The Musk-Trump falling out is glorious. But can Musk handle the heat?

Don't listen to any scold who tells you that Elon Musk launching a full-on billionaire slapfight against Donald Trump is "a distraction" from anything else. The collapse of elected government into pure idiocy is the core issue facing America, and especially so since the idiots' grand plan is to scuttle the Constitution and democracy in favor of a patronage system in which the wealthy plies them with cash in exchange for favors while the rest of us are left with no government at all.

It's not a distraction, it's a main event. And it's wonderful and we deserve every bit of it. Not only because it's satisfying to see two lifelong malignant narcissists implode from the pressure of having to pretend to like or respect each other:

... but also because every minute this goes on is a new opportunity for everyone in the grand idiot brigade to make things worse by exposing scandals we didn't even know about.

Okay, well, that's a bit odd. No, that's super weird. That's JD Vance on a couch levels of weird.

So we really ought to all enjoy this to the fullest, and don't listen to the scolds who say otherwise. That includes Democratic Party strategists, who have been embarrassingly ham-handed in preparing talking points like these:

Look, when some new story goes viral and makes normie Americans momentarily pay attention to politics, you probably don't want to be the person who then scolds the public for paying attention the wrong way.

All of this said, we can enjoy this fight, but we'll see if it lasts. The main reason to suspect it won't is because despite all of the bluster, The Criminal Seditionist has the power to destroy Elon Musk's entire fortune. Every company Musk heads depends on government largesse; tanking Tesla's stock price alone would set off a chain reaction in Musk's wallet that would destroy everything else.

So this whole fight is going to quickly boil down to a Musk judgment that he can withstand the same forces of batshit corruption that he himself helped champion in his D.O.G.E. slash-and-burn of federal contracts. And, when it comes to conning people to prop up his own profits: That's Musk's wheelhouse. He may not know a damn thing about rockets or social networks or tunnel-boring, but the man has spent entire adult life conning suckers.

So Musk may well decide he has to bend the knee and pretend to be friends again, and Trump will never, ever turn down an opportunity to publicly humiliate someone who comes groveling to him, and maybe this whole thing goes away with Musk announcing that he wasn't the one who tweeted all those nasty nasty things about Dear Leader, that was his five year old son. The one who punched him in the face. That kid gets up to all sorts of trouble.

Even then, this is still good news. The forces of idiocy are frantically taking sides, with the Nazi freaks and the crypto freaks and something called the "catturd army" all eyeing the others and planning their counterattacks. Even if Musk kisses (Trump's ass) and makes up (an excuse), this rift in the Forces of Stupid won't be easily mended.

Good. And it's about damn time.

In the meantime, all we can do is sit back, hope for as much carnage as possible, and wait to see if either side is willing to do real damage to each other and not just slap each other around like two preschoolers fighting over an M&M. Now that Trump and Musk and their allies have declared that the government is allowed to be corrupt as they want, cancel contracts on a whim, and prop up or destroy entire economic sectors based on their petty grievances, the damage the White House can do to Musk knows no bounds.

It's all astonishingly crooked, mind you. But that's what fascism is.

Live by the corruption, die by the corruption. That's how it works.

So let's all sit back and watch what happens when two people who both consider themselves the greatest geniuses to have ever lived decide that the other has gotten too big for their britches. We deserve this.

But don't be shocked if Musk caves, and grovels, and quickly goes to full Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio levels of sycophancy. This is a fight for dominance inside Republicanism, and so far The Criminal has won every such battle so decisively that it's turned his once-opponent into a family pet.