Donald Trump reigns like a great Ju-Ju from a mountain made of many tribes.
Supporting him in his glory is an unlikely coalition of blue-collar workers, redneck hillbillies, Gen Z men, conservatives, Latinos and Hispanics, black voters, disaffected female Democrats, evangelicals, Catholics, and, in the filthier corners, those who chant “Russia is our friend” and have flown the swastika flag.
The recent protests across America are a sign that the magic mountain is wobbling. The president has so far managed to keep his best tribes together with a mixture of charisma, boosterism, interest-group politics and the ruthless intolerance of dissent. The general cultishness of his movement also goes a long way. This week, however, the pressure of Trump’s berserk tariff strategy has opened the biggest cleavage among his supporters so far.
Elon Musk, the figurehead of his libertarian cheerleaders, has been spearheading a campaign to soften Trump’s tariffs before they unleash an age of economic and geopolitical havoc. This has not gone down well with the protectionists.
On Monday, Musk posted a video of the economist Milton Friedman praising the innovation, human flourishing and peace that free trade can provide. “Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil,” Friedman said, turning one over in his hands. It was the “magic of the price system” that caused them to work together so beneficially across the borders of race, politics and culture, he pointed out.
The post on X was a shot across the bows of the economically nationalist spur of Trump Mountain, whose totems include the likes of Steve Bannon and the president’s chief adviser on trade and tariffs, Peter Navarro. By all accounts, this tension within Trump’s inner circle is threatening landslide after landslide.
As part of his campaign, Musk has been demanding free trade with Europe, which now groans under American tariffs of 20 per cent. In a sombre interview, which he posted on X, he was unequivocal. “At the end of the day, I hope it’s agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America,” he said.
This happened to align precisely with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s “zero-for-zero” tariff proposal, which she made to the US on Monday in an effort to avert a tit-for-tat trade war. Given Trump’s declared view that the European Union was created solely to “screw” America, Musk’s statement represented a sharp break with the orthodoxy. To some in the protectionist camp, he was siding with the enemy.
Soon Navarro was publicly snubbing Musk’s demands on Europe. “Elon Musk sells cars,” he sniped. “He’s simply protecting his own interests, as any business person would do.” He then accused the Tesla boss of leading a “car assembler” rather than a manufacturer, using “cheap foreign parts” which “doesn’t work for America.”
In retaliation, Musk said Navarro was “dumber than a sack of bricks”. He argued: “By any definition whatsoever, Tesla is the most vertically integrated auto manufacturer in America with the highest percentage of US content.”
Trump’s landslide victory of 2024 defied gravity in its ability to bring together voters with wildly divergent interests and beliefs. To a great extent, this was a protest vote on steroids, an expression of disgust with the discredited old liberal order and an enthusiasm for Trump’s move-fast-and-break-things agenda.
As time goes by, however, it is increasingly looking like a one-off miracle that is unlikely to survive contact with the sort of reality Trump is beginning to unleash upon his supporters.
The president himself is a 3D model of contradictions. When it comes to domestic politics, he supports deregulation and cutting down the size of the state. Internationally, however, he is fiercely opposed to free trade. The problem should be obvious: the former is impossible with the latter. Domestic and international policies feed into each other. He can’t have both.
Does Trump believe he can force his way through this binary? Or is he entirely oblivious to it? Either way, with the president’s inner circle pulling itself apart and his diverse cheerleaders poised to feel the pain in their pockets, Trump Mountain may be about to come tumbling down.
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