How The Media Are Lying Now: Fake Trump-Musk Wedge Edition

Elon Musk, the world’s richest and perhaps most forthright man, is without a doubt President-elect Donald Trump’s greatest asset as he prepares to take office. So of course our deceitful national news media are attempting to drive a wedge between the two, thus preemptively kneecapping Trump’s governing agenda.

It’s so obvious I assume even someone as occasionally temperamental and sensitive as Trump sees through it.

Musk was indispensable to Trump’s campaign this year, endorsing the former president before pouring more than $100 million into the effort to elect him. Now he’s serving as one of Trump’s closest advisers, staying overnight at Mar-a-Lago and attending virtually every high-level meeting by his side. There are reports that he’s effectively living at the club. All of that was already inspiring headlines last month like, “Elon Musk may already be overstaying his welcome in Trump’s orbit.”

Because Musk is also tasked with targeting waste and inefficiency within the federal government, his input would naturally lend itself to the government spending deadline coming up at the end of this week. And when Musk, like so many of us, saw that the “bipartisan” bill propped up by Republican House Speaker Mike “McChurchill” Johnson was a laughable mess of unrelated giveaways to Democrats — $250 million for “child care,” aka single-motherhood incentives — he led a loud opposition publicly denouncing the proposal. A proposal, which, by the way, continued government spending levels through the first quarter of 2025, effectively nullifying Musk’s cost-cutting mission for the first several months of the new Trump administration.

There’s not a shred of evidence to suggest Musk freelanced his effort to tank the bill without consulting the incoming president of the United States (who, it seems, he is almost physically stuck to, the way bad drivers are to Teslas — kidding). Musk almost certainly suggested to Trump that the bill is garbage and that it would be best if their allies pressured House Republicans to drop it. Trump would eventually call the bill “ridiculous and extraordinarily expensive.”

Yet the media put forth a narrative in the proceeding hours so naked in its aim to foment a corny drama between Trump and Musk that you’d have to wonder if it was Aaron Sorkin’s idea.

With fake curiosity, CNN’s Kasie Hunt asked on Thursday: “The question that the events of yesterday raises is this: Who is really calling the shots? Donald Trump or Elon Musk? And who will be calling the shots in January after the president is sworn in?”

The Politico Playbook newsletter, widely read in Washington, said on the same day that Musk had “backed Trump into a corner.”

Mike Allen at Axios unilaterally dubbed Musk “the most powerful man in politics” and alleged falsely that Must “tank[ed]” the spending bill “single handedly.”

A more accurate reading of events is that Trump’s team informed the president-elect that Republicans might be able to get a better bill and that the impact of a government “shutdown” will be negligible. (As a longtime Washington resident, trust me— nobody loves a shutdown more than the scores of federal bureaucrats who use the time as an unplanned vacation.) The opposition campaign was given the green light and intentionally led by Musk. So now the media want to make it about him in hopes that it will irritate the attention-loving former president to the point that he would alienate one of the best things he has going for him — an indisputably brilliant and enthusiastic ally.

It’s incredibly juvenile, but nobody ever accused our media of being serious or sophisticated.