Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Rick Wilson: Hey, thanks, Greg. Thanks for having me. It’s been a hell of a day.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): People leave my administration, and they love us. And then at some point, they miss it so badly, and some of them embrace it and some of them actually become hostile. I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I guess they call it. But we have it with others too. They leave, and they wake up in the morning and the glamour is gone. The whole world is different, and they become hostile. I don’t know what it is.
Wilson: Look, when I shuffle off this mortal coil at some point, I will be remembered for one rule: Everything Trump touches dies. And for as smart as Elon is supposedly, the idea that he never heard this rule—or didn’t understand that Trump is a man with no loyalty to anyone ever, that no vow, obligation, oath, promise, relationship, contract, deal is ever anything but fungible and ephemeral with Trump—was insane. So look, Elon is not going to be in a happy place here for a lot of reasons. The Trump people are going to try to screw him on his contracts and things like that. But it’s really hard for me to mount a whole big pity party for this guy who jumped into bed with Trump. Was he living in a cave before this? Was he in orbit somewhere? No, he was a human being on the planet Earth. He had to know who Donald Trump was.
Wilson: They’re going to try to go after SpaceX. They’re going to try to go after Starlink. And this is the kind of thing that Trump will do because he thinks it’s like a power move against Elon. And the problem for Trump—and I say this advisedly ... Elon Musk may be a freak and a weird white supremacist and a neo-Nazi and a ketamine junkie and all that other crap, but his company made this rocket called the Falcon. And the Falcon is the backbone of the American space program, the backbone of the American military space program. It’s a fucking great rocket and we use them every day and there is no substitute. There is no other thing out there in the market. Trump will say, Oh, we’ve got to do this. And Department of Defense and NASA are going to have to go to him and go, We can’t boss. We’re stuck.
Sargent: Yes, I think that’s right. I want to play some more audio of Trump. This time Trump accuses Musk of turning against the bill only because it cuts tax credits and subsidies for green energy. Listen to this.
Sargent: Rick, what’s funny to me about this is that Trump simply assumes that everyone has thoroughly corrupt motives for everything they do simply because he does. I actually don’t think this is why Musk attacked the bill. I think his reasons are really terrible, but they weren’t that. But still, this is pretty damn revealing on Trump’s part. Your thoughts?
Now, I got to tell you, I just put this thing out a little while ago, giving Elon a piece of advice. Trump’s base—the loyalty of Trump’s base and the fear that base puts into Congress—all comes from Twitter. It’s the power of Twitter to be a normative force inside of MAGA. That is the one unified group in our country at all times behind Trump. Elon can turn that switch off. He can turn that dial down. I think that Trump hasn’t thought this through because he rarely thinks anything through, but there’s a lot to be said here. We’ve got two guys with a lot of weapons, but Elon probably has more guns right now.
Wilson: Right? Yes.
Wilson: A hundred percent.
Wilson: It will end up, if Elon reshapes this battlefield.... Well, he could turn ... Again, on the back end of Twitter, we know that he boosts and deboosts accounts all the time. We know that he elevates certain content and knocks certain content below the threshold of visibility all the time. He could easily turn Twitter into a machine right now that bashed the tax bill—endlessly bashed the tax bill—and killed it. You want to take revenge on Trump, that’s a good way to kill the bill. You want to show Trump that you’ve got the power, take away his signature piece of legislation.
Wilson: Yes, exactly.
Wilson: And they won’t have the protection of Trump to back them up.
Wilson: Sure. He already tweaked it. When he bought the platform, he tweaked it so that Trump and MAGA content and alt-right content got boosted dramatically. This isn’t debatable. We know this happened.
Wilson: When he wants to befriend somebody, they get a big boost. When he wants to knock somebody out, they get deboosted. I just know there’s probably another technical word for it, but I don’t know what it is. This idea that he should use his platform—it’s the classic question of power. Power exists when you use the power that you have. It doesn’t exist if you don’t. And what’s he going to do? Say, No, no, I’m going to stay fair and balanced and keep this platform weighted so Trump and his people get boosted? He can also.... And this is something I heard from an actual Twitter employee about a year and a half ago, We know who the bot farms are. Some get taken out and some do not. And he could switch off the pro-Trump bot universe probably with three clicks, and it would change the political climate in this country almost instantaneously.
Sargent: Yeah, I want to return to a point you made earlier about whether Trump actually has a big gun against Musk or not. I want to read what Trump posted on Truth Social. He said, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” So here again, Trump just shows [that] he thinks everybody’s corrupt. Biden should have done it because if he had just thought to be corrupt like me, he would have done that. So Trump can’t for a second envision making any decision around any conception of what’s in the national interest, right? Everything’s up for corrupt horse trading or to be used to punish and extort enemies. I got to say, it’s pretty funny to see Musk now get victimized by this, isn’t it, Rick?
Sargent: But you think in the end that Trump really can’t use the power of the government to punish Musk via the contracts because the space program and other things are just too dependent on him.
Sargent: Well, you’re a Florida guy. You know all this stuff. Saving the best for last here. Elon Musk tweeted this, “Time to drop the really big bomb: Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Now, Rick, I find it pretty funny that Elon Musk spent $250 million to elect Trump while knowing something this hideously incriminating about him. It’s a striking admission of his own corruption if you accepted it at face value. Beyond that, I don’t know what to make of this, so I’m turning this one over to you. Like I said, you know how to dissect these pathologies like no one else.
Epstein is the heart of that and he’s talismanic for them in that storyline. Even though Trump and Epstein were close, close, close friends—Trump rode on the jet; Trump partied with him; there were contemporaries quotes by Trump saying, Jeffrey’s a good guy to party with and he likes his ladies on the younger side; all this creepy, gross stuff for years—at the end of the day, Trump never got held to account for being close to Epstein because they hived it off in their mind. They’re like, Nope, nope, nope, nope, didn’t happen. It’s all fake news. It’s not fake. And this idea that we’ve been hearing for a couple of weeks now—that Bondi and Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are slow rolling the Epstein file release—has made MAGA very angry. And now this is like throwing a big old chunk of sodium in the water. It’s going to explode, it’s going to boil over, and it’s going to be lit as hell.
Wilson: Yes.
Wilson: Look, I keep saying this: Elon has more weapons here than Trump does. And I can envision what’s happening in the White House right now. They are in full lockdown. They’re in full panic mode. They don’t know what to say. Susie Wiles and her people will be saying, We’ve got to end this story, cut it off, stop talking about it. It’s going to hurt us. John Thune and Mike Johnson are calling Trump saying, Please, please, please stop. This guy will blow this thing up. We want to pass this tax cut for our donors. There is no good outcome here for Trump. None at all. And look, Elon’s fucked, too, but there is no upside here for Donald Trump. He is in a deep, deep, deep, deep hole.
Wilson: He’s of that culture.
Wilson: He’s of that troll culture. And look, there are two normative forces in Trump’s space: Twitter and Fox News. Elon controls a lot of the mindshare of the Republican base. And he’s out talking about maybe I form a new political party. Maybe I should advertise against people supporting the bill. We are in the middle right now of a cataclysmic political change on the right in this country. The last six hours while we’re....well, it’s been about six hours since this broke—you and I are recording this in the in the late afternoon on Thursday—but I think this is going to continue to unfold and expand because Musk is not stopping.
Sargent: Yeah, that’ll work. Oh, Elon Musk just unleaded on the tariffs, “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.”
Sargent: Well, it’s interesting. With Susie Wiles and all the Trump insiders—the ones who come from the old wing of the Republican Party, that old Republican Party that you belong to back in the day—this is the shit that’s going to absolutely drive them ballistic with panic.
Sargent: Right. And I just want to go back to a key point about Musk having all this firepower, which is that he understands the pathologies, right? He’s got his finger on the nerve centers. He knows how crazy this world is and he knows how to aggravate the crazy. You know what I mean?
Sargent: Right. Because he’s very trusted among a certain component of MAGA who will see him as someone who knows deep secrets, right? Now, whether he does or not is irrelevant, right? He’s seen as knowing these deep secrets. So if he says something like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are covering up this Epstein scandal in which Trump is in the files, that sets off this massive fire.
Sargent: So I will say a big MAGA influencer, Ian Miles Cheong, seems to agree that Elon’s got the power here. He reacted to the Epstein claim by saying, My money’s on Elon. Trump should be impeached and replaced with JD Vance. Now that’s the rumor, or I don’t know, maybe—
Sargent: Right. Well, the conspiracy theory in some quarters is that the tech oligarchs are manipulating this whole thing so that Trump gets into the White House, gets JD Vance in there, and then Trump gets taken out in some form—figuratively, of course—and then is replaced by the tech oligarchs’ real dark choice, JD Vance.
Sargent: What I keep coming back to, and I tweeted this, is that one thing that continues to be a reliable guide to human affairs is “no honor among thieves.”
Sargent: These guys, man. Where does it end up? Can you play this out a little bit more, Rick? I guess what I hear you saying is that ultimately Trump hasn’t thought this through. It’s going to blow up in his face for a couple of reasons. One, he doesn’t actually have the big gun to use against Musk because Musk’s companies really are deeply woven into the fabric of the federal government and the national security establishment, right?
Sargent: That is very big of you, Rick, I have to say. And the second reason that Trump could come to regret this is that Musk actually has his finger on the pulse of MAGA and knows how to fuck with all these people in their heads and in a way that nobody else does.
Sargent: So where does it go? Play it out.
Sargent: Is there any chance the two of them sit down and say, OK, this is getting out of control, we got to work this out?
Sargent: So this continues.
Sargent: Well, I think you’ve actually got your finger on what pisses off MAGA—
Sargent: —when you say that Trump is losing his energy and losing his step.
Sargent: Well, Rick, we knew that you’d be able to explain these pathologies to us and you didn’t disappoint. Rick Wilson, thanks so much for coming on, man. Always good to talk to you.
Wilson: Great being with you, my friend. Talk to you soon.
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