Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump UNLEASHES on Elon Musk Over Big, Beautiful BETRAYAL

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

BREAKING: Donald Trump finally responds to Elon Musk’s criticism of his ‘Big, Beautiful, Bill.’ The Trump-Musk divorce is here—and it’s messy. Jon and Dan react. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, Dan, it's the breakup we've all been waiting for. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have called it quits, and it is getting ugly out there. Are they consciously uncoupling right before our eyes? It certainly seems conscious. Well, I mean, is Elon conscious? Who knows? Depends on the hour. According to New York Times.

So we know that Elon Musk has been opposed to Donald Trump's piece of shit, legislation tax cuts, Medicaid cuts, all the rest. And finally, Donald Trump was asked about it in the Oval Office today as he sat next to the German Chancellor. And you could tell he started his very, very long answer about Elon with some kind of message discipline, no big deal. And then it just devolved from there. Let's listen. Elon and I had a great relationship. But I'm very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here. And he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate. And he never had a problem until right after he left.

And he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next. You saw a man who was very happy when he stood behind the oval desk. And even with the black eye, I said, do you want a little makeup? We'll get you little makeup. But he said, no, I don't think so, which is interesting. 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 Elon endorsed me very strongly. He actually went up in campaign for me. I think I would have won. Susie would say I would have won Pennsylvania easily anyway. Woof. Trump derangement syndrome.

That's the deepest cut, the harshest cut. So Elon was following along, and his first tweet in response to Trump's press conference was, whatever, keep the EV solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil and gas subsidies are touched. Very unfair, exclamation, exclamation, but ditch the mountain of disgusting pork in the bill. then after Elon saw the clip of Trump saying I would have won Pennsylvania anyway Elon tweeted without me Trump would have lost the election

Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate such ingratitude and then when Trump said Elon knows what's in the bill he's known about it forever Elon tweeted false this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it. Dan, what do you think?

You're even missing another one. Elon then tweeted out the clip of Trump talking about how Elon never asked him to put the EV tax credit back in. Oh, I miss that. Yes. John, we're responding so rapidly that it's happening as we're doing it. Yes. Breaking news banner. Can we get one up?

I don't know. What do you think about this? This was obviously a long time coming, not exactly shocking, very entertaining to watch. What does it all mean? Well, I would, before you even get into that, I would just say that there's another tweet that's worth mentioning. Your own tweet, referencing your original tweet from November, pointing out that you predicted that they would break up. I have to say, like, I don't even know how to search old tweets. I'm not good at that.

But Tim Miller sent it to me. Thank you, Tim. And I said, yeah, in November, right after the election, I said, excited to see how this arranged marriage between two sociopathic narcissists worked out. I mean, there is a, there's posting and then there's self-referential posting. So you've reached a new level. So I'm impressed. Honestly, it lasted longer than I thought. It lasted longer than I thought.

Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is fascinating on multiple levels. I think we should begin with the fact that here are two people fighting about a piece of legislation that neither one of them have any idea what's in it. Or how the budget works or why we have a deficit or what it would take to control the deficit, none of it. None of them know anything. the idea that this bill is filled with pork is missing the point.

The reason it costs so much money is because the giant tax cuts, the bulk of which go to rich people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And so if Elon Musk's point was we should, the bill should not increase the deficit, deficits are a huge problem. That is a position one could take. But then you would have to say one of two things, either massive cuts to all entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare, beyond what's even there in Medicaid,

and you can keep the tax cuts, or you have to not, you have to let taxes go up on at least the richest Americans. Which is the biggest problem from the beginning with Doge and everything else, is that Elon was running around trying to cut waste and inefficiency from the smallest part of the budget, that even if you cut all of it,

wouldn't do much to actually fix the deficit. If you were going to continue to have deep, deep tax cuts, for the wealthiest people in this country and the biggest corporations and continue to have a defense budget that this bill would make even bigger than before, mostly so that Stephen Miller can arrest every immigrant in the country, also for immigration, for DHS, they're adding more money there. And then you're right, then you'd have to cut. We already have 15 million people that are going to lose their health care because of this

bill. And Tom Tillis just told a reporter now, maybe we should look at Medicare too. Good. interesting comment from the potentially most vulnerable incumbent senator, Republican senator in the country. And all of the Elon fanboys, you know, the all in crew, all the rest of them, they're all like, go Elon. This is get rid of the pork? It's like, does anyone, is anyone going to read the fucking legislation? Is anyone going to look at the website?

Obviously not. Obviously not. Like, where's the pork? Show me the fucking pork, idiots. Like, he's treating this like it was the bipartisan spending deal that it was, he's treating this like the bipartisan spending deal that he was, he's treating this like the bipartisan spending deal that he, he, killed in December, which was a job, which you could find all kinds of spending in there because it was funding the entire government. This is a very terrible, stupid, self-destructive, but relatively narrow piece of legislation in the sense that it deals with tax cuts and cuts to primarily

to Medicaid and food stamps to pay for a small portion of those giant tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. And it massively explodes a deficit at the same time. There's also just like this interesting dynamic here, which is until Elon took this position, there was no incentive, online incentive, for people to oppose this bill. Right. Like there is this, there is this attention economy on the right where it's like, if you are pro Trump, you're going to get extra engagement because your, your tweets, your posts will be lifted up by all the Trump fanboys. Elon has his own set of fanboys who are now taking his tweets and his comments and the comments from people who have Elon's position and left in the amount.

So it's all these like weirdos who've come into our lives since Elon got involved in politics like Wall Street design. Yeah, Mario Nafalls, Doge designer. I hate that we know this. I hate it. Tesla owners of Silicon Valley, that's a big one. I don't know if Intersection Barbie has weighed in yet, but like these, but there's now a countervailing force of people online pushing a message against Trump.

And that has not happened at any point since January 6, 2021. So it's very, it's like a very interesting dynamic for media nerds. And obviously, obviously this is extremely enjoyable drama to watch unfold. But in terms of what it could actually mean politically, it does seem like the bill got out of the house with a bunch of House Republicans who are hardliners, freedom caucus people, really upset, even though they voted for it, about the fact that it adds this month. to the deficit. So you already have some House Republicans that when it comes back to the House, they're not definite yeses. So it really could sort of fuck up the conversation around the bill for Trump among Republican members of Congress. And then the next effect of this is Musk this week also said, you know, everyone who betrays us and supports this bill should be defeated in November

So who knows if, if, uh, Musk will still, you know, he's, he said earlier that he's like, not going to spend that much on politics anymore. He wasn't tweeting as much about politics. He kind of stepped back. But now he's, now he's pissed. Well, he got that little taste by making that one comment on CBS news or wherever it was got a bunch of attention, including some people who maybe weren't in love with what he was doing before. And then he did his abomination tweet. And he got all kinds of attention. And so now he's double tripling, quadrupling, down. He, he, he, he, he's in this now because this is what he wants. Will he spend his actual money six or eight months from now in a primary? Open question. The short term thing here is,

Lovett and I spoke on Friday for the pod that came out on Sunday. And at that point, Lovett asked me basically like, could this bill fail? And I was like, the odds of this bill failing are quite small just because of the dynamics of Republicans are for Trump. The, they can't let taxes go up. They have the debt ceiling. Like, maybe it's not this exact form. Maybe we can make the Medicaid cuts less onerous. We could get some of the, worse things out, but like it is on a path towards passage. A narrow and messy path, but a path. I think that path is different now.

I think this is, I'm not saying it's going to upend it, but John Thune and Mike Johnson's job and Donald Trump's job just got a lot harder because he is, Elon Musk has a very large platform. He's giving voice to the concerns of two groups of people at the same time. Far right, MAGA freedom of caucus types who like don't really understand how the debt ceiling works and don't really have budget deficits work, but also sort of deficit hawks in the middle, people who are concerned. And so for those two groups of people, Elon now has given them some permission to push for more changes in this bill that would not have happened otherwise.

Kill the bill. Elon's been tweeting that too, which is great. I'm on board. Kill the bill. He did a, I would I assume to be some sort of AI generated kill bill movie poster. Yes. With Elon on it. So we're behind you, 100% Elon. Let's kill this bill. All right. We'll talk about this more on the pod, but this is fun. Good morning. And also, please subscribe to our Pod Save America YouTube channel. We are putting a lot more rapid response type stuff here as news breaks. So all you have to do is just hit subscribe. We're trying to keep up with right-wing media outlets that have millions and millions of subscribers. So go ahead. Just hit subscribe. It'll take a couple seconds.

the least you could do, honestly.