Donald Trump threatens to deport Elon Musk

0:02Jon Sopel:This is a Global Player original podcast. Donald Trump loves nothing more than speaking to reporters on the White House lawn with an earshot of Marine One. This time he's really got it in for his old friend Elon Musk. Are you going to have a board for Elon Musk? I don't know. I think we'll have to take a look. We might have to put Doge on Elon. You know what Doge is? Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn't that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies, Peter. But Elon is very upset that the EV mandate is going to be terminated. And you know what? When you look at it, who wants?

0:44Jon Sopel:Not everybody wants an electric car. I don't want an electric car. I want to have maybe gasoline, maybe electric, maybe a hybrid, maybe someday a hydrogen. If you have a hydrogen car, it has one problem. it blows up, you know? So I'm going to give that one to Peter. And the question that elicits that response about, yeah, I'm going to look at that, is should Elon Musk be deported? Things are getting really sour because Elon Musk has got it in for Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill. And Donald Trump has got it in for Elon Musk. Where does this end? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:29The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. And if the world has been feeling quite quiet recently over the other side of the pond, that uneasy truce between Musk and Trump was pretty much shattered this morning. It has been a long night, a long night in Congress, where senators have been trying to pass the big, beautiful bill. It is Trump's bill. He's very proud of it. And right now it is all hanging on a knife edge. And maybe that explains why there was a little bit of grumpy tiredness this morning when Trump was looking at the man who essentially is trying to pull the whole thing down. Not from inside government this time, but from outside.

2:15Musk has called his bill an abomination, a disgusting abomination. And Trump basically let rip.

2:23Jon Sopel:Elon Musk having backed off and having gone too far in the spat that was so delicious the other week where, you know, Elon Musk is more or less accusing Donald Trump of being a paedophile because of his association with Jeffrey Epstein and then says, oh, maybe I didn't mean it. Maybe I've gone too far. So Elon Musk went quiet. He's got noisy again. And he's saying that if this big, beautiful bill, which he thinks, as you say, Emily, is an abomination, gets passed, then he's setting up a new political party in America tomorrow and that he is going to be running candidates against all the Trump people who voted for it.

3:02Jon Sopel:That's a big threat when you've got as much money as Elon Musk has got. And Donald Trump feels really pissed off with Elon Musk and wants to just introduce him now. Yeah, he's told him to close up shop and go back to South Africa. I think it was Steve Bannon originally who suggested that Elon Musk was basically another illegal immigrant. He told us on the show a couple of weeks back that he should be deported. He should get the hell out of America. And I guess what we are going to have to get used to is this idea of two people fighting a war where neither one is a winner that you particularly feel any empathy for.

3:45There are lots of people in America right now who are looking at what Trump is trying to do with this big, beautiful bill who might actually agree with what Musk is saying. because the, I mean, I'm going to stop calling it the big beautiful bill because I sound ridiculous, but essentially it is a massive, massive increase of the deficit up to 5 trillion. Now this bill would bring it up by 3 trillion. So there are a lot of fiscal hawks that think they don't want to see America going into debt and they have a very innately conservative opposition to what Trump is trying to do. And then there are lots of people, particularly on the Democrat side, I guess, although some Republicans as well saying this is going to massively hurt the poorest in America it's tax cuts for the wealthy but it would kill for many people Medicaid i.e exactly the kind of welfare discussion we've been having here in Britain by making 17 million people worse off you know on the poverty line because it would be taking away their ability to get health care and benefits.

4:48Jon Sopel:Look, in terms of the battle between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the Henry Kissinger quote about the Iran-Iraq war comes to mind, which is it's a shame both sides can't lose, because frankly, you know, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have both been, you know, the world's most powerful man against the world's richest man. It's a pretty unedifying spectacle. But it is remarkable, Emily, just to think that what Donald Trump is doing, I mean, it's Robin Hood in reverse, isn't it? I mean, Robin Hood in reverse in that it's tax cuts for the wealthiest and welfare cuts for the poorest to pay for it. And potentially, though, the really ruinous part, and it's not that Elon Musk is concerned about those who will be left particularly vulnerable.

5:34Jon Sopel:It's because of the rise in the deficit and the consequence that could have for the US economy, where we saw what happened in Britain with unfunded tax cuts under Liz Truss and the bond markets taking fright. Will this be the latest moment that the bond markets look at US treasuries, look at the debt profile and say this is unsustainable? And that is the economic argument that Musk is making over the big, beautiful bill. Yeah. And, you know, as we talked, the dollar is pretty weak at the moment. The US economy, whether as a result of what people think is coming at them in terms of the tariffs, whatever, is looking pretty weak.

6:12Now, you could say that's part of the whole Trump strategy longer term to sort of weaken the US dollar, to make manufacturing come back, reshore, all that kind of stuff. But at the moment, it doesn't point to an economy that's going in the right direction. And what is always unmissable is how personal these rows get. So Trump has taken to Truth Social and he said, no more rocket launches, satellites or electric car production and our country would save a fortune, block caps. Perhaps we should have Doge take a good, hard look at this. Big money to be saved. In other words, he's setting his dogs on Elon Musk and all his businesses.

6:50So everything that Musk used to get as a subsidy. So every bit of federal money that was coming Musk's way now sounds like it's going to dry up. He's going to be Doge. He's going to have his, you know, the packs put on him in the same way that he did on bits of federal government.

7:05Jon Sopel:Yeah. The thing that's so interesting and the reason that I argued originally, that I thought that there wouldn't be a big falling out between Trump and Musk, is that they each wanted what the other had. Trump wanted the access and the positive coverage on X, and Musk had control of the algorithm and was able to shape that. And Musk wanted the government contracts from NASA and others for SpaceX and other things. And yeah, and wanted the EV subsidies, the EV mandate, electric vehicle mandate, which would help Tesla. now the ev mandate is going if donald trump starts pulling the plug on spacex contracts and the like that does start to become serious and you know elon musk's dad reflected in an interview i think when he was in russia that in a battle between the world's richest man and the world's most powerful man the world's most powerful man wins and so you know musk needs to probably needs to a little bit careful.

8:03Jon Sopel:But if this threat comes true, that he's going to set up a rival political party to the Republicans to take them on over their spending, and it becomes a danger and a threat to the Republican Party. And that is something that I would imagine. There'll be a good many senators and even more congressmen and women who, frightened though they are of Donald Trump, are also frightened about the financial firepower that Elon Musk can bring to bear to their political careers. Yeah, I mean, I have to say, politics is nothing if not entertaining when it gets to this level of personal abuse. Elon Musk is calling Trump's Republicans the Porky Pig Party, the Porky Pig Party, because essentially he has donated, what, 300 million in the past to the Republicans in the 2024 election.

8:55And if he decided to basically sniper off everyone that voted for the bill he could throw a lot of money at whoever was primering them now musk doesn't always find electoral success i think it's fair to say he threw a lot of money at a wisconsin election for the wisconsin supreme court earlier this year and he went there and did a lot of jumpy up and down with a black maga cap and it didn't work right you know all that money to nothing and at that point i think musk thought he was going to sort of pull away from the campaign financing side of his business and sort of go back to cars and rockets.

9:35But if he does, I guess the question is, is that going to be enough to frighten those who do want to support the bill into not supporting the bill? And essentially, I mean, let's be honest, you've got two cult leaders here fighting out like some more eyes. You've got the MAGA cult lot, who basically, I'm going to guess, many of whom have not read the thousand pages, right? The thousand pages of Bill, which is undergoing changes all the time.

10:11Jon Sopel:Do you think Donald Trump has read the thousand pages of Bill? I mean, you have to wonder, right? But you've got people in the Republican Party who already feel slightly concerned by what is going on. Tom Tillis, who's a senator who's now said, I'm not going to stand again. I cannot in all conscience go back to my people, you know, my constituents and say we're going to cut Medicaid. He's decided that he'll vote against the bill and he is then going to essentially not run, you know, the midterms next year. And then you've got these curious people who inhabit a very odd sort of grey territory in the Republican Party.

10:47Lisa Murkowski, who's the Alaska senator, and Susan Collins of Maine, who both look as if they're sort of struggling to find the spine to stand up to Trump, but never quite do. So Murkowski is one of those senators that is saying, oh, we need an opt out for my state of Alaska and then I can sign it. Susan Collins is looking for her own sort of fudge. And the reason why I'm naming individuals is because, frankly, it comes down to a wafer thin majority of three. So it only takes three non-votes for Trump to lose this bill. And you have to wonder, you know, you have to wonder if Musk is posing enough of a risk to make people say, OK, I don't feel able to vote for it.

11:32Or if he's actually going to push people into the Trump camp and say, well, if I've got Musk on the other side, I'm going full on MAGA.

11:38Jon Sopel:with these bills and i think the porky pig comment is a reference to pork barrel politics as opposed to trump which is you know we don't really have it in the same way in the uk but i mean it's like you know we'll if if you get behind me on this piece of legislation we'll make sure that you get a dual carriageway around the town that has long been campaigning you'll get a hospital you'll get a hospital you'll get this you'll get your local projects and that's the old pork barrel politics. You promise people a little bit of pork for your own district and then you'll be able to go away happy. And that is the bribing process or cajoling process of American politics writ large.

12:18Jon Sopel:And, you know, it's obvious that that is what Trump and his acolytes, his legislative affairs team are doing in Congress right now to try and win over all these people who instinctively think this is a crazy idea, but are too terrified to go up against Donald Trump. And you're right. The numbers are wafer thin in the Senate. But I mean, again and again, you know, how many people have stood up to Trump when it's come to it? You know, you go back to the first term when he was trying to repeal Obamacare and John McCain was the person who in the vote, the late John McCain, who put his thumbs down and said, I'm not going to vote for this.

12:54Jon Sopel:And Trump was seething and scathing and really went after McCain as a result of it. So, you know, if you vote against Trump, the dogs of hell are going to be unleashed upon you and it's going to be unpleasant. Yeah. And I guess the trouble with the Musk position is I think he always, you know, as a businessman and as a sort of wannabe politician, he's always been on the fiscal hawk side. Right. He doesn't like the deficit. But when he came into Doge promising to find two trillion dollars worth of cuts, he couldn't. You know, we had Michael Lewis on recently, who's basically been inside federal government, studying the people that are working there, writing about it for his book, Who Is Government?

13:34And actually, what he says is Musk came in and he made all the cuts in the wrong places. He cut the newest people in because he could. He cut the people who were at the cutting edge of sort of technology and sort of new ways of thinking. He left all the stuff that was untouchable. Musk didn't find the savings that he wanted to find. So he kept bringing down what he was aiming for, the two trillion dollars worth of cuts to I think he ended up with 600. You know, a lot of jobs went, but not a lot of money was saved, which is the opposite, really, of what you're trying to do.

14:08Jon Sopel:The madness that's now happening in Washington is that a lot of these people are out of necessity being rehired by government. So they then get a payoff. They've had a payoff to piss off and go and kind of tend the garden. And now they're getting extra money to go back to do the jobs they were originally doing. And so there are areas of public life where Doge is costing money. It's not saving money. It's costing money because of the way that Elon Musk has gone about it. So you've got these two less than ideal role models to choose between in Donald Trump and Elon Musk. So do you think, let's just put this out there, is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80 percent in the middle, says the richest man in the world?

14:55I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Is he going to do that? Because Trump basically said there'll be all hell to pay. And last time he said that, he bombed Iran.

15:05Jon Sopel:no i i think that you know we look at our politics in the uk and you look at the most recent kind of council and mayoral elections and in britain it felt like we were in five-party politics in wales and scotland it felt like you were in six-party politics america still remains stubbornly democrat or republican we've seen third-party candidates who've never really stood a chance of winning power but stop other people gaining power and you look at the ross Perots in history or others who've had that effect. Nader. I mean, most sort of critically, I'd say, in the 2000 election, right? A lot of Democrats who went for somebody who was very progressive on the left, then got blamed by the Gore people for losing him the election.

15:47Exactly.

15:48Jon Sopel:So they have a power to cut a negative power. Whether you could create a third party that would take power is another matter altogether. But look, Musk has money. And in America, We all know money talks. I mean, I do think just as a last thought, this raises a really interesting back to your original point, which was we are at this nexus of trying to work out whether executive office or pure wealth is the stronger force in American politics right now. And if you had to bet on it, I think you'd probably say that Trump as president is more powerful than Musk as the richest man. But the fact that we're even debating that suggests somewhere along the lines that we've now entered an era where actually wealth doesn't have to heed politics anymore.

16:42Wealth can do its own thing. Whoever is in charge, even if Donald Trump is the most powerful person in the world, could he be floored by more money?

16:51Jon Sopel:I mean, the original idea of of the people for the people and what you've got in America today is a pissing contest between the richest and the most powerful. It has very little to do with the founding father's idea of of the people and for the people. In a moment, we'll be asking if that whole broken Britain narrative is going to define our next election. Is it fair? Is it being confected? And if so, what should those in power actually do?

17:30Jon Sopel:This is The News Agents. So this morning, Keir Starmer sat down with his cabinet colleagues and gave a state of the nation kind of address to them about how well they had done over the past year, how much better things had become, the achievements, the trade deals, the way that certain measures had been well received. And of course, this comes against the backdrop where you think, well, hang on, isn't there a major crisis going on with Keir Starmer's own authority at the moment because of the welfare bill? And a lot of noises off from all sorts of commentators where you say, is Britain going in the right direction?

18:10Jon Sopel:No. Is Britain broken? Yes. What is wrong with this country? Is it going to the dogs? Yes. People seem to be unhappy. And it's being harnessed by a lot of groups on the right of British politics who seem to want to suggest that Britain has somehow become broken. And I guess the question is, is this real or confected? And whether it real or confected, what does Starmer do about it if it's representing a real threat to him? Yeah, I mean, I think we should look at some of the facts, which is the level of dissatisfaction that a lot of people genuinely have in the country at the moment. For a lot of people, Britain does feel broken.

18:47You know, more in common, the polling experts said that 71 % of voters they spoke to feel like things are getting worse in the UK, only 10 % believing that things are getting better. so that maybe is your backdrop to why this is such an easy narrative for those who want power who are not in power to kind of get on the back of and I think there's clearly a lot of deep unease and deep frustration with many people's lives you know they are looking at the highest tax burden they're looking at generational unfairness they're looking at a sense that they cannot save whatever they are doing however many hours they're working whatever jobs they're taking on It doesn't seem to be actually going into the bank at all.

19:30And there was a piece, maybe I'm going to say a lesser spotted piece in The Times last week from Boris Johnson's former adviser, Munira Mirza. And it was called Fix Britain. And it's the launch of a, I don't know what you'd call it, maybe a think tank or maybe a sort of body, which has just been launched, which claims that a combination of the wrong priorities, insufficient bandwidth, hostile scrutiny has paralysed successive governments. and sap the confidence of the public. And it's basically a how-to-govern idea. Maybe it has something of Project 25 to it. Maybe it has something of let's get Whitehall out of government and start seeing what political parties are doing.

20:11But I think it wants to provide a blueprint, very possibly for an incoming reform government, for an idea of what needs to be done. Now, you've got two things going on at the same time. You've got deep levels of public dissatisfaction, for all the things we talked about, you know, whether it's the kind of trains not working on time, whether it's people feeling that they can't get ahead, they can't save, their kids aren't going to be better off than they are, they can't afford houses. And then you've got another narrative, which is, I think, a bit bleaker, a bit darker, which looks into what has become of London, what has become of England.

20:49Has it stopped being the England that we all loved? What is Englishness? There is a debate going on in some quarters about whether Rishi Sunak as a brown-skinned man could be considered as English as a white-skinned man and that takes you into a whole different level of declinist Britain in terms of a narrative.

21:12Jon Sopel:Yeah, declinism. This is the new thing that is being spoken about as not just a statement of apparent fact, we are in decline, the health service, you know, it's harder to get an appointment to see your GP, the trains aren't running on time, as you suggested, or the roads are crumbling, or my kids' school, there are problems there, whatever it happens to be. Everyone's got an answer to, like, isn't Britain crap? Yes, I can't get a signal. Yes, the trains don't run. But this is a whole different level. This is a whole kind of creepy xenophobia, which is like, are you thinking what I'm thinking?

21:44Is it their fault? You know, who can we blame?

21:47Jon Sopel:And it feels to me that looking at some of these groups that are trying to make this argument, We had a jokey outro on this on the podcast yesterday about how Richard Tice from reform had kind of said, oh, what's wrong with Britain? There are no more line judges at Wimbledon as if that was somehow part of it. And I kind of say, oh, Maitlis, you're being ridiculous, saying this is more serious than that. And the more I thought about it last night, the more I thought, actually, you know, this is a strategy that declinism is not just an observation of the state of Britain. It's part of an ideology to try and convince people that Britain is in decline and therefore is in need of rescuing.

22:23Jon Sopel:And so, as you said, Munira Mirza has got fixed Britain. Rupert Lowe, one time of reform, but now squabbled out of the party, is setting up Restore Britain. Ben Habib, who was also part of reform, has set up Advance UK. And so there are all these different groups on the right of British politics that seem to be kind of clustering around this idea of the inevitable declinism of Britain and that only they can fix it. To explore this a little bit further, we're joined by the MP Chris Curtis. He's the MP for Milton Keynes. He is a former YouGov pollster. So, Chris, I know you have a lot of hats in terms of the Labour groups you've been part of and the sort of alliances you've made.

23:03but just from your sort of polling days i don't know how much that has stayed with you but when we talk and when we set out these ideas of people feeling worse now than they did do you recognize that i mean the more in common number is 71 percent of britons say that they're feeling