President Donald Trump isn't mad about his ugly and public break up with his billionaire benefactor and now-former co-President Elon Musk.
He’s fine! Everything is fine! Never been better!
At least, that's what he called multiple reporters on Thursday and Friday to insist upon, as Americans point and laugh that Trump’s sugar daddy is now trashing Trump’s signature piece of legislation, drawing attention to Trump’s ties to noted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and even calling for Trump’s impeachment.
Trump told CNN's Dana Bash in a phone conversation that he's "not even thinking about" Musk and that he won't be speaking to his now former First Buddy anytime soon.
Bash recounted her conversation with the scorned commander in chief: “He said, ‘He’s got a problem. The poor guy’s got a problem.’ I said, ‘So no call with Elon now?’ And he said, ‘No, I won’t be speaking to him for a while, I guess, but I wish him well.’”
Trump also called CBS News correspondent Robert Costa to say he's "totally" focused on his presidency and not at all focused on Musk. "I don't focus on anything else," Trump told Costa of his presidency.
He told Politico's Dasha Burns that his public breakup with Musk is "okay," and that his presidency is “going very well, never done better.”
In a call with the New York Post—which poked fun at Trump’s break-up with Musk on the tabloid’s front page—Trump said he wasn’t surprised about the fact that his friendship with Musk went south.
“Nothing catches me by surprise. Nothing,” Trump told the Post, adding that everything is awesome!
“The numbers are through the roof, the stock market is up, billions are pouring in from tariffs, and my poll numbers are the highest they’ve ever been. Other than that, what can I tell you, right?” Trump said.
But Trump got a little fiestier with ABC News' Jonathan Karl, telling him that Musk is “the man who has lost his mind" and that he's “not particularly" interested in speaking to Musk, even though Musk wants to talk.
It’s as if he’s going through the five stages of grief in real time. Denial (insisting that he’s not mad Musk is trashing him), and anger (insulting Musk as having lost his mind) are up first. We’ll see when he gets to bargaining, depression, and later, acceptance.
But it’s safe to say, if Trump is speaking to reporters to insist that he's fine and not thinking about Musk, he is absolutely thinking about Musk—who could use his immense wealth to go after Republicans in the 2026 midterms.
Ultimately right now, Trump is the living embodiment of the infamous Dril tweet :
Another week of Donald Trump's presidency is in the rearview. And like the two weeks before it, it was filled with lawless actions, lies, and ridiculous behavior that Republicans lined up to defend.
Trump threw Ukraine under the bus and appears likely to let murderous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin seize control of the sovereign nation. He also fired more independent watchdogs, let more corrupt politicians off the hook, slashed grants to medical research, and he even said he might ignore court rulings blocking his unlawful actions.
And like the pathetic lapdogs they are, Republicans defended every move.
After multiple federal judges of all ideological stripes blocked some of Trump’s executive actions, Republicans pushed the country further into a constitutional crisis by backing Trump when he suggested he’ll ignore those court orders and do whatever he wants.
“It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that.’ So maybe we have to look at the judges. ‘Cause I think that’s a very serious violation,” Trump said on Tuesday.
Trump likely got this idea from his own vice president, who wrote in an X post on Feb. 9 that judges shouldn’t be allowed to stop the president’s executive power.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he wrote.
And other Republicans agreed with the false statement that the courts are not allowed to check the president’s power—when that’s exactly what the Constitution dictates.
“Of course the branches have to respect our constitutional order but there’s a lot of game yet to be played. This will be appealed, we’ve got to go through the whole process, and we’ll get the final analysis. In the interim, I will say that I agree wholeheartedly with Vice President JD Vance, my friend, because he’s right,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said during a news conference on Tuesday.
Later that day, he said that the courts should back off of Trump altogether.
“I think that the courts should take a step back and allow these processes to play out. What we’re doing is good and right for the American people,” Johnson told reporters, specifically referring to the cuts co-President Elon Musk is trying to make with his fake agency, the Department of Government Efficiency.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah
"I don't believe judges, courts have the authority or power to stick their nose into the constitutional authority of the president,” Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas said.
“These judges need to back off and get out of the way of what the executive branch is doing to administer the government,” Roy said on Fox News.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah also expressed agreement that courts don’t have the power to challenge Trump’s executive orders.
“These judges are waging an unprecedented assault on legitimate presidential authority, all the way down to dictating what webpages the government has. This is absurd,” he wrote on X.
Rep. Darrel Issa, Republican of California, claimed that “nowhere in our Constitution is a single federal judge given absolute power over the President or the people of the United States.”
But, of course, the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1803 Marbury v. Madison case that the judiciary has the power to declare laws or actions unconstitutional.
On the other hand, Sen. Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota seemed to acknowledge that ignoring court orders is wrong, but he simply couldn’t bring himself to criticize Trump.
“I think what you're seeing right now is the natural give and take between branches of the government,” he said.
A handful of other Trump sycophants went a step further, saying that they would launch an impeachment effort against the judges who block Trump's actions.
“I’m drafting articles of impeachment for US District Judge Paul Engelmayer. Partisan judges abusing their positions is a threat to democracy. The left has done ‘irreparable harm’ to this country. President Trump and his team at @DOGE are trying to fix it,” Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona wrote on X, referring to the federal judge who blocked Musk from accessing Treasury data.
And Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia wrote on X that he is backing Crane’s efforts.
“The real constitutional crisis is taking place in our judicial branch. Activist judges are weaponizing their power in an attempt to block President Trump’s agenda and obstruct the will of the American people. [Crane] and I are leading the fight to stop this insanity,” he wrote.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called for the impeachment of another federal judge who blocked Trump’s freeze on congressionally appropriated federal funds.
“This judge is a Trump deranged Democrat activist. Below is proof he is not capable of making good decisions from the bench. He should be impeached,” Greene wrote on X.
Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio backed those efforts, saying the judges blocking Trump’s actions “should be mocked and ignored while articles of impeachment are prepared.”
“These clowns are undermining every lower court, leaving the sole burden on SCOTUS. This is not sustainable. Sadly, excesses in judicial and executive authority are a symptom of the real problem: Congress keeps failing to take action. Time for #DeedsNotWords,” he wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, once a fierce defender of watchdogs, was fine with Trump axing the inspector general of the U.S. Agency for International Development who said that Trump's unlawful shuttering of the agency let hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food aid go to waste.
Grassley said that he "should have been fired," and gave Trump a workaround to make the firing legal.
"I'm just trying to make the president's job easier," Grassley said, completely ditching his past watchdog advocacy to bow down to Trump.
Other GOP lawmakers chose Trump over their own constituents, who are being directly harmed by the president’s actions.
Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio said that Trump’s decision to drastically cut back National Institutes of Health funding for medical research institutions is a good thing, even though it would decimate institutions in his own state and beyond.
“Well, I think what happens is the president is exactly right. I think if you ask the average American if we were spending a billion dollars to cure childhood cancer, how much of the billion dollars would go towards during childhood cancer? They’d probably say a billion. The idea that 60% goes to indirect cost and overhead is insane. And so I applaud the president,” he told the Bulwark
And Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri said that Trump's funding freeze, which is hurting farmers who are not being paid for contracts, is just a "little bit disruptive."
“But that's what this administration promised whenever they were coming to Washington,” Smith said on CNN, “is that they would be disruptive.”
Rep. Jason Smith dismisses farmers in his state who are getting stiffed by the US government not fulfilling contracts: "Right now it's a little bit disruptive, but that's what this administration promised whenever they were coming to Washington is that they would be disruptive."
Donald Trump's co-president, Elon Musk, admitted on Wednesday that he probably can't cut $2 trillion from the federal budget as he had promised, running into the political reality everyone told him existed but that he refused to accept because he’s a billionaire who thinks he knows better than everyone else.
"I think if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting $1 [trillion],” Musk said in the interview, which aired on Musk's disinformation platform X. “And if we can drop the budget deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and free up the economy to have additional growth, such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply, then there will be no inflation. So that, I think, would be an epic outcome.”
When asked what specific things he'd cut, Musk offered nothing concrete.
“It’s a very target-rich environment for saving money. … It’s like being in a room full of targets—you could close your eyes and you can’t miss,” Musk said, a metaphor so stupid he almost sounds like his buddy Trump.
Experts always said Musk's $2 trillion goal was unattainable.
Elon Musk, left, and Donald Trump attend a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5, 2024.
The entire federal budget in fiscal year 2024 was $6.75 trillion, with massive chunks of it spending that is either legally or politically impossible to cut, including Social Security, Medicare, defense spending, and debt service.
“Our federal budget is about $7 trillion a year. And I still think that they're talking about that $2 trillion number with serious purpose, that that's what they're looking at. And it would be unimaginable that we could find $2 trillion in savings out of seven in one year," Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told NPR in November.
Even finding $1 trillion in cuts, as Musk now says he can achieve, will be extremely hard.
Of the discretionary spending Congress appropriates each year, more than half goes toward national defense, while “the rest to fund the administration of other agencies and programs,” according to the Treasury Department. “These programs range from transportation, education, housing, and social service programs, as well as science and environmental organizations.”
According to an analysis from the CRFB, “in order to achieve balance within a decade, all spending would need to be cut by roughly one-quarter and that the necessary cuts would grow to 85% if defense, veterans, Social Security, and Medicare spending were off the table.”
What’s more, Musk admitted in October that slashing the budget would require "hardship" for the American people. And given that members of Congress are accountable to voters, they are unlikely to slash spending for programs that their constituents could punish them for.
This isn't the first promise Musk and Trump are backtracking on after the 2024 election.
Trump recently admitted he probably can't bring grocery prices down—arguably the key reason Trump was elected in November. "It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard," Trump said in an interview with Time magazine.
The American people were sold a bag of goods that they'll never get.
