We already knew that putting Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the same room was like cramming six angry cats into a shoebox. No one can be surprised by the fallout. The question was never if it would happen, but when, and whether there’d be time in between for their collaboration to bear any meaningful fruit. Sure, there were some results — too bad the honeymoon didn’t last long.
Let one go back to his electric cars and space launches, and the other to leading the nation.
Conservatives have watched, stunned, at what’s unfolded since the split. Musk’s exit from the administration was formal, classy, even leaving the door open for future collaborations. But just hours later, a public brawl erupted that at times feels like the absurd, laugh-out-loud arguments of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple.
I’ll admit I was cracking up watching the fight until I realized the real damage they’re doing to the conservative project. Their credibility has been shredded in this slugfest, like some kind of collective self-destruction.
I’ve left plenty of jobs. What I mean is, I’ve never been fired — except when I was a cultural advisor in Mariano Rajoy’s government, and that idiot Pedro Sánchez cooked up a no-confidence motion to oust the president and seize power without an election. Obviously, when the president was kicked out, so were the advisors. That’s the exception.
Every other time, I walked away on my own. Sometimes out of boredom, sometimes for a better opportunity, and sometimes because of my bosses’ bad behavior. Whatever the case, one thing I’ve learned from those transitions is that when you leave a job where you were close to the leadership, the choice to do it well or poorly lies mostly with the person leaving.
I’ve always considered it utterly disloyal to walk out of a company and start airing all the dirty laundry, complaining about things you never spoke up about before. I’ve always found it shameful to blame your bosses for your exit, even if you were fired, and to try to avenge your bad luck by unloading on the people who gave you the job. In life, in short, arriving is easy; the hard part is knowing how to leave.
From this perspective, Musk is doing everything I hate when someone walks away from a role, and it’s been disappointing. It’s not about whether he’s partly, fully, or not at all in the right. It’s about the fact that if you’re willing to torch the entire conservative project you were working on just yesterday, it means you never really cared about it in the first place.
I don’t know what he’s thinking deep down. I assume that, as the world’s richest man, all his energy is focused on making money, and maybe ideological convictions take a back seat. Still, Musk should have left quietly, with gratitude toward Trump, even if he’s dying to speak out and is furious with him, and even if he has reasons to be. Let’s not forget something crucial: Americans voted for Trump, not Musk.
As for Trump, engaging in a testosterone-fueled showdown with a wounded, pride-hurt Musk, and wasting time and resources defending himself in a now-personal feud, is beneath the dignity of a U.S. president. Throughout history, major presidential collaborators have left the White House without this kind of spectacle. It’s hard to find a case where a verbal knife-fight broke out, broadcast live to the world’s media, causing massive damage to the reputation of the libertarian-conservative movement that so much effort went into building.
Let one go back to his electric cars and space launches, and the other to leading the nation. They need to stop handing the global left and America’s enemies a reason to gloat with this childish tantrum. If they’ve already shown the immense immaturity of not being able to settle this privately, at least spare us the obligation of watching their failure play out in public.
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