Elon Musk continued his rampage against Donald Trump’s spending bill on Tuesday night, setting the stage for an ugly showdown with the president’s faithful.
“Mammoth spending bills are bankrupting America!” he wrote, sharing a graphic depicting rising national debt over the past three decades. “ENOUGH,” he added.
He also responded with a “100″ emoji to an X user who wrote that Musk had “reminded everyone: It’s not about Right vs. Left. It’s about the Establishment vs the People.”
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He then posted an American flag emoji under a post from conservative satire site The Babylon Bee, highlighting a story titled, “The Lord Strengthens Elon One Last Time To Push Pillars Of Congress Over And Bring Government Crashing Down.”
Earlier Tuesday, the billionaire unleashed hellfire on Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, lambasting the president’s flagship legislative package as “outrageous,” “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination.”
“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” he wrote of the package, which scraped through the House last month solely on Republican votes.
He didn’t let up in the hours that followed, sharing posts from Republican lawmakers who publicly agreed with him. In another post, he said the legislation would “burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”
Then, he turned up the heat on Republicans who supported the bill, suggesting they be booted from Congress in the midterm elections. “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people,” he wrote.
House Speaker Mike Johnson fired back, telling reporters Musk’s criticism was “terribly wrong.”
As of May, the national debt stood at over $36.2 trillion, a figure Musk highlighted in the graphic he shared.
Musk’s comments amplified rifts among Republicans, generating a mixed reaction from GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Democrats have been broadly united in opposing the bill, which they say would hike the national debt while gutting essential social programs. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Tuesday, “Elon Musk and I agree with each other.”
It’s a dramatic escalation of tensions between Musk and Trumpworld that had been bubbling amid the Tesla founder’s departure last week from his brief, headline-grabbing government role.
As head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk—Trump’s top campaign donor and his handpicked warrior for government cuts—led an aggressive and tumultuous charge to slash federal spending.
On his way out, he offered a comparatively muted critique of the bill, saying he was “disappointed” with it, and that it undermines the work of his DOGE team.
That prompted pushback from several Trump administration officials, though Trump himself has so far refrained from retaliating with the same ferocity as Musk.
Trump hadn’t directly acknowledged Musk’s Tuesday outburst by time of publication. In his first Truth Social posts since Musk’s posting spree, Trump ignored the drama altogether, writing instead about China and claiming that “THE UNITED STATES HAD THE BEST MAY IN 30 YEARS. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also brushed off Musk’s criticism when asked about it in an earlier press conference, saying the president “already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” adding that Trump was “sticking to it.”
One of his top aides, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, however, fired off a series of posts defending the bill and calling it “the most MAGA bill ever passed by the House.”
Musk’s set time as a “special government employee” ran out on Friday, but the businessman had already indicated weeks earlier that he would step back from government to focus on his companies amid a significant slump in Tesla sales.
