Maga is in meltdown - but the bad-mouthing has to stop

It didn’t take long for the Maga inner circle to fall out like a bunch of squabbling hoodlums after a bank raid.

- SEAN O'GRADY

A photograph, taken at a distance through a White House window, of Donald Trump gesturing at a slightly sheepish Elon Musk, has emerged which, literally, points to the tensions.

Even less ambiguous are the public insults being chucked around between Musk and Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro.

First, Musk belittled Navarro’s PhD in economics from Harvard (a perfectly genuine and more than respectable qualification). In return, Navarro sneered that Musk was just a “car assembler”, someone who puts together vehicle parts made all over the world.

Musk called Navarro “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks”, and later issued a faux-apology: “That was so unfair to bricks.”

This is amusing enough (unlike the ableist slur when Musk referred in a separate social media post to “Peter Retarrdo”). The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, downplayed the insults, saying they were “two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs” and that “Boys will be boys – and we will let their public sparring continue.”

But why, apart from their natural tendency to behave like spoilt adolescent frat boys, all the bad-mouthing?