice, like James Comey, or those who have defied his will, like Vladimir Zelensky. He does not hate in principle. Trump calls the mainstream media “the enemies of the people,” but that’s not going to make him stop calling Maggie Haberman at The Times. The media is his foil; he needs it the way the swaggering bully in professional wrestling needs his hapless mark. Behind the snarl is a knowing smirk.
Perhaps a great politician needs to be able to hate as well as to love. Lyndon Johnson, another hater nonpareil, always said that his friend Hubert was too nice a guy to be president. Jack and especially Bobby Kennedy had a flair for enmity. (Teddy, the youngest and nicest of the clan, did not.) But to think of Bobby is to understand how easily hate and love can live in the same soul. To have hate without love–enmity without friendship–is simply a pathology. And to express enmity in such juvenile and petty terms is pitiful. Yet we elected this man knowing full well who he was. In some measure we share in Trump’s spiritual hollowness and his epic petulance.
Can anything good–that is, beyond the sheer entertainment value–come out of this soap opera? Will MAGA-world be weakened if its two daddies are at each other’s throats? Maybe; but it’s an unequal battle. Musk has more followers on X than Trump does, but he may lose a lot of them if he reconstitutes himself as an anti-Trump voice for fiscal sanity. He’ll just gratify the Never Trumpers. If anyone sues for peace, it’s going to be Musk, not Trump.
Unless, of course, he’s right about Jeffrey Epstein.