Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says Donald Trump won’t let Elon Musk slide for the way the billionaire left his government position.
Lutnick’s take on Trump’s spectacularly messy public divorce from ex-bestie Musk came during a sit-down with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon on Friday. Lutnick said that while the pair may find a way of being cordial in the future, Trump will never truly let it go.
“Donald Trump is a really kind person,” Lutnick told the network. That characterization comes as no surprise as the Trump appointee’s penchant for flattery has earned him some less-than-flattering criticism.
Lutnick opened his interview with Ungar-Sargon by claiming he and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff sometimes literally “arm wrestle” over who gets to call himself the president’s “best friend.”
Despite reports he once called Trump a “buffoon” and his backing of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, Lutnick went on to say the president’s magnanimity would allow him to “forgive” Musk’s perceived transgressions, even if he’ll not quite be able to “forget” them.
“I think Elon Musk had that, he really earned the president’s friendship, admiration, and then in his departure, he expressed a part of himself that was very negative,” the commerce secretary said. “And I don’t think the president is going to forget that negativity.”
Having spent an estimated $290 million on Trump’s campaign, Elon Musk indeed expressed some rather “negative” views of the president shortly after leaving his post as head of the White House’s flagship cost-cutting drive, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
In fact, his departure toward the end of May detonated something of a bomb at the heart of the MAGA administration. Within days, the Tesla CEO launched a volley of attacks against Trump, describing the president’s then-pending budget proposals as a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled… disgusting abomination” that would only serve to undo all his work as DOGE chief.
Trump hardly took it lying down, shooting back with threats of revoking Musk’s lucrative government contracts. The SpaceX founder responded by calling for the president to be impeached, and alleging Trump had delayed the release of new findings in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case because his name features prominently in the files.
The last of those allegations would appear to have been prescient. Trump faced renewed scrutiny of his relationship with the late pedophile after the Justice Department and FBI found that Epstein’s 2019 death in police custody was a suicide, and that the disgraced financier kept no “client list” of uber-wealthy co-conspirators. This contradicted long-cherished conspiracy theories from the MAGA base.
Relations between the president and tech billionaire have since been hot and cold. It wasn’t long after their initial exchange that Musk deleted his posts about the “Epstein Files,” publicly stating he’d gone “too far” and donating roughly $15 million to pro-Trump super PACs. He was back to trolling MAGA with threats of launching his own “America Party” just three days after those payments landed.
The president and his former “first buddy” did appear to share a touching “where did it go wrong for us” moment during Sunday’s memorial service for far-right activist Charlie Kirk, though Trump has since been swift to pour cold water on any suggestion that Kirk’s death may have brought the two men back together.
“Do I think it’s going to go back to being lovey-dovey? No,” Lutnick gushed on Friday. “[Trump’s] going to be kind, and he’s going to be warm, as he is. He will be friendly, and he will be nice. Because he is incredibly nice. But do I think he’s going to forget? I don’t.”
