The Trump-Musk Split — What’s Driving It And How It Can Be Resolved

The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ has passed the House, and moving to the senate, where it is facing some serious opposition from one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the 2024 election.

That One Big Beautiful Bill has Trump and Elon fighting. And a lot of politicians and pundits have been totally misunderstanding what’s driving the fight. Some of them cynically and intentionally — others because they’re just missing the point.

Because both of them are loud, brash, prominent players in the business world who are accustomed to getting their way, and well-acquainted with trolling and s***posting, their difference in legislative priorities has spilled over into a p***ing match that strayed into a whole range of other insults and threats… which have already shown signs of being pulled back.

Democrats are beside themselves with glee, hoping beyond hope that this feud will derail Trump’s legislative agenda, because they know their only hope to stop is it to sow discord and hope infighting keeps them from moving forward with the same ruthless efficiency that the Democrats used to push their twisted agenda.

What we’re actually seeing is a policy difference that really amounts to a difference in first, priorities, and second, an understanding of what it will take to move ahead with each of those priorities.

Comparing their priorities

Both Trump and Musk see the same two problems require fixing. But they differ on the urgency on which to prioritize and how to get there… partly because one is has experience in what it takes to have legislative priorities passed into law as part of a conservative government and one does not.

Trump’s priority: permanent tax cuts. If we don’t get this legislation passed quickly, the Trump-45 era tax cuts will automatically expire, amounting to a massive tax INCREASE for which the GOP will be rightly blamed. This will tank the economy just as surely as the original cuts supercharged it. If the economy gets tanked, Dems take power in the midterms, and they will go right back to taxing and spending the country into financial oblivion and eventual collapse. (Anyone familiar with Cloward-Piven will know that socialists see that as a ‘win’, since they have been hoping that will allow them to replace the current system with a socialist model. That, and the grift Elon exposed, goes a long way to explaining why so many Dems, or their donors anyway, don’t seem to care about the looming debt crisis.)

Which brings us to Elon’s chief priority: the debt crisis. If we continue at our current pace, we will work and pay taxes to cover nothing but debt repayment. If you want to know what happens when a government gets so far out over its financial skis that it can’t cover its debts? Look no further than the financial collapse of once-thriving Detroit. Only, it’s at a national level with debt load far greater than anything Detroit has been bouncing back from.

Elon’s worries are real enough, too. ClashDaily has reported that interest on the debt — not debt repayment, just the interest, mind you — is now exceeding our entire defense budget.

The disagreement

Two features of the BBB are of concern to Elon. One is the rise in the debt ceiling, and the other is the perceived failure to cut significant spending. Say whatever you will about the debt ceiling, even the most aggressive spending cuts will take some time to show up in the overall budget, especially as we get later and later into the fiscal year. Some of the expenditures are a net benefit to the budget, for example, border security spending. When we no longer have 10 million people flooding over our borders and expecting handouts, that saves boatloads of taxpayer money in the long run. But the enforcement itself isn’t free, either. The savings will amount to what is called a ‘lagging indicator’ of success in the same way that the tax cuts being made permanent will take some time to work their way through the system as businesses adjust their long-term plans and spending priorities to fit those new legislative realities.

The errors Elon is making

While his objections are good, there are at least two errors he is making in assessing the problem. One, he’s accepting the government’s biased numbers. In the scoring of this bill, the Congressional Budget Office is getting its numbers wrong — as usual.

.@RealPNavarro: "What it's about with the CBO is a historic pattern of getting their forecasts wrong… We're not going to grow 1.7% over the period with Trump policies. That's absurd. We've seen the Trump policies work before… We know that we're going to grow in the 2s and… pic.twitter.com/gRAQqxkvz5

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 6, 2025

They are treating the taxpayer money as money it as a ‘right’ to receive. If the tax cuts are set to expire, they are planning for a big jump in revenue when it expires. Like so many other hair brained bureaucratic logic-busters, this policy pays no attention to real-world data that shows the growth of business and rise in income when taxes are cut, and it gives no thought to how much revenue might be lost if the economy gets tanked by having these taxes sunset.

That’s one of the errors he is making. The other one has to do with legislative process.

There is a reason the Big Beautiful Bill is using the ‘reconciliation’ process rather than the standard legislative budget process. To do it the right way runs into the fact that Schumer has enough votes to block passage of any legislation that has less than 60 votes in support. Since Dems vote as a pack, this gives them a lot of leverage to block votes that require the regular process. For this bill to pass — especially for it to pass in time to keep the tax cuts from expiring — requires that any legislation follows a very specific set of rules governing what kind of changes can, and cannot, be invoked.

The sorts of big structural changes DOGE has been pushing for do not fall within the scope of those rules, and will require another method.

In a real sense, it seems like Trump and Elon have been talking past each other. Trump wants to supercharge the economy — and has been wheeling and dealing around the world to do exactly that — and will focus on shrinking the government and its spending once that goal is achieved. Elon wants to massively shrink the government, stop growing the debt and save the economy that way.

Both are worthy goals. Where we’re getting tripped up is the pragmatic steps of implementation.

The Solution

There IS a way to resolve this. The Big Beautiful bill has rules that it needs to play by, and may not get much better than what currently stands. But that is no reason to throw up our hands and give up.

There’s another path the GOP can use to overcome this obstacle. The Budgetary Rescission process.

Trump has already been sending written requests to Congress to begin the process of deleting specific parts of existing spending that he would like to see canceled. Congress has a 45 day window from when such a request goes out to pass a vote on the House and Senate to remove that funding. The filibuster is still an issue, but if they want it bad enough, cloture can eventually be invoked to force the vote.

How’s Trump’s economy doing so far?

Inflation is now at 2.3%, the lowest it’s been since 2021. Jobs numbers have exceeded expectations. Actual private sector-jobs that improve the economy, and not just government jobs that help rack up the national debt.

And do you remember how everyone was losing earning poer in the Biden years because inflation was rising faster than income? Inflation is trending down and earnings are trending higher.

Even Musk said that we might have to ‘grow our way’ out of the debt.

With Trump’s growth strategies and the DOGE team still hard at work in finding waste fraud and abuse, there’s still a path for both priorities to move forward.

If — and it’s a big if — we can get the entire GOP to work together for once.