Trump v Musk: End of a marriage made in hell was predictable - the fallout will be less so

Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy," Donald Trump observed in the Oval Office on Thursday. "They hate each other, and they're fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don't want to be pulled. Sometimes you're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart."

- David Smith

The US president was referring to the war between Russia and Ukraine but could just as easily have been talking about himself. On Thursday, to the surprise of no one, Trump's bromance with the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk exploded in a very public feud.

While the president had urged his supporters to "fight, fight, fight" last summer after he survived an assassination attempt, now that mantra is evocative of children on a school playground urging Trump and Musk to go at each other. For political nerds this is like Alien v Predator, Batman v Superman and King Kong v Godzilla rolled into one.

It was always going to end this way for two megalomaniacs devoted to fame, money and the far right, neither of whom is unaccustomed to a messy divorce.

Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives' judiciary committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill: "I suppose it was in the stars. Everybody was predicting it when it first began. You've got two gentlemen with gargantuan egos and both appearing to suffer from malignant narcissistic personality disorder."

Trump-Musk had begun as the ultimate political marriage of convenience. Their interests converged last year when Musk saw in Trump a hammer against wokeness who could also benefit his businesses and help him reach Mars.

The Tesla and SpaceX supremo leaped on stage with Trump, flooded the zone with Maga propaganda on his X social media platform, and threw a record $277m (£205m) behind Trump's election campaign. The reward came with a seat among the oligarchs at Trump's inauguration, a seemingly permanent residency at Mar-a-Lago and a chainsaw in the form of the so-called "department of government efficiency", or Doge.