\n<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump appears opposed to reconciling with Elon Musk, based on new comments the president made to NBC News on Saturday.<\/span>Mehmet Eser\/ZUMA<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Trump has made<\/span> it official: He and Elon Musk are (probably) never getting back together.<\/p>\n In an interview with NBC News<\/a> on Saturday, the president was uncharacteristically restrained when asked if he had any desire to repair the relationship with the ex-DOGE head following Musk\u2019s meltdown on X this week<\/a>. Asked if he wanted to repair his relationship with Musk, Trump answered simply: \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n The blowout was caused by a series of posts on X. Musk railed against<\/a> Trump\u2019s \u201cBig Beautiful Bill\u201d and his tariffs<\/a>, which Musk claimed will cause a recession in the second half of this year. Musk also alleged Trump is in the Epstein files (that post has since been deleted). When NBC asked if Trump thought his relationship with Musk was over, Trump reportedly replied: \u201cI would assume so, yeah.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m too busy doing other things\u201d to talk to Musk, Trump told NBC, adding, \u201cI have no intention of speaking to him.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s a very bad thing, because he\u2019s very disrespectful,\u201d Trump added of Musk\u2019s statements. \u201cYou could not disrespect the office of the President.\u201d Trump also told NBC that Musk\u2019s since-deleted claim that he was involved with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s sex trafficking operation of minors was false and \u201cold news,\u201d and that he had not given his prior threat<\/a> to cancel Musk\u2019s companies\u2019 government contracts any further thought. He said he believes Musk is \u201cso depressed and so heartbroken\u201d and that his opposition to the reconciliation bill was ultimately \u201ca big favor\u201d because it \u201cbrought out the strengths of the bill.\u201d<\/p>\n But Trump does not appear to be fully confident that Musk will not affect the bill. If Musk funded Democrats to run against Republicans who vote to pass the bill, \u201che\u2019ll have to pay the consequences for that,\u201d Trump told NBC. He added that they would be \u201cvery serious\u201d but did not provide further details. Musk does not appear to have specifically suggested he plans to fund Democrats for this purpose, but he has urged<\/a> voters to \u201cfire all politicians who betrayed the American people\u201d in the next election.<\/p>\n As I reported last week<\/a>, Musk told CBS Sunday Morning <\/em>that bill \u201cundermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,\u201d adding, \u201cI actually thought that, when this \u2018big, beautiful bill\u2019 came along, it\u2019d be like, everything he\u2019s done on DOGE gets wiped out in the first year.\u201d (The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO)\u00a0estimates<\/a>\u00a0the bill would add $3.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, which would essentially cancel out DOGE\u2019s\u00a0purported<\/a>\u00a0government savings of $175 billion.) The personal attacks he launched against Trump on X just a few days later came as a stark reversal for Musk, who said in the CBS interview that while he did not agree with everything the administration did, he did not want to create \u201ca bone of contention\u201d by publicly feuding with officials.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s glib assessment of the death of what was probably the world\u2019s most powerful\u2014and insufferable\u2014bromance runs counter to the hopes of other top Republicans who are hoping the men will reconcile. On ABC\u2019s This Week<\/em> on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told<\/a> host Jonathan Karl that he hopes \u201cthese two titans can reconcile.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think the president\u2019s head is in the right place\u2026he can\u2019t get caught up in a Twitter war,\u201d Johnson added. \u201cI think all this will resolve. There\u2019s a lot of emotion involved in it, but it\u2019s in the interest of the country for everybody to work together and I\u2019m going to continue to try to be a peacemaker in all this.\u201d <\/p>\n