CNN panelists clashed over how long Donald Trump and his seeming co-president Elon Musk would remain in good graces, but they agreed that JD Vance had been sidelined after his election as vice president.
The pair appeared Tuesday night in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, who reacted to their apparent chumminess by comparing them to "two brothers," but conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg predicted that Trump's MAGA base would force a crackup between the president and his billionaire benefactor.
"Elon Musk is just making this stuff up as he goes along, right, and it's sort of it's a little, [as] someone was saying, comparing it to the search for WMD in Iraq, right?" Goldberg said. "He's constantly looking for [fraud] and then declaring he's found something, and it turns out he didn't find what he's declared."
For example, as host Jim Sciutto pointed out, the tech billionaire claimed he found millions of Social Security recipients who are 150 years old after misreading the database, which Trump has picked up and repeated, but Goldberg predicted that voters would eventually realize Musk has no expertise about government.
ALSO READ: MAGA is leading 'the dumbest imperial collapse in history': analysis
"My point is," Goldberg continued, "is that right now, anybody who knows anything about public policy can see where he's getting stuff wrong, and eventually that will become manifest outside ... eventually they're going to start doing stuff that, like normal people will realize is just wrong, and it will take the veneer of expertise off of all this. At the same time, there is a serious rift on the MAGA right. Steve Bannon, who I am not a fan of, wants a New Deal-style big welfare state kind of government. He's anti-libertarian, he's sort of nativist, and he sees Musk as basically a globalist libertarian, and those two things are hard to reconcile, and every day Bannon is saying more and more, this guy is a fraud and all that kind of stuff. Those tensions are eventually going to play out within Trump's coalition."
"I disagree," interjected New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro, as Sciutto read a quote from Bannon calling Musk a "parasitic illegal immigrant."
"I just don't think Bannon has the influence on this White House," Garcia-Navarro continued. "I mean, what we just saw, there is president Trump and his billionaire backer. It was very touching, you know, they seem absolutely to have a sort of father-son relationship or couple or something. I mean, if I were Vance, I would be slightly concerned. This is a very close relationship. I don't think that we are seeing the Bannon wing of the party ascendant."
Goldberg found a point to agree with there.
"I agree that, first of all, if I were Vance, I'd be day drinking at this point," Goldberg said. "But there's going to come a moment where the Musk-Trump show hits the point of diminishing returns. They're going to have some embarrassment. I don't know if it's – I don't know, if it's going to be fair or unfair, plane falling out of the sky, whatever – and at that moment you're going to see, I think, a section of the MAGA right, saying that we backed the wrong horse with this guy, can we be done with it?"
Watch the video below or at this link.