Trump and Elon — divided over China. By Michael Doran in The Free Press.
When Trump asks, “Who do I call?” the first answer is obvious: not Rupert Murdoch. The line is dead — killed the moment Trump hit News Corp with a $10 billion defamation suit in 2025. Even if Murdoch answered, the call would be pointless. The old kingmaker of American conservatism now presides over a shrinking archipelago — Fox, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post — that the New Right treats like a distant province.
But America Firsters live inside a sealed media world of their own: podcasts, YouTube and Rumble feeds, Telegram channels, Gab, and above all X, where attitudes harden long before they ever surface on Fox Primetime. Trump still takes his movement’s temperature by watching Hannity and Ingraham. But the real fights over the future of MAGA are happening in digital spaces that neither he nor Murdoch command. …
Trump spent five years trying to construct a counter-media empire: he launched Truth Social (which plateaued at under 10 million monthly actives), turned One America News Network and Newsmax into semiofficial house organs, handed press credentials to RSBN (Right Side Broadcasting Network) and Gateway Pundit, and elevated a rotating cast of loyal amplifiers — Steve Bannon from War Room, Dan Bongino in his radio heyday, Charlie Kirk before the assassination, even Candace Owens until she broke with him. He urged the base to migrate, floated the possibility of a “Trump TV” network that never materialized, and watched most of his followers drift right back to the big platforms. Nothing cohered.
The person who finally built a real, scalable information infrastructure for populism was not Trump, but Musk. By transforming X into the central nervous system of the movement — and propelling its loudest voices to unprecedented prominence — Musk succeeded where Trump’s own efforts had stalled. …
China, China, China:
But the intersection of Musk’s interests with Trump’s did not last long. The break that matters most is not over tax rates or H-1B visas. It is over China.
Trump’s second-term strategy rests on a single organizing principle: The United States must reorient its alliances, industrial capacity, and military posture to contain a rising China before Beijing overtakes it. Everything he is doing — tariffs, critical-mineral partnerships in Africa and Central Asia, equity stakes in chips and rare-earth supply chains — is designed to make that containment credible abroad and sustainable at home.
Musk is moving in the opposite direction. He has spent a decade cultivating a public posture of admiration toward Beijing. He praises its infrastructure as “100 times faster” than America’s, has called himself “pro-China” onstage in Shanghai, gushes over Chinese “positive energy,” and in late 2022 echoed the CCP line by suggesting Taiwan should become a “special administrative region.” … Musk’s robotics ambitions — Optimus and the broader humanoid push — depend on Chinese supply chains and manufacturing scale no other country can match on his timetable.
Their interests are fundamentally at odds:
The contradiction is structural. Trump’s MAGA is a nationalist restoration, aimed at reversing the offshoring that hollowed out the middle class and supercharged a hostile competitor.
Musk’s world is post-national and accelerationist: Mars colonies, brain-machine interfaces, artificial general intelligence. The fastest route to that future runs through frictionless global capital flows, open supply chains, and easy access to the world’s largest single market — China.
Trump wants to sever the economic dependence on Beijing. Musk wants to secure his companies inside it. One man is trying to rebuild the American heartland; the other is trying to escape the nation-state entirely. …
Musk’s new location-tagging features have already exposed a swath of “America First” accounts as foreign operators—Pakistanis, Indians, Nigerians — posing as domestic populists. It was a brief reminder that a trend line on X is not the voice of the American electorate. But the platform still remains wide open to manipulation. …
Friends, but:
Trump can call Elon — the line still works. But on the central strategic problem of his presidency, their vectors run in opposite directions: Trump toward a fortified nationalism capable of sustaining confrontation with Beijing, and Musk toward a globalized tech frontier that requires ongoing access to it
Musk does many things the US Government should do but is not longer capable of doing, e.g. Space X, Starlink, the Boring Company, maybe electric cars. He is the unofficial US Government, except he is also somewhat untied to the US, more global.