The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: The Trump-Elon bromance blows up and Ukraine's stunning military attack

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. Rudyard and Janice start the show talking about the blowup of the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk which took place in spectacular fashion over twitter. Was Elon's performance a genuine show of dismay at a congressional spending bill that flies in the face of all the cost cutting initiatives he was pursuing with DOGE? Or Is this a man having a nervous breakdown in public? And how will this breakup affect support from other tech billionaires and fracture the MAGA coalition? In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice turn to the surprise Ukrainian drone attack that targeted Russian air bases hosting nuclear-capable strategic bombers thousands of km away from the border of Ukraine. What will Putin's response be to this brazen attack? How will the use of cheap weapons to destroy expensive weapons change the face of warfare? And finally, how will the loss of some of its military capacity affect Russia's war with Ukraine and its relationship with NATO?  To support the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk Podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.Munkdebates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Welcome to Friday Focus for the 6th of June 2025. I'm Roger. Griffiths chair of the monk debates joined in studio by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the monk school of global affairs. Janice were out of the smog into the studio, forest fires,

in the air here in Toronto. Not a nice feeling this morning. Not one bit. As I walked to get here reddard, I could feel it in my eyes and in my throat. There is a certain justice out here that people living for the north have felt this. The big cities have ignored it. Well, it's in the biggest city of the mall now. Yeah, it reminds me of that summer two years ago where we dealt with this again. So really thinking about people in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and elsewhere that are really dealing with the brunt of this. But we've got other issues to talk about this week. And before we do that, let's just thank a whole bunch of new curators and supporters.

So huge list, I think no doubt partly because of last week's monk debate. So I'm going to do the curators this week and like half of the supporters, Janice, because otherwise you and I will be here for the whole half hour thanking people. What a great problem to have. So the curators, I'm going to read out their names in full. A big thank you to Heather Reesman. Thank you, Heather. Patrick Deion, Patrick, a good friend.

Nice to see you. Gillian Smith. Thank you. And Linda Solomon. Greatly appreciated all of you joining as curators. And here I'll do a selection of these supporters. promise to get to all of them over the course of the next few weeks, but let's just do a dozen or so now.

Ray Faye S. James N., Nicholas B., B. Van Van Vito S., Julian G., Sidharth S., Zachary W., Wendy B., Robert B., Michael, G. T., T., and Lori O. We'll, again, lots of other supporters joining this week, and I will get to them, I promise, in the coming weeks on the show to thank them for their generosity. Isn't that wonderful? Just great. Yeah, the big live mainstaged debates are the mainstay of the monk debates, and we're always reminded by that when we get an opportunity to gather at Roy Thompson Hall together. And thank you for coming last week. Oh, listen, it would be wonderful if all our monk supporters and donors could share that experience. Yeah. So they can. If you are watching this show right now and you

are a monk donor at $25 or more a year, a high-definition version, of the monk debate on Trump's America is available to you simply by logging onto the website using your membership information, then just go to the debate page, and you will see the debate in glorious video from gavel to gavel. And Janice, if you're not a member for 50 cents a week, you can get the full-length editions of this podcast and, of course, all the main stage debates in beautiful HD as a live stream and on demand. What a deal. The best. You can't, I don't think you could get even a fifth of a cup of coffee. That's right.

Let's jump into the week's news, though. We have to start with the blow-up of the bromance of the last, well, I guess last eight months. That is Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk. This, Janice, you predicted, was going to happen. But boy, has it happened with fireworks? What's your take on this and what do you think it all means? It was an astounding show to watch. I had my computer on yesterday afternoon and there would be a flash.

Oh, Musk said that and then I try to go back to work. And if you want to say, oh, no, no, no. Trump tweeted this and is public, I would have to say, slightly adolescent brawl just stretched itself over hours, but the content is serious, as opposed to the theater that we were all exposed to. Let me just give you one example. Really stunning to see Donald Trump say, I will cancel all his contracts. Well, you know, the government of the United States headed by the president does allegedly not make or break contracts based on somebody criticizing the president, but we're in a new world right now, Red Yard. And these are big

contracts. We are talking about billion-dollar contracts for SpaceX. So it wasn't, I've never seen a performance like this, never. Yeah. Let's talk about the, what seems to have catalyzed all this. There were reports in the last week or so that unfortunately Elon Musk had been dealing with what seems like an ongoing addiction problem to a drug called ketamine. This was reported extensively in the Washington Post. I think their lawyers would have taken a close look at that story before publishing it. And according to his associates, Elon Musk's behavior had become increasingly erratic over the last number of months. He has had children with multiple women. I always love it, Janice, how these billionaires find a way to take on the most difficult and pressing tasks

facing humanity. And for Elon Musk, this is clearly what he deems as a population crisis. And he has selflessly put himself forward to deal with this by having many children with many different women, who he's now in various stages of litigation. You can't make this stuff up. But, Janice, I guess what I'm wondering about... Can we stop for just a second over that story? Just for one second. Because it's not quite as selfless as it sounds.

Oh, I'm being completely sarcastic here, Janice. Here's what he says. I mean, it's ridiculous that one has to step into the breach as a billionaire male and procreate widely because, you know, it's not about me. it's about saving humanity so it can go and settle Mars. It's about perpetuating the entrepreneurial gene. It's about more smart people having children and not just vacating the field to whom,

to all those who are not smart. So if you actually pay attention to what Elon Musk has said, some of it is not very pretty. No, not very pretty. And frankly, not very respectful of women. if we want to be on, and that shows up in Twitter in other ways, but I won't go there. But what I'm getting at Genesis is, was this a real crisis, a crisis over the budget, Elon Musk, calling out Donald Trump at the beginning of this whole kind of tweet war that, you know,

saying truth to power that this budget will add trillions to the U.S. debt. It will saddle the United States with permanently hiring borrowed costs, and it will effectively, in Musk's view and the view of others, potentially lead America on the very path of decline that Donald Trump is supposedly there to stop. Or is this simply a man having a nervous breakdown in public? It's probably some combination of both because the story about drug highs,

and it would be charitable for a minute, that famous picture of him doing a jig on stage with a chainsaw. as he was about to destroy people's jobs and lives, you could imagine that was partly a drug high. I do think the issue of the size of that bill, the size of the spend, which had been building for 10 days, there were, you know,

there are Republicans in Congress who would prefer this bill not pass, but they won't put their head up, as we know. Elon Musk, as you rightly said, Richard, has funded campaigns in Congress as well as the president. And I think for him, here he had come in to do doge, to make government more efficient, had failed abysmal. He has paid a big business price for this as well as personal price. You know, there's now public opposition to him as a result of this.

and then he turns around that sees a bill that dwarfs the $150 billion that he had been able to cut. And frankly, does put, you know, U.S. spending and debt in a whole new category. So I think there is an issue here, but then let's just layer it on with all the other things we know about Elon Musk. Yeah. Let's talk, though, a slightly more serious aspect of this, which is that Elon Musk. Musk represented half of what emerged as a very powerful political coalition after the election. It was the seeming not simply detente or truce, but the uniting of an element of Silicon Valley, the so-called tech bros, with their billions upon billions of dollars with the MAGA movement.

And that these two things coming together, the polarities of on one hand, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro on one side, the kind of pure long-term MAGA guys that went to jail for Donald Trump. And then on the other, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, David Sachs, and Elon Musk as the tech billionaires who were willing to, on the basis of liberalization of technology, and particularly AI, a hands-off approach to AI, were willing to support Trump to the hill, to the tune of, in the case of Elon Musk, hundreds of millions of dollars that went in. to the Trump campaign and went into these different congressional races. If that is breaking up now, what does that mean for Donald Trump's presidency? I have some ideas, but I'd love to hear

yours. Let me start with two, because there's so many consequences of this. This is a big political event in addition to everything else that it is. Let's start with the coalition, as you described it accurately. One big issue that divides these two groups, both of whom supported Donald Trump until now it's China. So Peter Navarro is the leading China hawk. That is not Elon Musk. He sells Tesla's in China and he was never very happy with decoupling and sanctions and very high tariffs. Well, I think this relationship is broken. I do not think they can repair it. And I think this sends us a strong signal that we are going to see an intensification of competition between China and the United States. They were the break on it.

That's gone now. And I think that element of the MAGA movement will be in charge. Yeah. I was going to go there somewhere similar. Maybe just for us to understand that this is a victory for Steve Bannon and for what you call kind of deep mass. as opposed to Elon Musk, which they were calling dark maga, I guess because of the techno-post-human kind of vibe that he and others in Silicon on the right are associated with. So it's kind of deep maga versus dark maga. Deep maga coming out ahead. I think that, you know, China, yes, Canada

too maybe. You've got to understand now that if this break is serious, and it looks like today that it is that Donald Trump is refusing to talk to Elon Musk. He's effectively banished. That is going to cause not just the Navarro's and the Bannons to have more influence, but the deep mag of people that are already in the administration, like Russ Voigt, the head of budget and management, who is as extreme as they get, Stephen Miller, who is continuing to rise in influence and prominence. So I think this was consequential in a way. I was in no way a fan of Musk. I find elements of the tech bro kind of POV to be odious, but they were a check of sorts on Trump's kind of worst nativist impulses. And I think what we're going to see now is more of that coming to the fore because this community

is going to have to choose sides. And I think what's fascinating is that, A lot of them will choose Musk for business reasons, for the fact that as Musk joked on one of his Twitter feeds, the president's in power for the next three and a half years, I'm around for the next 40. Yep. Absolutely right. And, you know, look, there's evidence to support the argument you just made. We got a travel ban yesterday, right? Larger than the original travel ban, very muted opposition. people are exhausted and just cannot organize the way they did the first time.

Well, which part of the party of the movement does this favor? The deep MAGA movement, the Steve Bannons, the Steve Millers, not the Silicon Valley guys, not the tech brothers. Who want the visas. Who want the programmers coming in if they need programmers anymore. But that's another show. By the way, one of the big luster, which I think really matters here, is science, scientific research and universities.

Musk was a break on that. He was no fan of woke universities, for sure. But he did understand that you needed to educate scientists and produce people who were really good engineers and computer scientists. Gone. That element did the illustration. No holds barred, I think, now against universities.

Musk said one thing yesterday that got me kind of excited, which is he said, let's create a party for the 80% of Americans who are basically not represented right now, either by Donald Trump or by, you know, the fringier parts of, of, the Democrats. Could we, might we see, Musk throw his weight as we go into these critical midterm elections for President Trump into, you know, a new political movement in the United It's crazy. They never work. But if anybody was going to spend and could spend billions of dollars on it with being a rounding

error in terms of his wealth, this is the guy that could do it. And he seems like he enjoys his self-appointed role as chaos monkey in American democracy. That generally, I think, under Doge was for the worse. But could Musk, I know this is asking a lot, but could must be a kind of chaos monkey for good, with having split from Trump now and maybe willing to put his money where his mouth is and support independence across the political spectrum? I'm really dubious.

I would say no, I did for one big reason. Public opinion in the United States has turned against Elon Musk. He brings a tremendous amount of political baggage. Really interesting that the demonstrations against the Tesla showrooms are continuing. even though he is banished from the White House. There was outrage, and the outrage is not that he fired government workers, because if there's a group of people that are unpopular in the United States

and in Canada, by the way, it's government workers. But it was the chilling way that he did it. It was the glee, the joy, the dance with the chainsaw that started generating. And if you look at his polling numbers, they're abysmal. he's not the guy he's the guy who can fund it but he is not the guy who can lead it well I think he's going to be just

again a wild whirling dervish that we're going to have a Tasmanian devil of American politics and you know just to take this one step further if you think we've reached a moment in the United States where our third party might stand a chance

he's going to crowd the airwaves and keep somebody else out who might be able to pull it off actually. Well, let's say goodbye, Janice, to our audience watching the first half, the complimentary half of Friday Focus on our YouTube channel. So thank you for joining along. Please subscribe to the channel.

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