Donald Trump is calling friends to gripe about Elon Musk and has even bragged that he planted a dynamite report against his ally-turned-nemesis, the president’s biographer said Thursday.
Writer Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast that the billionaire has really got under Trump’s skin since the two had a public fallout following Musk’s opposition to Trump’s budget megabill.
“I was tracking some Trump phone calls on Monday night,” Wolff told the Beast in a podcast.
“And it’s sort of worth explaining here that over a long period of time, I’ve gotten to know and cultivated a lot of people who Trump regularly speaks to.
“Trump speaks to them, and then they speak to other people. Whoever he calls, he says the same thing to everybody. So you know exactly what is on his mind.”
And during those calls, the president suggested he was behind a Times report in May that claimed Musk was using multiple drugs — including ketamine, Adderall, ecstasy and mushrooms — throughout Trump’s campaign to be president. The report was dismissed as fiction by Musk.
“He’s like, calling people to say, ‘Do you think Elon is crazy?’” Wolff told the Beast.
“In one of these phone calls—many of them—he was on about, you know, how many drugs he takes. ‘He takes drugs all the time. You know that, don’t you? You know, The New York Times wrote about it. They said, he takes drugs.’”
He then admitted, “‘Actually, we dropped a dime to The New York Times ... on Elon’s drug taking,” Wolff said.
The White House did not return calls for comment from the Beast.
Musk has threatened to primary Republicans who back Trump’s bill, and has even suggested forming a third political party. Trump, on his part, has suggested looking into deporting the South African and cutting government subsidies to his businesses.
