Elon and the Taco Truck
Tweeter and The Monkey Man. A song by rock supergroup—The Traveling Wilburys. A tale of betrayal, drugs, blurred loyalties, and an inevitable standoff at the edge of your seat. Sounds like the perfect anthem. Cue the documentary bromance of Elon Musk and President Donald Trump.
While this story deserves its own algorithm, a few things we can lock down. This was inevitable. Elon was never a traditional MAGA disciple. How did the climate savior of the left—the electric messiah with a Tesla in every progressive driveway—end up a fascist meme in the eyes of that same crowd? How did the man who once toured factories with Leo and Al Gore become the Cybertruck poster boy for the Trump Jr. lookalikes?
Now enter God’s Country and taco trucks sponsored by the DNC. These days, how we get our information isn’t news—it’s cuts, clips, shorts, and reels. Less reporting, more affirmation. A world divided into bubbles and scripture. Elon turning Twitter into X wasn’t a glitch. It was an inevitability.
You can say Elon drifted. But maybe it’s the parties—and the information highway—that have veered off course, rerouted through wrong-way language and tollbooth purity tests. Elon has always been Elon. Do people evolve, grow, and change over time? Of course. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes not. But one thing’s always been true: Elon Musk has been clear about two things—make the world better, and make a fortune doing it.
Remember the astronauts we saved in space? Yeah, that was SpaceX. And while you're at it, don’t forget his other company, Neuralink—the one aiming to cure blindness, paralysis, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s. So go ahead. Keep burning Teslas and calling Elon a threat to democracy.
While he may not fit the Berning sensation to purge billionaires and jump to the fight oligarchy playbook, Elon might understand this: he can keep doing good—at least in his eyes—with his billions, rather than burn it all down in some Dark Knight Joker remake.
Enter the eye roll, the open-mouth gasp, and the wow factor. Read that again, because three people helped Donald Trump win more than Donald Trump did: President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Elon Musk.
Depending on your sources, Musk spent somewhere between $250 and $295 million supporting President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2024. That’s a pretty big jump from his 2020 and 2016 figures. So what changed the most? Certainly not Donald Trump. Maybe—just maybe—it was the other side. And the other option.
To many, Musk was the prototype for the common-sense liberal: someone who believed in a healthy planet and a positive future for all, due process for immigrants, education as a right, and the idea that you could still chase the American Dream without being hated for success or wealth.
So what can we learn from the rise and fall of the Musk–Trump bromance? It's a Montague and Capulet lesson, if you can put down the popcorn long enough to stop rooting for the breakup and start listening to what it says. Two very different households, with different views and instincts, found common ground in comfort, in need, in hope—and in the absence of better options.
How many billionaires own Twitter, now X? How many people run for president with a real shot? The options were few. But the willingness to try anyway, to work past the differences, to make something functional out of something unlikely—that's what Democrats should be learning from right now.
While DOGE may not have come close to its $2 trillion goal of cutting government waste, fraud, and abuse, what it should have reminded Democrats is this: a Department of Government Efficiency used to be a Democratic issue—back when the party liked winning more than whining.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore introduced what was then a radical idea—cut the deficit, rein in overspending, and go after waste. They succeeded in slashing the federal deficit by $500 billion over five years—half from spending cuts, the rest from politically risky tax hikes. In today’s dollars, that’s a $1.1 trillion reset.
And they didn’t stop there. The National Performance Review—an ambitious audit of how Washington operates—targeted bureaucratic waste. The projected savings? $108 billion then. About $238 billion now.
So if Democrats want to mock Elon’s Department of Government Efficiency, fine. But they should at least admit he didn’t invent the idea. He just remembered it.
So who gets what in the divorce? Well, Trump already won re-election. Elon already unleashed his AI into the government agencies he had his eyes on. Power was flexed. And both proved that the thin line between love and hate is no stranger to the Resolute Desk—or the Twitter war field.
While the Democrats—at least the ones with the cameras and microphones on them—seem to be enjoying all this, they’re treating it like an episode of Days of Our Lives or the Brad and Jennifer breakup. So what sparked the rift between President Trump and Elon Musk? Was it the tariffs, the Big Beautiful Bill, or just the inevitable clash of two incompatible forces?
Maybe it’s time for Democrats to peel off their Tesla-apology bumper stickers and start asking what Elon might actually offer if they want to be the perfect rebound.
Musk made no secret of his opposition to the tariffs. And while he spoke up, Democrats kept eating tacos—literally and metaphorically—choking on them without even realizing it. Their latest brainstorm from the Idea-thon retreat? A slogan, TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out. A dig at his tariff theatrics. He bluffs, the market panics, then rallies when he backs off.
Instead of using this moment to offer a clear alternative, Democrats have fallen into a reflexive posture—opposing everyone: Trump, Musk, even each other—without saying what they’re actually for. Musk was the climate champion when he fit the narrative. The moment he broke ranks, he became radioactive. Even when he’s right—when he flags Trump’s fiscal incoherence or points to legislative bloat—they dismiss the argument because they don’t like the messenger. Or worse, they root for Tesla to tank, as if the retirement funds of everyday Americans, managed by firms like Vanguard and BlackRock, aren’t heavily invested in that stock.
This is what happens when politics becomes personality cult. You start rooting for chaos like it’s a sport. You confuse volume with vision. And somewhere between the memes and the meltdowns, you forget the one thing voters actually want: a plan. Not a team. A plan. For when the markets shake, when AI starts writing the rules, when tariffs show up on the grocery bill. They don’t need theatrics. They need answers. They want to know what you’re doing to make their lives work.
What happened to President Elon? Maybe it’s time to rediscover the one thing the other party seems so willing to forget: humility. If you want to win the 2026 midterms—or more importantly, the 2028 election—ask yourself this: would you rather have Musk on your side, or against you? Would you rather see him backing a Republican—or building a new political movement from scratch?
Because the real lesson of the Trump–Musk bromance isn’t betrayal. It’s options. And when those run low, outcomes get complicated. In a democracy still learning to govern in real time, the ability to forgive, to adapt, to move forward—that’s not weakness. That’s strategy. And right now, only one side seems interested in having a winning one.
Musk isn’t loyal—he’s available. If Democrats can drop the Wokeville theatrics, recover a little humility, and remember how to speak common sense, they might just win back the Elon Musks of the world. And with them, the future.