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- [00:00]
Andrew Egger
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- [00:17]
Will Sommer
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- [00:45]
Andrew Egger
Hi, this is Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. It was the cat fight heard round the world. It seems to be over Elon Musk hopping on Twitter bright and early this morning. A little too early, a little too late, some might say around 3am to say this. He regrets A few of the things he said about Donald Trump last week might have gone a little too far, perhaps with some of those accusations of potential pedophilia and things like that association with Jeffrey Epstein, insinuations that he had betrayed campaign promises about the big beautiful bill. He didn't say. Leaves it up to our imagination. He's backing off here to talk about it a little bit. Our conservative media correspondent Will Sommer. Will, how you doing today?
- [01:25]
Unnamed Correspondent
Good. I mean, Elon is, as you said. I mean, he's Tweeting at like 3am I assume this was really weighing on his soul, you know, and he just, he was up all night and he said, I just have to apologize.
- [01:37]
Andrew Egger
He's in, he's, he's at the, the Musk compound with all of his, you know, 58 children down there, wherever that is in Texas. He's tossing and turning. It's weighing on his conscience. He has to pop up and, and log on and unburden himself a little bit. What were you up to at 3am this morning, Will?
- [01:53]
Unnamed Correspondent
I have to say I was sleeping and I think noticeably less ketamine than allegedly may have been involved in this tweet. So, so, you know, it's interesting here. So this tweet, he says, you know, some of my tweets yesterday or last week about Trump went too far. Now, I think we assume that probably includes his allegation that Trump is covering up the Epstein files because he's in them. But he doesn't say that explicitly. Right. Like maybe, maybe he was just like, oh, I was a little harsh on him about the deficit. But, but the Epstein stuff still stands.
- [02:21]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, I mean, to my mind, the Epstein stuff is the only thing on which he does not have Trump absolutely dead to rights. Right. I mean, like, almost all that stuff that was just like, criticisms of the bill for not doing. Not following through on Trump's campaign promises about the deficit and all this. I mean, that stuff's all true. You know, Republicans are totally cucked on this issue of promising to rein in, you know, these runaway deficits that are supposedly so explosive. I think they are. I'm not saying supposedly they are. They're bad deficits. They should do something about them. But this bill doesn't. This bill moves pretty emphatically the opposite direction. But. But when he. When he started throwing around that Epstein stuff, I was like, has Elon jumped the shark a little bit? Like, what's. There are. Like, there's no such thing as, like, this. This giant treasure trove of unreleased Epstein files. It's this kind of mass hallucination on parts of the. Right. So. So while it was kind of fun to see it happen, it was also like, what. What's Elon up to here? Like, what. What is he doing other than just sort of lashing out?
- [03:15]
Unnamed Correspondent
Well, yeah, I mean, I think. I think we have to kind of put ourselves in the mindset of that world where we have to assume the Epstein client list does exist, even though it ob. When, as you said, I mean, that, you know, that was maybe a five or six hour stretch of that fighting. And when it initially started, oh, you know, he's saying Trump's feckless. Whatever. It's getting a little spicy. And then I saw the Musk tweet, as we all did, and I just thought, or, excuse me, the Epstein tweet. And I thought, whoa, okay. It's like he's pulled out a gun basically in the fight. You know, these guys are shoving each other. He's like, whoa. And so. And that, I think, for. For a lot of people was kind of aligned to far. On one hand, it's only going for kind of the nuclear option. And I think that was really sort of forced people to choose, like, do you support Elon or do you support Trump now? Pretty much everyone. And then Elon, I believe, also said Trump should resign and be impeached, or he supported Elon Ian Miles Chong, who's kind of a right wing figure, his call for that. So at that point, I think people like Cat Turd, the kind of prominent MAGA figure, he kind of led the charge. Like, all right, guys, we got to get off the sidelines. Here we got to support Trump because if it's just accepted that Trump is in the Epstein files, like, it's over for us, like, if that becomes like an acceptable topic of debate, like, reasonable people can disagree. And so I think that's where Elon's retreating now. I mean, it is at the same time, though, I mean, he's not saying it's untrue. He's not saying I lied or like, you know, saying I went too far. It's like, all right, so number one, did you, you know, falsely call Trump a pedophile? Or two, if you didn't, are you now just like, all right, I'm sorry, I beefed with the pedophile, I'm backing off?
- [04:49]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah, he's still an accused pedophile. Outstanding questions remain about that. But he's not so sure he wants him to resign or be.
- [04:57]
Unnamed Correspondent
It's just like kind of, it's a lot of drama for me to bring it up, so I'm just going to back off. I have. And then, I mean, I mean, the reality is that you could take it even further and say, you know, for my business interest, I need to stop acknowledging that this man is a pedophile, you know, from his point of view. And I mean, the, the other thing about the Epstein allegation that, like, I think pretty quickly undermined Elon is that we have all these videos of X. Elon's kid hanging out alone with Trump. And so on one hand, you know, I think a lot of the Trump supporters were quick to point out, okay, if Elon, this guy's a pedophile, what's he doing? You could go hang out with my kid, though, have this kind of like avuncular role with him. So I think Elon, you know, even from a, sort of, in terms of defending his argument, he got a little over his skis here, which he's recognizing now.
- [05:45]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the reaction to all of that because it was so funny. It's really, honestly just very funny. Last week when they were beefing to see all of these right wing influencers whose entire brand is just always punch, punch, punch, punch, punch. They don't hardly do anything other than that. That's the point of their, that's, that's their role in the ecosystem to, to, for them all to pivot very suddenly to. No, guys, it's okay. You can, you can work this out. Get on the phone, make peace. This is deeply uncomfortable for all of us. I assume there's A kind of mass sigh of relief over some of this stuff. Now, although guys like Cat Turd, at least the last I saw were like, you know, no, no forgiveness for Elon, you know, unpardonable sin, you know, that you can never come back from, from saying Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. Where are they at here?
- [06:39]
Unnamed Correspondent
So there is division. I mean, yeah, taking back to like the original fight. I mean, as you said, some of a lot of these kind of right wing media personalities who have reputations as like Trump knife fighters, they're going to do the dirty work that the President and his people, his associates in office can't do. Laura Loomer is going to dig up dirt on, on some judge's daughter or whatever. I mean, like, like they're really going to go for it. But then when Elon and Trump were fighting, there's a lot of like, oh, ha ha. Oh, those boys sure love to roughhouse. Like, you know, because they have interests on either side. You know, they get money from X. Elon can, you know, take them on a big trip or he could fund some project of theirs. On the other hand, like, you know, they can't get on the wrong side of Trump either. But, you know, now we're seeing, I think the initial reaction to this Elon thing is a lot of like, you know, I saw Guy Benson, you know, it's initially very muted because a lot of times the reality is these people will kind of at bet, you know, it's in their best interest to kind of avoid it because they don't want to be like, Elon eating shit. Welcome back, loser. You know, because they don't want to make him mad still. But so I saw like Guy Benson from town hall was saying Elon appears to be backing off of, you know, his earlier claims. Yeah, you think it's literally what he says. You know, I had to go over to the, the former, the Donald Page Patriots win for the forum there. And I think the reaction there was a lot of like, Elon is welcome back but at a reduced role or, you know, we have to kind of keep a lot more of an eye on him. You know, I, I would be remiss if I forgot to mention like the, the greatest take on this whole thing, which was, you know, during the initial spat when Jack Posovic, one of these right wing figures, came out and said, you know, this is simply a fallocentric dispute. This is how men fight. You know, I mean, he said, he said when he.
- [08:21]
Andrew Egger
Well, I was sitting here preparing to mention that exact tweet, because I totally agree. It was the funniest.
- [08:28]
Unnamed Correspondent
He said, like, these are men, you know, with their dicks out and they're fighting in a forward facing way, not a gyno sense. Like what? And I mean, look, I mean it's obviously iconic. I mean, it's one of the, the greatest posts ever. But, you know, people were losing their minds, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
- [08:46]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't, I don't know how, how Pizza Pizzagate Posobiec would parse this latest development. I haven't seen any recent tweets from.
- [08:56]
Unnamed Correspondent
Him about what's that doesn't seem so fallocentric.
- [08:58]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, I know, I know. What's the, what's the phallocentric move about, you know, 3:00am I'm sorry about all that, guys. Please, please don't target my companies. Please don't. You know, this is one of the major differences between, between Trump and Elon, right? Just as sort of posters. Elon is just letting it all hang out. But he also does have these sort of moments of like, you know, reevaluation where like we all do, right? I mean, everyone's kind of like, huh, did I say the right thing? Was that the sort of thing? And Trump is kind of like a unique, like sui generis figure in terms of just his superhuman ability never to do that about anything ever. Like he's never looked back over his shoulder a day in his life about anything as far as I can tell. Just like the, the real self confidence of that. I mean, that, that there's something fellow centric about, about that insane lunatic energy, right? Like, good, good, good, good, good for Donald Trump. A poster. A poster with no peer. Where do we go from here? I mean, like, like you said, you know, a lot of these guys, you know, just, just sort of in the Donald dot win, to whatever extent they, they control the discourse, they're like, all right, Elon's back, but he's on a leash. Donald Trump seems a little less inclined to, to really bring him back into the fold at all, at least so far.
- [10:08]
Unnamed Correspondent
Well, yeah, it sort of seems like Elon is, you know, he was already kind of being transitioned out and had already, they'd already had like kind of the goodbye party at the White House. So it seemed like maybe he's gonna go do his companies now for a while, but they're kind of going to keep him in the fold. At least that's what that message would suggest, I don't know that message also, I mean this is pure speculation on my part. Had kind of the vibe of like okay Elon, you have until 8am on Wednesday to apologize or like you know, SpaceX's contracts are going to be in trouble. So you know, who knows. But it is interesting that I also kind of feel like this apology isn't enough to get to win Trump. Like I think he needs to say like the Epstein thing was made up. I lied. But it because he's, it's still kind of out there.
- [10:51]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. Trump, Trump, historically not a big one to accept like half baked, non groveling type apologies. Sort of tends to demand the full subjugation. We will see like the full world, right?
- [11:02]
Unnamed Correspondent
Yeah, exactly.
- [11:04]
Andrew Egger
Man. It's such, it's so weird talking about this stuff because like you, you, you, they're both so distasteful. Just sort of as figures that like anytime Elon's talking about Trump you're like wow, he's making some pretty good points. And when, when Trump is like putting Elon through this ritual self abasement routine, you're kind of like ah, yeah, that's pretty good. Good, good. I'm glad somebody's able to, you know, make, make him squirm like that. And at the same time it's all just so grotesque that this is sort of the stuff that's happening at the very kind of most rarefied levels of, of culture and society and business and government where it's the President of the United States and the world' absolutely insane, totally unhinged slap fight with major implications for US policy on a bunch of stuff. It's just kind of gross and, and, and, and totally horrible. But at least we can, at least we can, you know, have a little fun talking about it when it, when it gets particularly postworthy. Thanks for coming on to chew it all over. Thanks to everybody out there for watching. Hope you'll subscribe to the channel, hope you'll head to the Bulwark and subscribe to Will's False Flag newsletter. Thanks and we'll see you all next time.