This Trump-Musk cage match could be seen coming
National Post, 7 June 2025
The World’s Richest Man™ and The World’s Most Powerful Man™ made a fearsome tag team while they lasted
More or less on schedule, U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are headed for a steel cage match. The steel will be more expensive now due to tariffs, but spectacles don’t come cheap.
This past week’s Trump-Musk breakup could be dismissed as simply the latest episode of a professional-wrestling-reality-show presidency. The script is as old as baby-oiled wrestlers in the ring and as current as the Axe-body-sprayed young men in the audience.
Two great titans — The World’s Richest Man™ and The World’s Most Powerful Man™ — joined forces to form a fearsome tag-team. Call the alliance The World’s Most Manly Men™, with rotating mouthpiece managers in their corner, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and the like.
The World’s Most Manly Men™ steamroller over weak opponents at first to establish their dominance. Trump-Musk dismantle overseas aid to the poor; Trump-Musk take down funding for Aids prevention and treatment in Africa. Next up, The World’s Most Manly Men™ grapple with stronger opponents, preferably effete and somehow suspect; Trump-Musk battle public broadcasting, then Columbia, then Harvard.
Eventually though, the new tag-team champions run into formidable opponents — the judiciary, the bond market, the American voter’s preference for big government without having to pay for it. Victory is no longer easy nor assured. Will The World’s Most Manly Men™ prevail?
The final step comes as surely as celebrities gather like moths around the pro-wrestling flame. The World’s Most Manly Men™ must turn on each other. The spittle-flecked air is filled with cries of ingratitude, betrayal and treachery. The ambush then comes. The allies turn on each other. A low blow is landed — Trump is a reckless spendthrift! A steel chair is used to devastating effect — Musk’s government subsidies will be cut off!
The erstwhile allies are headed for a showdown. Tickets are sold to the clash of the titans; The World’s Most Manly Men™ will fight each other in a cage match.
That may well suffice as an explanation for the latest melodrama here in Washington, the latest staging of circuses in the declining imperial capital. But it overlooks a deeper division at the heart of the Trump project, a division advertised as brazenly as the golden Trump brand on a failed casino or a skip-the-line visa. It was right there in the name: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Efficiency is what Elon Musk desires, but it runs counter to the heart of the Trump project. Efficiency is what has driven globalization, automation, information technology and open trade, where more efficient production enables cheaper goods and services. Efficiency is the altar at which Musk and the tech-bros worship. Efficiency is the AI future where goods are cheap and services may well be cheaper still; The World’s Most Richest Man™ takes his billions and employment shrinks dramatically.
It was thus a contradiction from the beginning that Trump would embrace efficiency in general, and this particular efficiency czar in particular.
The signs were there early on. Remember that DOGE originally was a dyad, with Musk accompanied by a sidekick, Vivek Ramaswamy, the bio-tech entrepreneur who had previously run for president before endorsing Trump.
Before the inauguration, Ramaswamy observed that America needs high-skilled foreign workers because an American culture “which celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
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