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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.

Musk went nuclear against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", calling it a "disgusting abomination". In response, the White House is "very disappointed" in the criticism. In other words, they're probably saying "fuck you, Elon" behind closed doors. Trump had previously been anomalously deferential to Musk, but if you read between the lines you could see there was trouble in paradise. Musk feuded with other members of the administration and Trump didn't back him up. Musk was causing enough chaos that he was starting to be seen as a political liability, and so Musk was somewhat gently pushed out of his role. People like Hanania who claimed the bromance would last have been proven incorrect, at least on this point.

Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.

It's worse now, He has explicitly said that the republicans have shown him ingratitude despite him having helped Trump win the elections.

He spent close to 180 million usd on the Trump campaign which might hbe the single highest donation by a single donor in an election.

Trumps second term has been retarded. Having literal terrorists like Royer, deporting people for no reason whilst failing to contain real immigration woes and alienating his biggest donor who risked a lot makes me agree with Moldbug pre 2020 who called him a sellout instead of a sulla.

My biggest disappointment has been in how MAGA more broadly has just rolled over and accepted this foolishness. Punishing politicians after they're elected is hard, but MAGA did this to at least some extent when Trump + Elon said we need tons of Indian immigration back at the start of the year. But besides that, they've just held a competition to see who can do the most goofy mental gymnastics to claim Trump is actually doing 7D Chess. Tariff flip flops, egregious corruption, exploding the deficit, incompetence, buffoonery, etc.

Q people are salivating seeing the split. Trumps term can't be defended. Bannon is put there telling trump to threaten Musk by dismantling spacex live on air.

You have the most respected public founder, whose public image is pristine, instead of ensuring you leave a legacy, you choose to act like a woman. I've questioned the public story for musk's firm, regardless, even the most skeptical tin foil hat wearing Charles Johnson leader would find the split damming.

A quarter of a billion dollar, loss of revenue from being outed as a 90s liberal who isn't ok with South Africa's near faux anti white apartheid, all to get the guy you backed to publicly want to get you culled.

This isn't even a leftist spiral, leftism will remove its less radical people with time, cuck right is full of liberal rejects, orange man instead chooses to act like a woman. The India Pakistan intervention where he got refuted by both sides, visits to qatar. It's all so tiresome.

How do people here cope with Trump. Themotte unlike slatestarcodex has some balls, the people here probably voted for him over Kamala who would have been terrible too. I'm not sure anyone expected such pettiness on public display.