Donald Trump Intends to Disrupt Elon Musk's Latest Event | Vanity Fair

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are once again clashing over the new political party the tech billionaire says he’s starting. “I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump told reporters Sunday, before boarding Air Force One. “Third parties have never worked, so he can have fun with it.”

“I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’” Trump added later in a lengthy post on his social media platform Sunday night, “essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks.”

The pair have been feuding for more than a month now over Trump’s signature megabill, which he signed into law last week. Musk had been critical of the legislation, using the social media platform he owns to lobby against what he described as the “DEBT SLAVERY bill”—and to launch more personal broadsides against the president, most notably in his references to his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump, meanwhile, has dismissed Musk’s criticisms as self-serving—“Unfortunately for Elon,” Trump wrote Sunday night, the megabill “eliminates the ridiculous Electric Vehicle (EV) Mandate”—and threatened to cancel government contracts and even look into having Musk deported.

Musk, in response, posted an X poll on the Fourth of July, asking his followers if they would like “independence from the two-party (some would say uniparty) system.” “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!” he wrote the next day. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

Musk offered little detail about the party’s platform, aside from some of his typically grandiose promises. (“The way we’re going to crack the uniparty system is by using a variant of how Epaminondas shattered the myth of Spartan invincibility at Leuctra,” he wrote in one of many posts on the matter.) But the announcement attracted some support—including from billionaire businessman Mark Cuban, who campaigned for Kamala Harris last year—and jabs from Trumpworld. Steve Bannon called Musk a “buffoon” on his War Room podcast, a “non-American starting an America Party.”

Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, pointedly suggested on CNN Sunday that the boards of directors at his companies may not “like this announcement…and will be encouraging him to focus on his business activities, not his political activities.” (One Tesla true-believer told Vanity Fair last month that Musk's political activities had been “pretty dark for the Tesla story,” and, indeed, Tesla stock plunged further Monday, reflecting investor worries about yet another unpopular political venture from Musk.) And then there was Trump himself, accusing Musk of conspiring to sow “Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS” with his new party.

“i ain’t reading all that. i’m happy for you tho or sorry that happened,” Musk wrote in response.

Musk seems keen to sell his new party as the “centrist” antidote for our ailing civic life. But he is, of course, part of the affliction—contrary to what the gullible and grifty who have cheered on the America Party might have you believe.

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