I really don’t know what’s going on in Trumpworld anymore, and apparently neither does Donald Trump. Amid a very public fallout between Trump’s OG MAGA superfans and the knuckleheads he put in charge of taking enough money from poor people to pay for his tax cuts for billionaires, it seems the president-elect isn’t getting the kind of levels of communication he wants from Elon Musk.

One prominent social media account, “Patriot Takes,” which has mostly migrated their presence entirely from X to newcomer Bluesky, had questions about what’s going on as well. For example, why is Donald using his platform to reach out to Elon Musk instead of just calling him up?

Trump posted a somewhat cryptic message this morning on Truth Social, which Patriot Takes took a screenshot of and posted to Bluesky. The phrase “We miss you and x” is a reference to X, which is what Elon calls his son with the unpronounceable string of letters for a name, so you know this message is for Elon Musk.

Hey MAHA people, why is Trump posting about Bill Gates coming to Mar-a-Lago?

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— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) December 27, 2024 at 8:22 AM

That’s an excellent question, too. Some commenters offered the suggestion that Trump is trying to lure Elon Musk back to his Florida resort by teasing him with a new billionaire friend, while others thought that maybe HE asked Bill Gates to come, and Gates said no. That would be pretty in line with everything we know about Donnie.

I have another theory.

I think Donald Trump is trying to create the perception of distance between himself and Musk because of all the talk about a shadow presidency by the Tesla CEO. He giving off a definite “Hey, what have you been up to vibe,” when he knows exactly what Musk has been up to.

Musk and his cohort in the pretend “Department of Government Efficiency,” Vivek Ramaswamy, have been making waves, and not the kind Trump likes to surf. Donnie thought he was going to give those two a game controller that wasn’t plugged in while he throws turtle shells at the economy and brown people.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

Now Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber are clashing with hardcore Trump fans who don’t like their vision of “deport everyone except the tech workers.” No, seriously, that’s what they’re talking about now. Musk even tweeted about it on X.

Yes, that’s literally the guy Donnie left in charge while he parties through the transition period, saying — on Christmas — that “America First” is a thing of the past. He plans to hire immigrants, who he could basically pay in those weird green “portions” from Star Wars that Rey eats, to do an inferior job because they’ll just be grateful to rub elbows with the folks whose jobs they’re taking.

Yikes.

And MAGA is not happy. Here’s one big Trump supporter questioning the plan:

“How did DOGE go from ‘let’s cut wasteful government spending’ to ‘here’s why we need to import more immigrants’ almost overnight? Did I miss something?!”

And who can forget about loony Laura Loomer?

And Vivek wasn’t faring much better than Elon in winning hearts and minds, either. The next morning, he tweeted out a SUPER long and boring diatribe about how American culture just doesn’t breed the kind of innovation that comes from people like him and his pal Elon, and instead values prom queens over “math olympiad champs” (You should capitalize “Olympiad,” genius).

The responses HE got were even worse than the flak Elon took.

Do I really need to start listing American inventors and what the world wouldn’t have without us?

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) December 26, 2024

The Woodstock generation managed to build out aerospace, the one before went to the moon, America was doing great. Underlying your post is that we were all living in squalor until being rescued by H-1B’s. Then why did everyone want to come here?

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) December 26, 2024

Turns out the “waste” that DOGE wanted to cut from America was Americans

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) December 26, 2024

I think Trump is well aware that there is NOTHING good in store for him in this conversation. He is acting like he hasn’t seen Elon Musk in a million years now, so he can swoop in and reassure his voters that he hates ALL the brown people, not just the ones with Spanish accents.

Don’t get me wrong. It could still absolutely be this:

How do you make a billionaire jealous? You threaten to have a new billionaire best friend.

— 𝙳𝚛. 𝙴𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚘 𝙻𝚒𝚣𝚊𝚛𝚍𝚘🦋 (@emiliolizardo.bsky.social) December 27, 2024 at 8:24 AM

I just think Trump would never settle for a bestie with only half the money Elon has.