The DOGE Days of Summer
Maybe the real savings were the lessons we learned along the way.
“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.” - Mark Twain
Immediately after Election Day 2024, I predicted the three main fault lines that could split apart the MAGA-Tech Right alliance: immigration, bioscience, and war. Well, two out of three ain’t bad. There was already some major Christmastime contention over immigration, ending with Vivek Ramaswamy being the first to depart from DOGE. The debates over bioethics have been slowly boiling along since then, with advances in the genetic screenings of embryos delighting many on the Tech Right but disgusting much of the Republican base. Even still, missing the now-obvious fissure of finance feels like a black mark on my fortune-telling record. As always, it’s the economy, stupid. In my defense, back then, it really did seem like everyone was behind DOGE—who wouldn’t be eager to cut away waste, fraud, and abuse? As tagline goes, the people voted for major reform, and Trump 2.0 might be the only admin capable of delivering it for quite some time, given his vendetta against the “deep state,” his inability to run again, and the surplus of high quality tech-talent that has converged upon the capital to enact his (very) popular mandate.
What happened?
Not even a year later, the temporary alliance between the right-wing progressives and the conservative base has never been more tenuous. Everyone has rushed to their keyboards and microphones to prognosticate on what it means when the world’s richest man calls the world’s most powerful man a pedophile (and then deletes it a few days later) and promises to start a new political party (and then appears to walk back from that as well). As we sort through the debris from the weekend’s inter-coalitional ballistic exchanges, it looks like Elon has calmed down (or at least come down) and is now making moves toward de-escalation. Trump responded as expected, starting the exchange by giving as good as he got, but ultimately closed out the conflict in a manner closer to a magnanimous grandfather wanting the best for a prodigal son.
As we have all been learning over the past few years, first with the great interior migration brought on by COVID and now with the right recapturing the capital, the nature of a city is very hard to change. Sure, if you’re Joe Rogan, you can buy up a B-tier town like Austin, already known for being a bit weird, and import some podcasters. But what happened to Miami as the new heart of tech? Despite all the good governance, it’s just harder to be productive when surrounded by all that sun and fun. So it has gone with DC. It’s a little more difficult to move fast and break things when you’re wading through a swamp of entrenched interests and brittle egos. Harder still when you're used to innovating new technology to tackle problems that are much more interesting and important than partisan politics.
To Elon, a man not exactly used to making concessions to anything other than the laws of physics, the work of maintaining a political coalition must be maddening. This can only be magnified by trying to run multiple companies that already demanded constant attention before they became political targets. While any throw molotov must eventually come down, the politics that set it in motion has its own set of rules, one that relies on a different understanding of inertia and gravity. As Mike Solana points out, “Both men are historic titans in their respective fields, which they both know, and they are both globally famous social media personalities, which is no small thing: beyond politics or tech, these are the two most successful shitposters in human history. Their instincts are to conflict, and to navigating conflict, which means while their alliance was powerful, the highly dramatic dissolution of their alliance was always inevitable.” Both men thrive on conflict, but it's evident that the unique viciousness of politics at the very highest level has impacted them in different ways.
Trump is the only person who can survive the pressures of the presidency, not only unscathed (with perhaps the exception of a small scar on his ear) but also seemingly healthier. He’s in his element in DC, playing to his East Coast instincts, with deals to be made, friends to reward, and enemies to punish. Trump has also had many years to develop a resilience to the attacks, whereas Elon, though never without his detractors, was immediately dropped into the very deep end of political vilification. Elon is also much more accustomed to the type of conflict that's found on factory floors and launch pads, battling against forces that can be modeled, the center of a universe that can, at least theoretically, run on pure logic.
After losing a small fortune, Isaac Newton once complained that he could “calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” So it goes with Elon, who can comprehend precisely how much all this political conflict has cost him. Its rewards, however, are a little less quantifiable and are ultimately reliant on his continued popularity with Trump and the movement he leads. The reality is that there will always be an uneasy tension in any relationship where one party receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the other. While Trump was certainly made financially prosperous thanks to Elon, he made Elon popular in return (as much as these terms can apply to world-famous billionaires). Accusing Trump of being indicted by the Epstein Files was too ridiculous to cause any lasting damage, but it does seem as if Elon’s claim that he was responsible for Trump winning the 2024 election is what pushed things over the edge. It’s true that Elon’s purchase of Twitter and reinstatement of pro-Trump accounts, including Trump himself, triggered a massive vibe shift. But it’s also true that Trump had won (at least) one election without Musk and was prepared to do so again.
Musk was supposed to provide tech talent and capital, while Trump provided the political movement and popular support. Misconstruing the subtle art behind that particular deal was unwise. I firmly believe Elon expected a massive amount of popular support when he stood up for fiscal responsibility and the 80% of Americans found in the center of the political spectrum. There are only two problems with that approach. The first is that it’s never really about the money, but what the money represents. The second is that the members of the “silent majority” are not defined by their numbers, but by their silence. Turns out that the massive reform voters have consolidated behind is driven by what the 20% have been shouting since before 2016, something, as Matt Taibbi distilled down, approximating “fuck you”— the least responsible and quantifiable statement of all time.
It’s these interpersonal and political dynamics that contributed more to the blowout than any one aspect of the Big Beautiful Bill. America’s debt is an extreme crisis, but the money represents something more than just existential risk. It’s something you can count, something that could be hypothetically shrunk as “easily” as the headcount at Twitter HQ. Elon thought that, along with a few trusty sidekicks, an infusion of new blood in the form of Big Balls & Co., and some SF sleep-on-the-floor start-up style work ethic, this was just a new system that could be conquered. Compared to gravity, wrangling the out-of-control government gravy train must have seemed at least possible. But this is a new physics, of the culture war, of “fuck you,” of interpersonal relationships and the weird, fetid ways that time and space work differently in a swamp. A son of South Carolina, Scott Bessent understands these strange distortions. So it’s no wonder that he and Elon reportedly came to blows in the days leading up to the great divorce. Any competent Treasury Secretary cannot cleanly compute the cost of tariffs. What each dollar represents to the administration must be taken into account. Try explaining that sort of moldy calculus to the guy who needs to continue building and selling cars in China.
What may be hard for some in the Tech Right to understand is that there are simply some things that the MAGA base prioritizes over money. We should not underestimate how many voters out there would be willing to tank the world economy or send tanks into downtown LA if it means recapturing a dream they can feel fading all around them. While Elon correctly pointed out that he will be around making an impact much longer than Trump, he forgot that the issues that carried Trump to power not only predate, but will outlast them both. This is a reality that I hope Musk, as well as others in the Tech Right, will begin to internalize. The only viable political movement with which they can hope to work alongside has not exactly been hiding its opinions, nor does it show any signs of reevaluating them immediately after a colossal victory. For these technically minded migrants to the political right, it’s much better to take the immediate wins where they can be found and then work to build up the popular support and institutional capital needed to put differing plans into action down the line. This is especially true now, where reconciliation is still possible, as all future disagreements will now be viewed as the harbinger of another very online, very counterproductive meltdown.
Another meltdown cannot be afforded for all those relying on Trump 2.0’s coalition of the great and powerful to do as promised and deliver massive change. Much like how the metric by which a nuclear engineer can be ultimately measured is how safely he can run a reactor, the metric by which anyone tagged to bring the Trump campaign over the finish line can be measured following that success is this: do your actions help get JD Vance into the White House in 2028? Because without that, following through on inevitably years-long initiatives like the deportations of illegal immigrants or DOGE will be increasingly unlikely. Now, the only goal for anyone invested in this coalition is to prevent more radiation from seeping out and poisoning something that has real potential.
Men put the mission above themselves, and there is some hope that this blowup might actually be for the best, assuming we can continue putting the pieces back together again. It will create much-needed space, the one thing all productive partnerships require from time to time. The Trump administration is better off staying focused on the pressing issues of its agenda, just as Musk’s time is better spent on starships and robots, rather than becoming another one of those right-wing automatons who recycle outrage porn all day. Quoting Solana again here, “While Trump may work with Elon, neither man will ever fully trust the other again. This means the populists have another opening, and what will likely follow is a quiet war for power at the White House, where they certainly outnumber the Tech Right.” This is probably true, and it’s also fine. They don't have to trust each other completely; they don’t even need to like each other. They need to realize that fighting each other is against their own and the country's best interests.
Likewise, those gleefully proclaiming an early end to the Tech Right are only showcasing their ignorance of what many political pundits, however inelegantly, have been saying since everything kicked off. Men can laugh over a drink minutes after scrapping outside the bar. Elon knows this well, having spent his 20s fistfighting with his brother at his first startup and ultimately losing control of his second to people he still considers friends. Trump knows it as well; it’s probably impossible to count the number of people he’s fallen in and out with over the years.
A lifetime ago, when I was firefighting in Canada, my first crew boss and friend once told me there were three phases to any team: norming, storming, and performing. At first, you get along because everyone is feeling out the ropes, that’s norming. Storming comes when the cracks that inevitably build up grow too wide to ignore. However, the best work is often found after some shouting, if everyone can set aside a bit of their pride. At the end of the day, some very important jobs need to get done. So while it's possible to remake a thing better than what it was before it broke, so long as there is enough gold to cover over the cracks, it’s a lot better to just get to work.
Vance has much bigger problems than Elon.
His popularity is proportional to how much he keeps out of the news cycle.