It was always going to end this way for two megalomaniacs devoted to fame, money and the far right
“Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,” Donald Trump observed in the Oval Office on Thursday. “They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”
The US president was referring to the war between Russia and Ukraine but could just as easily have been talking about himself. On Thursday, to the surprise of no one, Trump’s bromance with the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk exploded in a very public feud.
While the president urged his supporters to “fight, fight, fight” last summer after he survived an assassination attempt, now that mantra is evocative of children on a school playground urging Trump and Musk to go at each other. For political nerds this is like Alien v Predator, Batman v Superman and King Kong v Godzilla rolled into one.
It was always going to end this way for two megalomaniacs devoted to fame, money and the far right, neither of whom is unaccustomed to a messy divorce.
