For Trump and Musk, breaking up wasn’t all that hard

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It took less than five months, but Elon Musk has repealed a more-than-half-century-old political science principle established by the singer Neil Sedaka. Mr. Musk has shown that “breaking up is hard to do” – the title of the crooner’s most famous song – doesn’t apply in Donald Trump’s Washington.

Actually, in the case of Mr. Musk and his patron Mr. Trump – the power balance between the two billionaires was never quite clear – breaking up wasn’t that hard at all.

It took the political furor caused by a chainsaw (the unfortunate Musk metaphor for his government cuts); resentment from Republican lawmakers (who faced repeated grief at home from constituents enraged by Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency); stunning technological failures (three botched Space X missions, including a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”); cratering economic prospects (the sales backlash against Tesla); and one phrase even more evocative than the Sedaka song lyric (the application of a searing characterization to the spending bill on Capitol Hill that Mr. Trump dearly wants).

The American capital didn’t need a thesaurus to understand that “disgusting abomination” – Mr. Musk’s description of the legislation – and “big, beautiful” – Mr. Trump’s description of the measure – were not synonyms.

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“Elon and I had a great relationship,” Mr. Trump said in the White House Thursday. “I don’t know if we will anymore.” Mr. Trump averred that he was “very disappointed” in his onetime friend.

Mr. Musk then accused Mr. Trump of “ingratitude,” saying in an X post, “Without me, Trump would have lost the election.”

Now that the two men are on the outs – actually it is Mr. Musk who is out – there is even greater scrutiny of the onetime BFF relationship between the man known as POTUS and the one who named his social-media company X and named his child X Æ A-Xii. Much of that scrutiny comes under the subcategory of schadenfreude.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, for example, did not appreciate Mr. Musk’s threat to “fire all politicians who betrayed the American people,” a task ordinarily applied to voters and not to a presidential appointee with the breezy air of a gadfly and the wardrobe of an undergraduate.

In many ways the bromance between the real-estate-and-casino billionaire and the tech billionaire was as unstable as nitrous oxide, and as doomed as dinosaurs. Theirs was a relationship marked by a toxic mix of wealth and power – they had the former, they yearned for the latter – that was stirred by ample servings of ambition and resentment. As Barack Obama liked to say, the United States can have only one president at a time, and it wasn’t Mr. Musk.

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In the long history of presidential friendships, the Trump-Musk relationship stands out as perhaps the most peculiar, and the most problematic.

The businessman Mark Hanna helped politician William McKinley win the White House in 1896 and later, as a senator, was the president’s closest adviser. Harry Truman is famous for having said that “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,” but his friend and onetime business partner Eddie Jacobson prevailed on the 33rd president to make the U.S. the first country to recognize Israel. George H.W. Bush named his longtime friend and tennis doubles partner James A. Baker Secretary of State, and the two managed fall of Soviet communism and the 1991 Gulf War.

In his tumultuous White House years, Bill Clinton leaned on his Hot Springs, Ar., friends. “Even in the White House, it was like we were back home,” Carolyn Staley, a high school classmate who lived next door to the Clintons, recalled in an interview Thursday. “That was because none of us ever asked Bill for anything.”

Such relationships are rare, and indeed presidents often are drawn to other presidents (and in the case of Mr. Bush, to other world leaders, especially Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney) for companionship. Mr. Bush and his onetime rival and successor, Mr. Clinton, became so close that George W. Bush joked that Mr. Clinton had assumed the role of the Bush family’s first-born child.

Those links are sometimes called the Presidents’ Club, but Mr. Trump does not have a gift for friendship – he is the personification of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s description of the United States as having “no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”

Moreover, Mr. Trump is not regarded as – here is a word thrown around golf links like the ones the President owns – clubbable. At least one of his presidential predecessors examined how to keep him from his funeral, only to be surprised to learn that the final word on such questions went to the Pentagon, not to the preferences of the president or the presidential family, which in this case was adamant but overruled.

There is no indication that either Mr. Trump or Mr. Musk believes that, in one of the lines from the Sedaka song, “Instead of breaking up I wish that we were making up again.” If it is true that, in a phrase some etymologists believe has roots in the third century BC, a friend in need is a friend indeed – this was a friendship that the two no longer needed. Nor, it might be added, did the country.