Will the Trump Musk fallout hurt the conservative movement? Probably not.

President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk traded barbs and insults Thursday, rupturing a relationship that had been one of the most consequential in modern American politics.

The feud broke into the open after Musk’s aggressive criticism of Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill. The president said Musk, who stepped down last week from an administration role as a special government employee, was suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and that his opposition to the bill was because of the rollback of electric-vehicle tax credits in the measure. 

Trump also threatened to eliminate government subsidies and contracts for Musk’s businesses. millions of dollars to help get Trump elected, said that the president was ungrateful and wouldn’t be sitting in the Oval Office without his support. Musk floated the idea of starting a third political party and agreed with a tweet that Trump should be impeached.

As a result, shares of Elon Musk’s Tesla stock fell 14%, losing $152.4 billion in market value. This represents the stock’s biggest one-day slide on record. What has transpired has been a war of words between the two men.

Elon Musk said that Trump’s tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of the year, and also claimed that the President is in the Epstein files, which is why they have not been made public. Musk also said that without his help, Trump would have lost the 2024 election, the GOP would have lost the House, and the GOP majority in the Senate would only be 51-49, instead of its present 53-47 margin.

While Musk will have a certain amount of people that back him against the President, Donald Trump will certainly have a much larger group of people backing him. The left wing already hated Musk, and that’s not going to change. So it looks like Elon Musk will end up disliked by a huge swath of the country.

But the bigger question is whether this will hurt the conservative movement. While this does represent a split within the conservative movement, most people on the political right will support the President.

That this offers fodder for the left wing is mostly irrelevant. The left still is on the wrong side of most 80/20 cultural issues, and has an extremely weak bench. They are also proven hypocrites. What might follow is leftists not knowing whether to start supporting Musk, on account of his turning on Trump.

This fight also puts to rest that Trump and Musk are in lockstep on everything and that Trump would just do whatever Musk wants. For months, many left wingers had been claiming that Elon Musk was the real President of the United States. This of course looks foolish now.

But in terms of the conservative movement, how it fares over the next 5-10 years will largely depend on how the economy performs, and how everyday Americans feel about their personal financial security, as it does for nearly all political movements.

It is highly unlikely that there will be voters in 2028 who would have voted for Vance, or whoever the 2028 GOP nominee is, had Musk and Trump stayed friendly, but will now sit the election out, or vote for a Democrat because of what has happened.

You might argue that Musk will not be using his money to make sure that all populist conservative voters get out to vote. But it was unlikely Musk was going to do in 2028 what he did for Trump in 2024.

And while Musk might have helped on the margins, how critical he was compared to other things, like the June 2024 Presidential debate, the coup to oust Biden, and the failed assassination attempt on Trump, is probably not as important.

This debate may lead to some divisions among certain specific sections of MAGA who really liked what Musk was doing, but the group of possible people who could be negatively effected by this is quite small.

Trump’s successor could very well lose in 2028, and Trump could have a bad second term. But it is most likely that if this is the case, it will have more to do with the MAGA movement running out of steam, a bad economic downturn, or inability to get anything done in Congress, not the Trump-Musk feud.