Much of the right-wing media ecosystem appeared unsure how to react to the seeming public implosion of the relationship between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk on Thursday and into Friday morning. Outlets and influencers that typically react savagely to criticism of Trump played the spat more or less down the middle. Even much of the criticism of Musk was relatively genteel.
“He’s gotta let Trump be Trump,” former Fox News host Eric Bolling said on Steve Bannon’s broadcast network, Real America’s Voice. “You can be First Bro,” he said of Musk, “but you can’t be de facto president.”
Behind the scenes, they tell WIRED, Republican operatives could not help but be entertained at the torrent of messages flooding their group chats. They tended to take Trump’s side.
One Trumpworld consultant tells WIRED that the entire episode reminded them of a line in a recent Wall Street Journal report, about how Trump had privately described Musk as “50% genius, 50% boy.”
“After today,” the consultant says, “I think he’s just 100% stupid.” (Musk did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)
While Musk had been railing against the Republican budget reconciliation package formally known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for several days on X, things turned ugly once Trump denounced the billionaire during an Oval Office appearance on Thursday with the German chancellor Friedrich Merz. “Elon and I had a great relationship,” Trump said. “I don’t know if we will anymore.” Musk subsequently agreed with an X user who called for the president’s impeachment.
Still, some presented the conflict as a positive thing, even while calling for it to end.
“I think the great thing about this is we all see it,” said Fox News host Greg Gutfeld. “Would you take a forceful president and a billionaire publicly feuding in public over an invalid president? … At least I know what is going on, and I can somewhat enjoy it, but I want them to stop. I’ve had it. I don’t want to see my parents fighting.”
By Friday morning, Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade was hoping for an end to the animosity, suggesting there could be a “big, beautiful truce.”
While many in the broader Trump coalition appeared hesitant to commit to one side or the other, this wasn’t true of everyone as Thursday afternoon’s bevy of rude posts bled into the night. After Musk posted “@realDonald Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public,” some MAGA loyalists were shocked. Alex Jones, though—the right-wing talk radio host and conspiracy theorist who called the Sandy Hook school shootings a hoax and was sued for defamation and found liable by default—wrote that Trump “needs to respond asap.”
One of the MAGA-verse’s most prominent accounts, Catturd, then went after Jones. “What a POS Alex Jones turned out to be – what a fucking fraud,” he tweeted. (Jones did not immediately reply to a request for comment sent to InfoWars.)
