Manipulating Social Media Power Dynamics

As you’ve surely heard, the feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has erupted, with the two men trading attacks on each other for hours. As of this recording, the last big things to happen are that Trump threatened to cut off all government contracts to Musk’s companies, and Musk then dropped what he called a “big bomb”—that Trump is in the "Epstein files." Former GOP strategist and Never Trumper Rick Wilson grasps the inner pathologies of MAGA like no one else, so we talked to Wilson about the latest Trump-Musk madness. He offers a counterintuitive take on why Musk’s attacks on Trump will trigger MAGA’s paranoid obsessions in an unexpectedly explosive way, why he thinks Musk has more weapons in this battle than Trump does, and why the White House has almost certainly entered into a “full panic” about where this is all going.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices