How Elon Musk’s Service to Trump Will Probably, Eventually End

A week ago Donald Trump went to both Truth Social and the White House’s official social media account to proudly quote what he thought was a line from Napoleon, stating that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” (As a stickler I will point out that the quote actually comes from Balzac’s posthumous and sentimentally apocryphal 1838 Maxims and Thoughts of Napoleon — there is no proof Napoleon himself said it — and in any event is a mere epitome of Book III, Ch. 41 of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.) Then, a few days ago, Trump trollingly pronounced himself royalty after rescinding Kathy Hochul’s New York City car congestion tax with an AI-drawn Time magazine cover of himself wearing a crown and the all-caps statement “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

Yes, delusions of monarchy are in the air as we approach America’s semiquincentennial anniversary next year. This week CPAC has rolled into Washington, D.C., as very much its own Carnival of Fools, complete with knaves, lords, aspirants to the king’s court, courtesans, and a malodorous glut of freelance jesters. In fact, I’m kicking myself now for missing the easy editorial pitch: Fly me back to my old D.C. stomping grounds to cover CPAC as I educate an entire generation of shy Zoomer activists on how to at least drink in a memorably literary way.

Then again, it seems they’re doing fine out there without me. As a friend observed, if ever Stephen Glass’s infamous fantasies about overexuberant juvenile insanity at CPAC were going to come true, then this is the year to bet on a boom in the local mini-fridge-rental business, what with Trump 2.0 triumphantly rebooted and ready to reformat Washington, D.C.,’s hard drive like Jukt Micronics. Why do I suspect many attendees are already ruinously drunk? Because (1) today is Friday and the sun’s already up over the yardarm, and (2) yesterday afternoon Elon Musk got “knighted” at CPAC by Argentine president Javier Milei to a delirious crowd of cheering attendees.

I desperately wish I could have been in the room for that moment, to experience the insanity in person. It was almost narcotically disorienting, and crystallized something that had been naggingly out of reach for me as a writer up until I saw the clips. I have certain gonzo sensibilities myself, after all, so it was impossible not to appreciate the bizarre theatricality of a political display from what is definitely Not Your Dad’s Republican Party: Milei, looking lupine as always, quasi-ennobling Musk with a giant chainsaw. (Musk: “GROAAR! This is the Chainsaw for Bureaucracy! CHAINSAAAW! NYEAAAARLGH!” — you must hear it, the mere words on the page do not suffice to capture the Lynchian surrealism.)

I understand exactly what kind of message Musk, dressed in all black to hopefully project “fierceness,” was intending to send: Clad in sunglasses, a “Dark MAGA” hat, and a handcuff necklace, he sat down on the couch to declare to a worshipful interviewer, “I am become Meme!” (The audience responded with hilariously lowbrow incomprehension to the Oppenheimer reference, maybe because he left out the tag “Destroyer of Worlds” — though I suspect Musk worships Meme above Shiva in his pantheon.)

The act speaks for itself. Elon Musk loves the attention. He has likely never been happier than at this moment in his life — and why not, given that he remains the richest man on planet Earth while also wielding the spotlight as well as vast, novel, and democratically unaccountable power within the American government? Musk’s Q-rating now compares only to that of his patron and current bro-crush Donald Trump, and if he’s strutting around like the kid in Shazam! who suddenly found himself transformed into the strongest man on Earth, then he can hardly be blamed for it given the example set by King Trump himself. With the puppy-dog love Musk affects to have for him, this is just as easily framed as a political anti-drug PSA: “I learned it by watching you!”

So this is where I get extremely nervous. Because whether or not you approve or disapprove of his actions with DOGE (it’s impossible to judge results yet in any event), one cannot watch the way Elon Musk has carried himself over the last month without thinking of the hubris that inevitably precedes a spectacular downfall. I could gesture to the elements of Greek drama alone to explain why Elon — as he occupies the Twitter proscenium, performing for his online throngs — is setting himself up with his own words for an ironic denouement. (If anyone believes himself to be a figure of classically heroic proportions, surely it is Musk.) But there are more than the mere laws of dramatic gravity at play here.

Musk is laying the predicate for his own fall from grace right now, while he flies high in the esteem of the president he serves, by his careless and oftentimes casually cruel comportment. His arrogance, curdling over into clumsily manipulative cynicism, is impossible to ignore. For example, has anyone else noticed that Elon Musk tends to say a lot of things that simply aren’t true? As in, almost constantly, if X’s own AI audit of Musk’s account is anything to go by, and particularly about anything related to his role in “fixing” the federal government through his role at DOGE?

I’m not just talking about Elon’s repeated, seemingly naïve online promotion of false stories about “savings” or “scandals” apparently being turned up in the federal budget. (No, gentle readers, millions of 150-year-olds are not in fact receiving Social Security checks — but if you read Elon’s Truth Site, you would have seen his farcically ignorant claim that they were.) The man also has a fondness for outright falsehoods. I cannot look into Elon Musk’s soul, so I instead ask readers whether they believe a man as well-informed as he, working in such a crucial government role, really thinks that the federal budget can be balanced by what DOGE might root out of Medicare and Social Security as “waste, fraud and abuse.” In fact, who are we to question the intellectual integrity of a man who — after nodding his head to this — suggested that in fact DOGE’s savings would be better spent sending American voters one-shot $5,000 “savings” checks instead?

As we head into the weekend, media voices are chirruping — many of them expectantly — about how Donald Trump’s once-positive poll numbers are beginning to sag again as his brief honeymoon with the public wears off. This may be true, but it is both inevitable and irrelevant. The immediate flux in Trump’s approvals matters less than its long-term equilibrium point, for the simple reason that nobody can really know yet what Elon’s adventures in playing teppanyaki chef with the federal government will end up looking like. (Bloody mess or delicious meal? America is going to have to eat it either way!)

What matters more is that Elon Musk is more unpopular than Trump right now, significantly so. This serves Donald Trump’s interests well; Musk not only wields real financial power in his partnership with the Trump administration, he is the face of wildly unpopular decisions, the “bad cop” who allows Trump the leeway to play “good cop” should the need ever arise. That need inevitably will — the laws of political gravity are even more ironclad than those of Greek drama — and this presents inexorable peril for Musk, who (it’s to be hoped) realizes how expendable he is. Donald Trump is, by both the laws of our nation and those of his own ego, the only indispensable man in this relationship.

So as fond as Elon Musk seems to be of visualizing himself amid the ranks of the world-bestriding heroes of history, he would do well to remember one of history’s most instructive lessons, repeated throughout history across all cultures: When the miserable masses would threaten the monarch’s rule by gathering outside the walls of the palace to vent their rage over his failed policies, the monarch would sometimes make a rational calculation. He seized his most notoriously disliked subordinate, designated him the cause of all problems, lopped his head off, and tossed it over the ramparts to slake the bloodthirst of the crowd.

We live in more civilized times. But when Musk finally runs afoul of Trump — or, more brutally, needs to be sacrificed to deflect anger away from him — he should expect a rhetorically equivalent fate from his new best friend.