Those who think President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk will make up, or staged their feud,for effect, do not understand how narcissism works.
It’s a one-way street with a bridge that once violated cannot be recrossed. Musk alleged that Trump was in the files of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a charge he quickly deleted from X as pedophilia is still the third rail of society and politics. Trump is selling his Tesla. It’s over, folks. Indeed, Trump has said as much.
The question is: What will happen now? Will Trump investigate and try to deport Musk and/or take away his SpaceX contracts? Will Musk go over to the Democrats or fund and/or start a third party, sparking a Trump retaliation?
In Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus,” the legendary general Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus is the hero of Rome until he goes over to the Volscian enemy. When he tries to return to Rome, the Volscians kill him.
To mix our Roman metaphors here, Musk has crossed the Rubicon, as in the river Julius Caesar breached in 49 B.C., sparking a civil war. There is no going back.
The Trump-Musk rift, which may have widespread consequences, stands in start contrast to the behavior of two actual world leaders. When Trump taunted the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that D-Day (June 6, 1944), in which the Allies landed at Normandy, France, launching the beginning of the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany, wasn’t a good day for his people, Merz chose to speak of gratitude for the Allied liberation of his own country and for the continuing need for Allied intervention in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV used the eve of Pentacost (June 8) — the 50-day-after-Easter feast that marks the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Virgin Mary and the Apostles and the birth of the Christian Church — to talk about the need of the faithful to be “pilgrims not predators.”
If only.