Every Man Is Falling Out This Week
The Friday Post.
More from Hung Up this week: Patti LuPone apologizes to everyone but Glenn Close and a Mountainhead chat in the Substack app.
If a man has not embarrassed you, devoted Hung Up readers will recall, he just hasn’t embarrassed you yet. Generally, that applies to “wives,” “daughters,” “girlfriends,” and “mothers.” This week a novel development: men are embarrassing one another. Several male friendships have fallen out in spectacular fashion this week.
How you get ‘em is how you lose ‘em: the alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, which catapulted both of them to the White House, was ill-fated from the start. A close friendship just cannot be sustained between two foaming-at-the-mouth rabid posters, those people obsessed with talking and being talked about. Eventually, a poster will start posting about you.
Musk is critical of Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” a spending package that passed the House of Representatives this week. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, the world’s richest and most desperate man (funny how those things go hand in hand…) said he was “disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it.” Musk said the bill “undermines” the “work”1 of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Last week, Musk departed DOGE and made a final appearance at the White House (with a black eye, which he said was from one of the children he doesn’t see).
But like the Green Goblin mask, the urge to post called out to the cartoonishly evil technocrat. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” he began. I love it when people start a sentence like this, insisting upon casting their own cowardice as straight talk. All the evil Trump has done in his second term is fine, but this is the legislation that was too much for Elon to bear. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.” The bill would “defeat all the cost savings achieved” by DOGE, that department Elon made up; he reposted several critics of the bill.
And again because this is a war between posters, he dug up archival Trump tweets about government spending under Obama. This is so completely lame — I’m sure someone was paid like a million dollars a year just to remind him of the “there’s always a tweet” industrial complex.
Less than a week after they’d exchanged pleasantries in the White House at Musk’s sending off, Trump confirmed the falling out. “Elon and I had a great relationship,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “I don’t know if we will anymore.” He told reporters that Musk was familiar with the bill and is lashing out because the electric vehicle tax credit was cut. “False,” Musk tweeted. “This bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!”
Musk wasn’t content to say the bill needed Ozempic or call it some version of slim thick. “Time to drop the really big bomb,” he posted later. “@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
I get very little satisfaction from a feud like this. I mean … okay? And? Is that supposed to surprise me? Let me guess, next Elon Musk is going to say that Trump incited an insurrection.
Am I supposed to get a little thrill out of an Elon crash-out? I won’t fault you if you do, but I cannot. This is like a Housewives cast post-reboot deep into a half-hearted blood feud so transparently for ratings it is disrespectful to the OGs. This is like when, for the nineteenth time, a friend is telling me a story and I ask, “Right, but Andrea who?” Elon Musk just doesn’t have that way about him — he is too sweaty and creepy to be funny. Trump, just by being a New Yorker and a narcissist, is a fascist first, a comedian second, and president third. Look at Trump in the clip below and tell me Trump v Elon isn’t a Veep character is going head-to-head with an Office extra.
I’m more moved by Pusha T airing out everyone who has ever crossed him. Pusha and Malice have reunited for a new Clipse album, and Frazier Tharpe sat with the brothers for GQ. Pusha never starts the fights, he says, but he’ll finish them. “I've really been in Paris, making my joints, doing my shit. When these people mention me, they're really going out of their way,” he told GQ. “What have I done besides wear clothes these past couple of years?2 I just been with LV. This shit ain't coming out of nowhere. Bro, I be cool with all these guys. Everybody you mentioned today, bro, I promise you, they did the underhanded, weird shit.”3
The friendship between Pusha T and Kanye persisted, Pusha says, because of label politics. When they were working on Donda in 2021, Pusha said he felt like their vibe had shifted. Ultimately, though, the relationship drained him. “It's like, bro, you've been mentioning me, screaming about me…. You got every soul believing that I've done such a great injustice to you. And that's a lie. He goes on his rants. The one thing that I can say about him is that he knows that every issue that he's having and crying about online right now, I've told him distinctly about those things, distinctly … That's why me and him don't get along, because he sees through my fakeness with him. He knows I don't think he’s a man. He knows it. And that's why we can't build with each other no more. That's why me and him don't click, because he knows what I really, really think of him. He's showed me the weakest sides of him, and he knows how I think of weak people.”
He's showed me the weakest sides of him, and he knows how I think of weak people. A buffet of resentments, hard truths, long-term envies, immediate callousness. As we say in Roma: Buon appetito!
Coincidentally, on this week’s “Lemme Say This,” we get to the bottom of the so-called male loneliness epidemic. Men don’t know how to gossip, that’s why they dont have any close friendships.
What the paid list got this week:
Patti LuPone: And Nothing For Glenn Close. Bye!
SEEKING: London readers! I will be back in London on June 10 for a few days. Should we do a meet-up? Where?? … and some good vintage George-Leo gossip at the end of this.
More more more
“Miley Cyrus Told Us to Ask Her Anything” (NYT) Okay, when is she getting on the Cowboy Carter stage to perform “II Most Wanted,” that’s news I can use … My personal agenda aside, the interview is really quite moving.
I need to convene a chat for every Lena Dunham Vogue essay. This is another great one, about her last affair before getting married: “All I could summon was the feeling of the whole world narrowing to a single point and the sense that it was happening again.” (British Vogue)
Nick Viall is hosting the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Reunion for Hulu, airing July 1. (Deadline) Where’s Demetria…
My beloved New York Knicks fired head coach Tom Thibodeau, whom I have frequently said “looks British,” on Tuesday. “Our organization is singularly focused on winning a championship for our fans,” team president Leon Rose said in a statement, according to ESPN. “This pursuit led us to the decision to inform Tom Thibodeau that we've decided to move in another direction.” What funny phrasing to break up with someone: we want a championship, so we need to move in another direction. (ESPN) Of course I’m expecting Coach Chalamet and Assistant Coach Club Chalamet.
JoJo Siwa confirmed her relationship with Chris Hughes. “It’s not platonic anymore,” she told The Guardian. “It’s been a beautiful development, a beautiful connection, and I’m absolutely head over heels for him and he’s the same way.” (The Guardian) Have to agree with Peyton here…
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We’re doing it all over again! Here’s the trailer for Wicked: For Good, out November 21.
Speaking of “for good,” Dakota Johnson and Chris Martin have broken up again. “It feels final this time,” a source told People.
That’s all this week. Thank you for reading. Ciao! I have amatriciana to eat and Addison Rae’s new album to listen to. Have a good weekend!
Quote marks mine.
What a sentence! I love Pusha T though I will never forgive him for using Whitney Houston’s bathroom as that one album cover…
“I don't rate him no more,” Pusha says of Drake’s humiliating (and likely doomed) lawsuit against UMG. “The suing thing is bigger than some rap shit. I just don't rate you. Damn, it's like it just kind of cheapens the art of it once we gotta have real questions about suing and litigation. Like, what? For this?”
nick VILE is the shane dawson of reality tv like he is a cockroach that will never go away 💔💔
‘I've told him distinctly about those things, distinctly’…. the double distinctly gave me chills!