'Gone Crazy': Trump Slams Musk's 'Ridiculous' Party

Donald Trump on Sunday called Elon Musk's decision to found and fund a new US political party "ridiculous", The Guardian reports. "Third parties have never worked, so he may enjoy it, but I think it's ridiculous," the president told reporters returning with him to the White House from his golf club in New Jersey.

He then elaborated on the matter in a post on Truth Social. “It saddens me to see Elon Musk completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a train wreck over the last five weeks,” the president wrote. “He even wants to start a Third Party, despite the fact that they have never been successful in the United States.”

“The only thing third parties are good at is creating total CONFUSION and CHAOS,” Trump added. He then claimed Musk was unhappy with his plan to stop subsidizing electric car purchases.

Trump also accused Musk of seeking to exert undue influence by asking the president to nominate his friend Jared Isaacman to be NASA administrator. After Musk left his position as a special government employee in the Trump administration, Isaacman’s nomination was withdrawn. “I also thought it was inappropriate for a very close friend of Elon’s, who worked in the space business, to run NASA when NASA is such an important part of Elon’s corporate life,” Trump wrote.

Earlier Sunday, the Trump administration's Treasury secretary said Musk should focus on running his companies and stay out of politics, a day after the world's richest man and former White House adviser announced a new political party.

“The Doge principles were very popular — I think if you look at the polls, Elon was not,” Scott Bessent said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” referring to the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” that Musk temporarily headed after Trump’s second term began in January.

Polls have shown that Doge and Musk’s work to implement tough spending and job cuts in the federal government is deeply unpopular. And Bessent cited how investors in Musk’s companies, including electric carmaker Tesla, whose sales have suffered during Doge’s tenure, have publicly asked that his tenure in the Trump administration be short-lived.

“So I believe that the boards of his various companies wanted him to come back and lead those companies,” Bessent said. “I believe those boards were not happy with yesterday’s announcement and will encourage him to focus on business rather than politics.”

Bessent's reaction came after Musk made good on his promise to create a new party and accused his former ally Trump of "bankrupting" the country by signing his massive tax and spending bill, The Guardian notes.

The tech billionaire announced the formation of the “America Party” in a series of posts late Saturday and early Sunday on his social media platform, X. “When it comes to bankrupting our country through waste and bribery, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Musk wrote. “Today, the America Party is here to take your freedom back.”

Musk, who served as Doge's unofficial leader to cut federal spending from January to May, has become a vocal critic of Trump's "big, beautiful bill," which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says will increase the nation's deficit by $3.3 trillion by 2034. It would provide deep tax cuts for the super-rich while slashing federal safety net programs, leaving up to 10.6 million people without health insurance.

The pair have been feuding over its cost and implications since Musk left government in May, and on Friday, as Trump signed the bill at a White House Fourth of July picnic, the heads of Tesla and SpaceX took a poll on X: “This is the perfect time to ask if you want independence from a two-party (some would say one-party) system.”

Musk announced late Saturday that respondents had voted 2-1 in favor. He gave no details about the structure of his new venture or when it would be created. But his previous posts have suggested that it would involve two or three Senate seats and eight to 10 House districts.

Both houses of Congress are under tight Republican control, The Guardian reminds.

“Given that the legislative framework is extremely limited, this would be enough to be the deciding vote on controversial laws, ensuring that they correspond to the true will of the people,” Musk said.

Bessent was one of the Trump allies who quickly responded to Musk's actions. Musk's series of messages to X, which continued into the early hours of Sunday morning, also appeared to indicate that his on-again, off-again relationship with Trump was back in negative territory, The Guardian reports.

When the pair fell out earlier this summer, Musk unleashed a scathing attack in a surprise social media exchange in which he claimed Trump’s name appeared in files about associates of the late pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Musk later deleted the post and apologized to the president as the two reached an uneasy truce. But on Sunday, Musk returned to the topic, posting a photo of Epstein’s jailed assistant Ghislaine Maxwell and questioning why she was the only person in jail while men who had sex with underage girls (a crime colloquially known in the U.S. as statutory molestation) were not.

In other posts, he said it would be “not hard” to break the two-party stranglehold that Democrats and Republicans have on U.S. politics. And he asked: “When and where should we hold the first American party convention? It would be so much fun!”

Trump has made his feelings toward his former friend clear in recent days after criticizing the bill. In response to tweets from Musk calling the bill “insane,” Trump said he might “consider” deporting the South African-born billionaire, a naturalized U.S. citizen. The president has also mused about cutting subsidies to his companies, especially SpaceX, which wins billions of dollars in government contracts.

“Doge is a monster that might have to come back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible?” Trump asked reporters on Tuesday.

In the US, there is no requirement for new political parties to initially register with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), but reporting rules kick in once spending exceeds what the FEC calls “certain thresholds.”

Musk is estimated to have spent more than $275 million of his personal fortune helping Trump win a second term in the White House in last November's presidential election.