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As the once-strong alliance between President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk rapidly disintegrates, the two titans are not only trading fire over the president’s “big, beautiful” tax cuts and spending bill.
Trump and Musk, who spent the first four months of the president’s second administration as a special White House advisor steering the recently created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), are also blasting each other over which one of them should get the credit for Trump’s decisive 2024 election victory.
The president, speaking with reporters Thursday, argued, “I think I would have won” even without Musk’s help on the campaign trail last year.
Musk, the world’s richest person and the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, went all in for Trump last summer and autumn.
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He endorsed the GOP presidential nominee in July right after the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Musk became the top donor of the 2024 election cycle, dishing out nearly $300 million in support of Trump’s bid through America PAC, a Trump-aligned super PAC. Much of the money was used for get-out-the-vote efforts and ads in the crucial battleground states as Trump and Kamala Harris faced off for the presidency.
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Musk concentrated much of his efforts on Pennsylvania.
He joined Trump for the first time on the campaign trail at an Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, then held five town halls in the Keystone State later in October.
And Musk set up a war room of sorts in Pittsburgh.
Trump, mentioning how Musk campaigned for him in Pennsylvania, pointed to his White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who was co-chair of Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The president noted that “Susie would say I would have won Pennsylvania easily anyway.”
Musk, apparently watching Trump’s comments in real time, quickly fired back on X, which Musk renamed after buying Twitter.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote. “Such ingratitude.”
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Tom Eddy, the GOP chairman in Erie County, a longtime crucial swing county in northwestern Pennsylvania, told Fox News that Musk “helped Trump significantly. I really think so. He had money and he had a name.”
But Eddy added that “my gut feeling would be that Trump is basically saying, ‘Look. I won the election. These people helped me, but I won.’ That’s what he’s trying to bring across.”
Longtime Republican strategist Dave Carney, a veteran of numerous GOP presidential campaigns over the past few decades, said the president and Musk are both right.
Carney, who steered Preserve America, another top-spending Trump-aligned super PAC, told Fox News that Trump “might have won without the help, but you can’t underestimate how important that help was.”
Pointing to Preserve America, Musk’s America PAC and MAGA Inc, which was the main Trump-aligned super PAC, Carney said they all deserved “a tremendous amount of credit” and “just made it easier” for Trump to sweep all seven battleground states and win the White House.
Carney also highlighted the Musk-aligned super PAC’s “unprecedented field effort, mail and other communications … to turn out these low-propensity Trump voters.”
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