Trump and Elon’s Awful Monster Movie

It’s gripping—but Godzilla vs. Kong had a more loveable gorilla. And this one’s much darker.

If you own stock in a popcorn company, you're probably feeling pretty good this morning.

The clash between Donald Trump and Elon Musk unfolded Thursday as a real-time horror movie, optimized for must-see scrolling. The tech titan and the MAGA monarch roared, hurled and thrashed, stopping just long enough to preen.

The outrage-industrial complex almost threw a rod. Musk culminated days of slamming Trump’s prized, deficit-exploding mega budget bill with this afternoon broadside to his quarter of a billion or so Twitter followers.

“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

Social media detonated. Journalists stampeded like chimpanzees on Red Bull. Cellphone blew up with democracy Amber alerts. The Republican Caucus froze like the Miss Universe pageant dressing room.

In the moment of adrenaline, I found myself rooting for the erratic, unhinged megalomaniacal, grievance-fueled billionaire with the God complex.

Oh wait. That’s both of them.

I cheered initially for Musk, admittedly not a good look for the son a Holocaust survivor. Hey, I told a friend, Elon’s one of the most dangerous men on the planet, but the other guy has a nuclear button within those little hands.

Godzilla vs. King Kong immediately appeared in my own foggy mind’s eye. Except the movie classic had something of a cause and conscience. It had depth. It had a very large gorilla you could grow attached to.

One similarity: Trump vs. Elon offered towering egos that dwarfed the skylines of New York and Hong Kong.

Now for the scary part. This isn’t a movie and it’s not even reality TV, though that it’s contrived to feel that way. It’s a deadly serious business and too many of us are content to serve as a rapt audience for their movie.

We’re munching popcorn when we should be searching our souls.

This is heat check for democracy. It has devolved in America to the point where talk of its dissolution is no longer the hyperbole that so many of us have indulged in for far too long.

To frame this as a serious disagreement about America’s future is to participate in a grotesque carnival, where the loudest liars get the biggest stage. That any of this gets treated as real political discourse reflects not on Trump or Musk, but on the political illiteracy of our nation.

Too many feel compelled by convention to analyze these two as if they’re engaged in some high-stakes policy clash. That’s pathetic. This is not about the economy or immigration or governance. It’s about ego, mental instability, and the dangerous reach of platforms built for spectacle.

If Trump and Musk ever held a policy debate, it wouldn’t be a battle of ideas—it’d be a clash of crayons. The textbook example is DOGE, whose intrusions into the underbelly of the public’s most private information caused permanent and immeasurable damage.

And there were the countless destroyed lives of hundreds of thousands of hard-working, honest, taxpaying middle-class Americans who had proudly listed the federal government as their employer and the provider for their families. They’re whisked off like fleas to the purported – but false – benefit of hard-working, honest, taxpaying middle-class Americans.

Musk first proclaimed he and his troop of creepy child Brainiacs would function as human MRI’s to detect $2 trillion in “waste” That quickly became $1 trillion.

I’d suggest you contemplate that, but none of us can. A trillion cannot be comprehended by the brain.

For perspective, the only formal cuts to emerge to date are in a $9.4 billion rescissions package recently sent to Congress—mostly targeting foreign aid and public broadcasting. That’s a big number, equal of 188,000 luxury Teslas.

But want to know how infinitesimally small that is? And how meaningless that $9.4 billion number becomes when translated into numbers the brain can absorb?

The $9.4 billion in cuts to the federal budget relative to Musk’s $1 trillion claim equals trying to cut the family budget by $100—and only finding 94 cents in savings.

We have become an unserious people when it comes to our governance as a nation. We have lost all perspective.

What fertile ground for monsters.

The worst part of all this is how many Americans—especially those who should know better—are still entertained. They roll their eyes at the madness, share the memes, laugh at the chaos, and then wonder why their rights keep shrinking.

This isn’t politics as usual. It’s a toxic feedback loop where power rewards outrage, and outrage drives engagement, and engagement gets monetized by people who think empathy is weakness.

So, Donald Trump and Elon Musk can indulge their vanities as the most famous and powerful men in the world.

And the monsters aren’t lumbering into the ocean any time soon.