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Let's return to this growing war between Elon Musk and President Trump
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Simon Marks joins us from Washington, D.C. Live. Simon, very good evening. Has it developed any further
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Well, we appear, Ian, to just be living through the worst Marvel movie ever
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with these two pathetic men going hammer and tong at one other
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over their respective social media platforms, with Elon Musk now escalating the battle with Donald Trump by suggesting that he's going to drop the bomb
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which is the revelation, according to Mr. Musk, unsubstantiated, that Donald Trump's name is contained within the Epstein files
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and that that is a reason why they haven't yet been released in full
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Now, certainly one very large batch of documents was released by the Attorney General Pam Bondi a few weeks ago
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But there have been calls immediately now from Democrats up on Capitol Hill for the remaining documents all to be released and for any documents that make any reference to the President of the United States to be put into the public domain
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calls also now from Steve Bannon, a longtime skeptic about the wisdom of including Elon Musk
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in Donald Trump's inner circle. Indeed, before the inauguration, Ian, you will remember that Steve
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Bannon said that he would go to the Met to stop Elon Musk from getting access to the West Wing
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Well, he clearly lost that tussle. Now he is calling for an immediate revocation of all federal
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contracts held by Elon Musk's businesses. Those are billions of dollars worth of contracts
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particularly held by Mr. Musk's rocket launching enterprise SpaceX. Steve Bannon, the president's
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former political advisor, is also urging Donald Trump to launch an immediate immigration probe
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into Elon Musk's American citizenship, saying that he believes that Mr. Musk has been living in the United States illegally
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was admitted to the United States illegally. So on both sides now, this ridiculous tit-for-tat that we have watched escalate
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over the past 36 hours has now escalated, and there doesn appear immediately to be an off here particularly I think for Elon Musk I mean at this point his postings on X are coming at a mile a minute and the White House can keep up with them
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The share price in Tesla, his electric car company, has suffered its biggest one-day fall in the company's history
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This is going to terrify Tesla shareholders, who, of course, had been told by Elon Musk that he was pulling out of government work partly to return to the day job and try and put the electric carmaker back on track
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But it's absolutely apparent that a relationship that Elon Musk and Donald Trump were celebrating less than a week ago at the White House, when, of course, Elon Musk famously turned up with a black eye that sort of symbolized the drubbing that he felt he had taken in Washington, D.C
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We still don't really know how he got that black eye. No one here believes his claim that it was from horsing around with his young son, X
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I mean, we're less than a week since that pastiche in the Oval Office that was designed to paper over any suggestion that there were chinks in the armour between Donald Trump and Elon Musk
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Well, the armour is now completely shattered. I mean, they are both now evidently pointing to deep and abiding disagreements that are widening by the hour
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and where this is going to leave the Trump presidency, I think is a very real question
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because it does raise huge, fresh questions about the way in which Donald Trump picks people
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who are occupying senior positions within his White House. And in the case of Elon Musk, let's be honest
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for the first three months of the presidency, he was essentially Donald Trump's de facto prime minister
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and now is not only unleashing on him and making these unsubstantiated claims about what may or may not show up one day in the Epstein files
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But he's also positing on social media the possibility of funding a new centrist political party in the United States
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So he has the real possibility to be a substantial threat to Donald Trump and also to Republicans up on Capitol Hill
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who now have to decide what they're going to do about this big, beautiful bill
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the opposition of Elon Musk to which started this entire row less than 48 hours ago What about these Epstein files Are they going to be released at some point
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Well, you know, President Trump came to office saying that he was going to release all of them
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And we've certainly seen a massive batch of documents that were released in the first tranche
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that the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, ordered to be released several weeks ago
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We've not heard very much more about when we're going to see more of them
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We have seen Kash Patel, the FBI director, on numerous occasions, insisting that he has seen evidence that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide
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as successive American governments have claimed. Donald Trump himself has said that Jeffrey Epstein's death was suicide
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and has tried to put to rest conspiracy theories about the financier's demise
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I mean, there are obviously enormous implications potentially of the release of more of these documents, not just for Donald Trump, but for a whole host of prominent figures whose names may appear in some of those documents
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And of course, you know, names can appear in the documents, but they don't necessarily tie up and equate to criminal activity
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But certainly there is tremendous public interest here in now what those documents may say about Donald Trump, members of his family
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and whether they are going to shed any fresh light, as Elon Musk insists
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on the nature of the relationship between the now president of the United States and Jeffrey Epstein
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Musk has been tweeting again while we've been speaking. He just tweeted, the Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year
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That's quite mild compared to some of the other tweets. Yeah, I mean, he's still hammering away at trying to derail this big, beautiful bill of Donald Trump's
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which is a massively important piece of legislation to the president of the United States
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who's absolutely standing by this legislation, and says that Elon Musk basically withdrew his support for it
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because he learned that Donald Trump was scrapping the electric vehicle mandate
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which was a government policy that said, and this dates back to the Biden administration
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that, you know, moving towards electric vehicles is a priority for the United States
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You know Donald Trump has long been opposed to EVs and is a big champion of fossil fuels So it hard for me to believe that Elon Musk was particularly surprised by simply the disappearance of the EV mandate in that legislation I think
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Elon Musk genuinely believes that having spent the last 19 weeks trying to reduce waste and fraud
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in government expenditure and trying to hack back unnecessary spending, he thinks that this big
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beautiful bill entails profligate public spending that is, according to the Congressional Budget
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Office, going to swell the country's deficit by another two and a half trillion dollars. And
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you know, there is an issue for Republicans on Capitol Hill there. And some of them are outspoken
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about this bill. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, for example, who says, look, I'm simply not going
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to support this kind of increase in either public spending or the federal deficit. So he's pushing
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at a door that is ajar, Elon Musk, in trying to get enough Republicans either to derail the bill
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completely or to demand that it gets rewritten, in which case, of course, it gets pushed into the
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long grass, and that will be problematic for Donald Trump. So I think this is actually, I mean
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you know, for all the cartoonish nature of the nonsense that we have witnessed over the last few
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hours between, as I say, these two, frankly, pathetic individuals going after each other
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publicly and on social media. There is a real political threat here to Donald Trump that Elon
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Musk now poses. And it's not just a short term threat. It's also potentially a long term threat
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because of the amount of money Elon Musk is sitting on. And he can activate that money and
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use it politically here to bankroll rivals to Donald Trump, rivals to the Make America Great
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gain movement and maybe even to bankroll the creation, as he suggested on social media
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today, of a centrist political party. So, you know, as I think I've said on the programme before, you know, Donald Trump may
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find that it was much better to have Elon Musk inside the tent and onside rather than
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outside the tent trying to burn it down. yeah I'm thinking was it Lyndon Johnson who talked about sort of being inside the tent
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we don't really want to go there because we might have to use an unfortunate word no we better not
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even though it's after nine o'clock I'm still valuing my job and I'm sure you do too
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Simon thank you very much indeed