The Big Beautiful Breakup

Our political culture is sinking deeper into chaos

We don’t want to say we told you so, but we told you so.

JEP’s annual list of predictions, which we posted in December, included this item about how DOGE would fare in the harsh, cold winds of Washington.

DOGE — Order Out of Chaos: The Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of government efficiency will officially storm the windmills of the empire sometime next month and immediately create chaos and confusion. At first, they will rely on crowd-sourcing solutions to trim the reach and cost of government, which will turn into a mosh pit of cheer-leading and resistance. There will be mistakes. By year-end, Elon and Vivek will trim their wicks a little and get serious, nominally achieving some $1 trillion in cuts and a 20 percent reduction in regulatory overhang. Alert: Elon runs the risk of taking too much oxygen away from Trump and being banished from the Oval; this will test his self-restraint.

First of all, we completely whiffed on Vivek. Remember him? Vivek Ramaswamy was Elon Musk’s wingman when DOGE was launched last year, but faded away as quickly as he rose. He’s busy running for governor of Ohio right now. We also whiffed on predicting what the results of the DOGE exercise would be. Elon broke his pick and was barely able to notch cuts of $16 billion to $175 billion, depending on who you believe; at any rate, a far cry from $1 trillion. We stand by the rest of our prediction, including the ending coda.

Did Elon jump, or was he pushed? Who knows. What we do know is that we’re witnessing one of the most spectacular celebrity breakups since Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, in which self-restraint is the first casualty.

All seemed well in the Oval last week when Trump hosted an impromptu retirement ceremony for the Dogefather, handing him a Golden Key to the White House and praising him as “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced.” But there was some foreshadowing: Elon seemed very twitchy (too much Adderall?) and the black eye, in hindsight, seemed to signal what was to come.

Days later, Musk was calling the Big Beautiful Bill an “abomination” and the gloves were off. It wasn’t long before Elon slagged Trump as a bold-faced name in the Epstein files. It’s only a matter of time until Trump posts accusations of Elon overdosing on ketamine and mushrooms or makes reference to his industrial-scale harem out there in Texas. Or maybe just tells Tom Homan to deport him.

Following the feud on social media has become one of the greatest political soap operas of our time, certainly since the Blue Dress — or maybe even since the Hamilton-Burr feud. You remember that one, when founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr clashed over the role of the federal government, resulting in a duel at dawn with Burr slaying Hamilton.

The Trump-Musk duel is virtual now, playing out in hyperimaginative images on X and other platforms.

Of course, none of this is good for the Republicans. It’s hard to say where all the slung mud will end up. Scott Jennings, the happy conservative warrior on CNN, captured it best when he was asked what Republicans thought of the whole affair. He picked up a wastebasket and put his head in it. Paul Begala couldn’t stop laughing.

Elon, never one to shy away from lofty ambitions, is now suggesting he may start a third party in response to the balagan that is Washington right now. It’s another quixotic idea; Polymarkets currently gives it only a 20 percent chance of reality by the end of the year.

All of this is entertaining, of course, but also sad. Our political culture is broken right now. In the House, Republicans are now expressing reservations about the Big Beautiful Bill, saying they didn’t know everything that was in it. Isn’t that their job? In the Senate, deficit warrior Ron Johnson is like a lonely lighthouse out on a rocky point. The President of the United States is still hawking $100,000 watches on Fox and pumping meme coins to tech bros at lavish Mar-a-Lago dinners. Eric Swalwell’s idea of political commentary is eating a bag of Taco Bell at his desk. Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s former press secretary and chief gaslighter, is making a sordid cash-grab with a new book in which she’s claiming to have an answer to our broken politics. Please. Stop. It. All of this spectacle, grandstanding and posturing — all of this bullshit — is crowding out the kind of sober, authentic dialogue we need right now in the public arena.

This is not to say that we can’t get back there at some point. But the political effluvia is rising faster than sea levels right now and it’s hard to see how we can roll it back anytime soon. While the political class wallows in it, business (i.e. the real economy) is struggling to navigate it and the public is becoming more disengaged and cynical by the minute. My long view is that we’re on the brink of a transformative moment in America catalyzed by a fusion of technology, imagination and common sense, if only we can get through this very messy inflection point. We’re still on the wrong end of the Churchill dictum about America — we can always be counted on to do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else.

Let’s hope we run out of things to try sometime soon.