"Fuck You": Entire Trump Team Hated Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have been the final nail in the coffin for the tech billionaire’s four-month stint in the White House, but it came after months of bubbling frustration at Musk’s “chain-saw” approach to dismantling the federal government.

Musk and Bessent exploded at each other in April when Musk attempted to force through his pick to lead the IRS—Gary Shapley—behind Bessent’s back. (Musk eventually lost this battle—Shapley lasted less than 72 hours before Bessent tapped Michael Faulkender to replace him.)

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing.

“The fight had started outside the Oval Office; it continued past the Roosevelt Room and toward the chief of staff’s office, and then barreled around the corner to the national security adviser’s warren,” The Atlantic reported Wednesday.

But the gossip-worthy feud was just one of many that occurred between Musk and Trumpworld 2.0’s prominent members.

In March, Musk walked into what he understood to be an ambush, facing heated backlash from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Donald Trump had arranged the volatile meeting: “Bring them all in here, and we’ll have at it,” Trump said, according to The Atlantic. The advisers were frustrated with what they felt was Musk overstepping into their agencies.

Musk’s tenure wasn’t a total failure, according to former federal employees. He had managed to force out some of the federal workforce and shutter agencies (while “traumatizing the employees who remain,” The Atlantic reported). But ultimately, his Department of Government Efficiency’s Silicon Valley, hacking-and-slashing approach to reshaping the government failed to make bureaucracy more efficient. And some of his haphazardly introduced policies, such as requiring federal employees to submit weekly bullet-pointed progress reports, have quietly fallen by the wayside.

“He had some missteps in all of these agencies, which would have been fine because everyone acknowledges that when you’re moving fast and breaking things, not everything is going to go right. But it’s different when you do that and you don’t even have the buy-in of the agency you’re setting on fire,” one outside Trump adviser told The Atlantic.

Another adviser was a little more blunt. “How many people were fired because they didn’t send in their three things a week or whatever the fuck it was?” the adviser said anonymously. “I think that everyone is ready to move on from this part of the administration.”

And even those still on Musk’s side now see that a different approach would have been more effective at advancing the administration’s goals.

“In retrospect,” Matt Calkins, the CEO of Appian, a Virginia-based company that provides software for the federal government, told The Atlantic, “it wasn’t nearly as much as we needed, and we probably didn’t need the chain saw. We needed the chisel.”

Musk’s unceremonious exit from government followed widespread reports that several senior Trump officials practically hated the tech billionaire, finding him abrasive, unfunny, and pompous—with some describing Musk as the “most irritating person” they’d “ever had to deal with.”

“I have been in the same room with Elon, and he always tries to be funny. And he’s not funny. Like, at all,” a senior Trump official told Rolling Stone last month. “He makes these jokes and little asides and smiles and then looks almost hurt if you don’t lap up his humor. I keep using the word ‘annoying’; a lot of people who have to deal with him do. But the word doesn’t do the situation justice. Elon just thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room and acts like it, even when it’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Donald Trump’s many deals during his trip to the Middle East last week have rankled one of his closest allies on the right.

Tucker Carlson called out the president’s “corruption” on his podcast Tuesday while speaking with his guest on the program, fellow right-wing influencer Shawn Ryan. The pair were discussing their thoughts on the Trump administration, and while Ryan was happy with certain things from the president, such as his immigration crackdown and his war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, Trump’s Middle East trip gave him pause.

“F--- it, I’m gonna get blasted for this,” Ryan said, “but I see all these negotiations going on in the Middle East, and then I don’t know when these buildings were approved or when these deals got done, but then I also see like, ‘Oh, there’s a brand-new hotel going up in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And another one going up in Doha.’”

“I’m like, ‘Did these just get done also with the deals that just happened over there, or was this earlier?’” Ryan continued, before telling Carlson, “You would probably know.”

Carlson denied knowing about Trump’s dealings, and Ryan said he thought the pundit was “a lot more on the inside than I am,” adding about Trump’s deals, “That stuff kind of worries me.”

“Well, it seems like corruption, yeah,” Carlson said.

It’s surprising to see Carlson offering criticism of the president, considering how close he is to Trump. He even spoke at a Trump campaign rally in late October, just days before the election.

Trump’s Middle East trip came with several announcements from his businesses in the region, as well as a $2 billion investment in his family’s cryptocurrency business from a firm backed by the United Arab Emirates government.

There was “mayhem” outside an immigration court in Phoenix Tuesday, as federal agents arrested several people, including one person whose case had just been dismissed.

Immigration attorney Issac Ortega told the Arizona Mirror that several masked agents, who refused to identify themselves as officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arrested his client after his first immigration hearing.

Ortega’s client, a Venezuelan man in his mid-twenties who had entered the United States last fall using the CBP One app, had been told during his hearing that ICE had agreed to close his immigration case. Shortly after, federal agents moved to detain him and others outside the courthouse. Similar to other immigration arrests, the agents provided no identification or warrant.

Ortega told the Mirror that he believes ICE agreed to close his client’s case so that the Trump administration could more easily expedite his deportation. The sick part is, the Trump administration appears to be using compliance with the law to trap immigrants it wishes to deport.

“They always want people to enter the right way, to follow the process, but how are people supposed to do that when the rules are getting changed?” Ortega said.

Several people were swept up in the arrests Tuesday in a scene one attorney described to Ortega as “mayhem.” But that wasn’t the only city that saw mass arrests at courthouses.

Lindsay Toczylowski, the president and co-founder of Immigration Defenders, posted on X that there had been similar reports of people being detained after having their cases dismissed at immigration courtrooms across Los Angeles. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, posted that he’d heard similar stories from San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Seattle, suggesting the arrests in Phoenix were part of a larger sweep.

ICE has not posted a press release about the arrests on its website. These latest arrests represent a growing trend of immigration enforcement at courthouses, considered to be protected areas where ICE has not previously pursued arrests. New Trump administration policy has empowered immigration officers to detain individuals at these locations, as well as schools and places of worship.

Donald Trump argued with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa Wednesday about whether there was a so-called “white genocide” in the latter’s own country.

During a press conference in the Oval Office, Trump was asked by one reporter, “What would it take for you to be convinced that there is no white genocide in South Africa?” 

Earlier this month, the U.S. president carved out an exception in his refugee ban to allow Afrikaners, white descendants of mainly Dutch colonizers in South Africa, to immigrate to the U.S., claiming that they were facing a “genocide.” 

Ramaphosa quickly stepped in. “Well, I can answer that for the president. It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans, some of whom are his good friends like those who are here,” he said.   

“It will take President Trump listening to them. I’m not going to be repeating what I’ve been saying,” Ramaphosa continued. “I would say that if there was Afrikaaner farmer genocide, I can bet you, these three gentlemen would not be here, including my Minister of Agriculture. He would not be with me. So, it’ll take him, President Trump listening to their stories, their perspective.”

“We have thousands of stories talking about it, and we have documentaries, we have news stories,” Trump replied, before turning the lights down to play a long clip from an unspecified documentary, which included a clip of the leader of the South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters party chanting, “Kill the Boers.” As the video played, Ramaphosa looked increasingly uncomfortable. 

After a long moment, Trump began narrating, “Now, this is very bad, these are burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers.”

“It’s a terrible site, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump continued. 

“Have they told you where that is, Mr. President?” Ramaphosa asked. “I’d like to know where that is, because this I’ve never seen.”

“It’s in South Africa,” Trump shrugged. 

“We need to find out,” Ramaphosa replied. 

Trump was also asked what he hoped Ramaphosa would do about the violence against Afrikaners. 

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Trump said holding print-outs of several articles. “Look these are articles over the last few days. Death, of… people. Death, death, death, horrible death. Death. I don’t know.” 

Trump continued to lament the deaths of white Afrikaners. “If this were the other way around it would be the biggest story. Now, I will say, apartheid—terrible,” Trump said. “That was the biggest story, that was reported all the time. This is sort of the opposite of apartheid.”

Ramaphosa invited John Henry Steenhuisen, South Africa’s minister of Agriculture who is white and from an opposition party, to address Trump’s claims. Steenhuisen admitted that the country had a “rural safety problem” that it was working to address. 

Steenhuisen also responded to the documentary clip Trump had shown. “The two individuals in that video that you’ve seen are both leaders of opposition minority parties in South Africa,” he said. 

“Now the reason that my party, the Democratic Alliance, which has been an opposition party for over 30 years, chose to join hands with Mr. Ramaphosa’s party was precisely to keep those people out of power. We cannot have those people sitting in the union buildings, making those decisions,” said Steenhuisen.