President Donald Trump is trying to play MAGA mediator between his former advisor, populist stalwart Steve Bannon, and his shiny new broligarch lieutenant Elon Musk, according to a report.
Trump told Bannon last month that he wanted him to sit down in private with Musk to hash out their differences, New York Times reported.
He also asked him to stop a series of blistering attacks on the senior White House advisor and Tesla CEO.
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No meeting has happened yet nor is it clear if one will, the Times said.
Bannon, who represents the first wave of Trump’s MAGA movement that pitched itself on reactionary nativist grandstanding, recently ripped South Africa-born Musk as a “parasitic illegal immigrant” and “truly evil person.”
A White House chief strategist during Trump’s first administration, Bannon has repeatedly implied Musk, the world’s richest man, is an insincere corporate interloper who doesn’t really believe in the movement’s values and is instead out to give a leg up to the super wealthy.
Of note, the immigration hardliner has attacked Musk, who is the de facto leader of the Trump administration’s radical cost-cutting task force DOGE, for his support of H-1B visas got high-skilled migrants.
Musk has been privately bothered by the attacks, the Times reported, citing people who have been in contact with him.
He has generally refrained from clashing with Bannon publicly, but did fire a shot across the bow last month on his social media platform X, writing: “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer. What did he get done this week? Nothing.”
“He’s still not a populist nationalist, he’s a globalist,” Bannon told the Times, in an interview conducted in February. “He and I have a chasm that is probably insurmountable.”
Trump, the newspaper reported, has made clear he wants the two men to remain under the MAGA political tent—Bannon owing to his existing clout within the movement and his new influence in the wider Republican Party as the host of the popular War Room podcast, and Musk, as Trump’s chief benefactor and the man whose influence kicked off a procession of powerful tech CEOs cozying up to Trump.
“We do not comment on private conversations that may or may not have occurred,” the White House told the Times in a statement, while expressing support for Musk.
A Musk spokesperson didn’t reply to the paper’s request for comment.
