It didn’t take long for the Maga inner circle to fall out like a bunch of squabbling hoodlums after a bank raid.
A photograph, taken at a distance through a White House window, of Donald Trump gesturing at a slightly sheepish Elon Musk, has emerged which, literally, points to the tensions.
Even less ambiguous are the public insults being chucked around between Musk and Trump’s trade advisor, Peter Navarro.
First, Musk belittled Navarro’s PhD in economics from Harvard (a perfectly genuine and more than respectable qualification). In return, Navarro sneered that Musk was just a “car assembler”, someone who puts together vehicle parts made all over the world.
Musk called Navarro “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks”, and later issued a faux-apology: “That was so unfair to bricks.”
This is amusing enough (unlike the ableist slur when Musk referred in a separate social media post to “Peter Retarrdo”). The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed the insults, saying they were “two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs” and that “Boys will be boys – and we will let their public sparring continue.”
But why, apart from their natural tendency to behave like spoilt adolescent frat boys, all the bad-mouthing?
Well, the answer is the Trump tariffs, which have already badly damaged Musk’s highly globalised Tesla business. Following a sharp decline in its stock price, the First Buddy’s net worth this week dipped below $300bn. Market volatility may yet inflict commerce harm on SpaceX, a more important part of his business empire, and the vehicle, almost literally, whereby Musk will achieve his ambition to make humanity an interplanetary species.
There is no reason to doubt that Musk thinks Trump’s tariffs are deeply wrong-headed on less selfish grounds, as indicated by his reposting an old but persuasive clip of Milton Friedman using a pencil to extol the advantages of global free trade.
What we are witnessing is the kind of schism that could actually break the loose Republican-Maga coalition, for that is what it is. The issue is free trade versus protectionism, and it has smashed political parties before (including the British Conservatives in Edwardian times, and again, in a way, over Brexit). On the one side, there are what Trump calls the Rinos, “Republicans in name only”: the party establishment, but allied with more dedicated conservatives, such as Ted Cruz and, now, full-on Maga insurgents, with Musk being the most prominent.
Businesspeople, donors, and sections of the Republican groups in Congress and in the country are lining up on different sides in this argument – and it is getting heated.
As when protectionism has reared its unlovely head in the past, there are great economic arguments and interests at stake. Yet there is a reason why protectionism – and its evil siblings, isolationism and nativism – never lasts that long. It’s not just because it leads to wars, occasionally real ones – it’s because trade means progress and the higher living standards that human beings invariably demand. Indeed, such are the benefits of the unparalleled integration of the world economy today that globalisation is irreversible.
We see now, and powerfully, how investors are shunning US treasury bonds because they fear for the future health of the US economy and the dollar. In short, that means it’s more expensive for the Trump administration to do its work and fund America.
It may not have been a deliberate act of sabotage, but it is not a coincidence that one of the biggest buyers and holders of US bonds is China – about $750bn, and if they offload them, they could crash the dollar. It wouldn’t make much sense, because they would thereby devalue their own savings. But they may have to if Trump’s 104 per cent tariffs stop them exporting to the US, and they too need to raise some cash.
A few days after vice-president JD Vance made a characteristically scornful remark about how “we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture”. Beijing called it “ignorant and disrespectful”, which it was – and stupid too, because China can’t be pushed around like Ukraine or Denmark. It has clout.
Perhaps it’s time Trump’s Maga mates cooled their engines – and their mouths.
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