Blog

The bromance may be dead, but Republicans worry that an escalating feud between President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk could live on, leaving collateral damage in its wake for weeks, months or even years.

The proximate cause is the centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, the “big, beautiful bill,” which Musk is trashing publicly and privately. To try to kill the legislation, he’s said he will spend money to oust Republican lawmakers who vote for it.

“He does not give a f— about Republicans or the RNC, or House seats, or whatever,” a Musk adviser said Thursday in the middle of a social media war between the president and the tech mogul, who had never aligned with the Republican Party until the last few years. The adviser was given anonymity to speak candidly about the blow-up. “He will blow them up, he will. … I mean, we already know Republicans are going to lose the House. Senate will likely be fine, but Elon does not give a s— about that party stuff.”

Republican lawmakers care a lot — especially when it comes to their own congressional seats and chairmanships, which would be in danger if Musk tried to oust them from power in next year’s midterm elections.

In interviews with GOP lawmakers and operatives with ties to Congress, a clear theme emerged: Republicans should be scared of getting crosswise with either Trump or Musk — a tough task when they are slinging mud, insults and threats at each other.

In short, other Republicans are like the kids caught between parents in the midst of a possibly brutal divorce.

“I’m staying out of it,” said Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a competitive Nebraska district. “There’s a good verse in Proverbs: ‘Stay out of fights.’ I’m staying out of this one.”

But Trump allies are taking shots at Musk for his comments about the president and even encouraging Trump to take action against him.

“People including myself are recommending to the president that he pull every every contract associated with Elon Musk and that major investigations start immediately,” said Steve Bannon, a White House adviser in Trump’s first term and a frequent critic of Musk.

In particular, Bannon said, the South African-born Musk’s immigration status, security clearance, reported drug abuse, relationship with China and “involvement with attempting to get President Xi to the inauguration” should all receive scrutiny.

Getting nastier by the minute

Perhaps it was inevitable that the Trump-Musk buddy-trip movie would end — how long can the world’s most powerful man and its wealthiest man pretend that they aren’t in competition? But few in Washington could have predicted that the resulting inferno would consume their professional and personal relationships so quickly.

By Thursday afternoon, Musk was retweeting a suggestion that Trump should be impeached. In the hours before that, Trump said he was “very disappointed” with Musk for turning on his signature legislation, which would cut taxes by $3.7 trillion over a decade and slash government spending by $1.3 trillion — leaving a $2.4 trillion deficit — over the same period.

Musk and his allies bristled at the suggestion by Trump and White House officials that he was angry because the bill would kill tax benefits for electric vehicles, like those made by the Musk owned Tesla company.

Musk spent $275 million in the 2024 elections, mostly to help elect Trump, according to campaign finance records, and Trump rewarded him with a high-profile post as the face of the new Department of Government Efficiency. The role positioned Musk as the avatar of a push to cut the size and scope of the federal government — a role that turned him into a controversial figure as he appeared to revel in firing workers and closing agencies. At one point, Musk wielded a fake chainsaw on a stage to illustrate his post as cutter-in-chief.

That all came to an end last week when the two men held a chummy Oval Office news conference to announce Musk’s departure from the government.

But now, Trump says Musk was “wearing thin” as a special government employee and the featured player at DOGE. In a Truth Social post Thursday, Trump said the easiest way to cut more government spending would be to cancel federal subsidies for Musk’s business ventures.

Musk fired back by picking at a scab involving the Trump administration’s withholding of some documents from its hyped release of records pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein, a onetime associate of powerful figures — including Trump — who died in prison after being charged with sex-trafficking of minors. The Trump administration has released some new information from those records, but most of it has already been public. Musk tweeted that the “Epstein files” include Trump’s name. Trump and Epstein knew each other and Trump’s name appeared on flight records for Epstein’s plane, but Trump has never been implicated in Epstein’s abuse of underage girls.

Musk also predicted the economy would be in recession by the second half of this year as a result of Trump’s policies.

The fallout

Just a few months ago, Musk indicated he would put $100 million into political committees associated with Trump. That money never came — and now, it won’t, the Musk adviser said.

In addition, Republicans have to worry that vast sums will be used against them if they vote for Trump’s bill.

“It’s gone,” the Musk adviser said of the money once earmarked for Trump’s use. “He’s going to go nuclear. He will support Democrats if needed, he absolutely will.”

Democrats watched Thursday’s contretemps with glee.

“This is Christmas,” one Democratic Party operative said in a text message.

But even on a more substantive level, it gave some of Trump’s adversaries hope that his agenda would sink under the weight of Musk’s threats.

“The most important thing that’s happening here is that Musk is killing this terrible bill. If he’s willing to do that, then welcome,” said Simon Rosenberg, a veteran Democratic operative. “This is doing enormous damage to Donald Trump. There is no version of this that is good for him. There is nothing here positive for Trump. He looks weak and feckless, he can’t control his buddy.”

That’s the view from the left. The view of a GOP operative close to the White House was that the episode underscores Trump’s independence from Musk, adding a note of optimism that the fight would end with harmony.

“President Trump is the boss and there can be only one boss. If anything, this deals a blow to the Democrats’ lame attempts to paint the president as a puppet of the world’s richest man,” said the operative, who was given anonymity to speak candidly about the two powerful men. “On the other hand, I could see them both back in the Oval bro-ing it up again in a month, as it may be just the art of the deal.”

Some GOP strategists said the damage could be contained — but that it’s not yet clear whether that will happen.

“It depends on how long it goes and how nasty it gets,” said one former Trump campaign adviser who counts congressional candidates among his clients.

Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., who chairs the House GOP’s campaign arm and is in charge of protecting their 3-seat margin in the chamber, said he believes the rift will “blow over.”

But asked whether he thought Trump and Musk would make up, he just shrugged his shoulders.

A Texas woman died from an infection caused by a brain-eating amoeba days after cleaning her sinuses using tap water, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention case report.

The woman, an otherwise healthy 71-year-old, developed “severe neurologic symptoms” including fever, headache and an altered mental status four days after she filled a nasal irrigation device with tap water from her RV’s water system at a Texas campsite, the CDC report said.

She was treated for primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) — a brain infection caused by Naegleria fowleri, often referred to as the “brain-eating amoeba,”the CDC said. Despite treatment, the woman experienced seizures and died from the infection eight days after she developed symptoms, the agency said.

Lab tests confirmed the amoeba in the woman’s cerebrospinal fluid, according to the report.

The CDC said the infection usually occurs after “recreational water activities” but noted that cleaning sinuses with non-distilled water is also a risk factor for developing PAM.

An investigation conducted by the agency found that the woman had not recently been exposed to fresh water but had done the nasal irrigation using non-boiled water from the RV’s potable water faucet “on several occasions” before her illness.

The potable water tank, the investigation found, was filled before the woman bought the RV three months ago and could have contained contaminated water. The investigation also concluded that the municipal water system, which was connected to the potable water system and bypassed the tank, could have caused the contamination.

The agency stressed the importance of using distilled, sterilized or boiled and cooled tap water when performing nasal irrigation to reduce the risk of infection and illness.

Anger and condemnation broke out as families, attorneys and immigrant advocates absorbed the blast from the latest bombshell delivered by the Trump immigration — a travel ban that stops or restricts people from 19 mostly African, Asian and Caribbean countries from entering the U.S.

While the Trump administration said the travel ban is meant to keep Americans safe, critics lobbed accusations of discrimination, cruelty, racism, inhumanity and more in response. Meanwhile, the news also elicited confusion over what will happen once the ban goes into effect on Monday.

“This travel ban is a racist, bigoted and xenophobic and deeply un-American attack on human rights — it’s like persecution. We have fled dictatorship, violence, hunger,” Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan American Caucus, told NBC News from Miami, a city with a large population of immigrants from several of the countries on Trump’s list.

“This administration clearly has something against immigrants, and it has something against us in particular,” said José Antonio Colina, a former Venezuelan army lieutenant who fled to Miami in 2003 and heads the exile organization Veppex. “We are double-persecuted. We are persecuted by the tyranny of Nicolás Maduro and we are persecuted by the administration of Donald Trump.”

A 38-year-old Haitian green-card holder in Miami who was too fearful to allow her name to be used said she and many others in the community feel “confused and scared” over the travel ban on Haiti. She said most of her family lives there, including her sister and father, who is sick. “They come all the time to visit and now I don’t know if they will be able to,” she said, adding she heard there were exceptions to the ban but wasn’t sure.

There are some exceptions, including for people with lawful permanent residency, spouses and children of U.S. citizens, those who are adopted and others.

“But if you are a spouse of a permanent resident, forget about it,” said Doug Rand, former director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration. It will also impact other relatives, such as adult children and siblings of lawful permanent residents, people who won the diversity lottery or were sponsored by a U.S. employer and are from the listed countries, “people who have been waiting for years and done it the right way,” he said.

In Havana, a queue of people outside the American Embassy learned the news of the travel ban and suspensions as they waited for their visa interviews.

“I had been waiting nine years for this moment,” said one young woman in line, who declined to be identified by name for fear it might affect her visa chances. She and others said the suspension means not being able to visit family or escape dire circumstances in Cuba.

“If they don’t grant visas, Cubans will starve, given the situation, they will starve,” said Ismael Gainza, a retired Cuban. “I see that measure as bad, I see it as bad because the situation is tough and we have to survive.”

Trump’s proclamation issued Wednesday night bans people from 12 countries from traveling to the U.S. The countries are: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

In seven more countries, travel to the U.S. was suspended but not banned. They are Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

Shahzeen Karim, managing attorney at Hafey & Karim law firm, said that although she’s in the immigration law space, she holds “Republican views” on the topic, agreeing there’s a need for a stricter immigration policy and more thorough screening.

“I know the White House presented some explanations as to why each of those countries, but I can’t help but feel very targeted, being a Muslim immigration attorney,” Karim said. “The countries are majority Muslim unfortunately.”

Challenging the ban could be ‘an uphill battle’

Immigration advocates said that, unlike Trump’s previous travel ban, which caught them off guard, they expected the president would enact a similar policy in his second term. Trump’s 2017 ban immediately barred Muslims from entering the country, leaving some stranded at airports or unable to board flights.

But like his previous ban, the impact of the current ban taking effect next week will be felt by people trying to bring together families, those who landed a job in the U.S., who had tours or visits planned, who planned to study here or were looking forward to a cultural exchange.

It took three tries for Trump, in his previous administration, to come up with a travel ban that the U.S. Supreme Court would accept. Lower courts nixed the first version and the administration kept revising it until the high court accepted its third version in June 2018. Immigration and civil rights groups opposed all three versions.

Raha Wala, vice president of strategy and partnerships at the National Immigration Law Center, said that challenging the latest ban “will be an uphill battle” because the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land.

Edward Cuccia, an immigration attorney in New York City, said that blocking the latest ban could be tougher now than in 2017.

“Trump got smarter this time,” he said, explaining that the mix of countries makes it harder to argue that the ban is discriminatory.

Also, the implementation won’t be as abrupt and the argument that the singled-out nations do not vet the documents of their citizens well may hold up in court, according to Cuccia.

Even so, the implications are vast for the people who are affected and are not a security threat, he said.

“What is this going to mean for family unification? There’s a lot of countries here!” Cuccia said. “And then, there are people that maybe had business dealings, people who wanted to do investments here in the United States or come over on temporary work visas, student visas or even just to visit … That seems to be gone out the window.”

Wala called the justification for the ban — that visa overstays present a national security threat and the inability to fully vet visa travelers in those countries — a “fig leaf.”

If there is a gap in vetting, “that’s worth taking a look at,” he said, but added that “all kinds of people overstay their visas — and just because someone overstayed their visa and committed a crime, we just have to get away from this guilt by association concept.”

For Wala, the newly announced ban cannot be separated from the president’s previous policies and statements.

“This ban started as the president saying he was going to have a complete and total shutdown of Muslims in the country. And he also said he wants to ban folks — and pardon my French here — from s—hole countries,” Wala said.

In Miami, Colina said he was glad the ban would prevent officials of Maduro’s regime in Venezuela and their families “who always find a way” to get a visa to enter the country, “but they are a minority, and the partial ban will negatively impact the larger community and it’s not fair.”

A New York father and daughter whose bodies were found on a mountain in Maine earlier this week had planned the hike while on a work trip.

Tim Keiderling, 58, of Ulster Park, was found dead Tuesday in the Tablelands area on Mount Katahdin. The body of his 28-year-old daughter, Esther Keiderling, was discovered Wednesday afternoon about 1,000 feet away, between two trails off the Tablelands, Baxter State Park said.

Tim was a father of six and a grandfather of two. He and Esther were very close, Tim’s brother, Joe Keiderling, said.

They both worked for Rifton Equipment, a New York-based medical supply company.

“Tim was utterly unique,” the brother said in a statement Thursday. “Many young men and women remember him as an elementary school teacher who could hold them spellbound with wildly imaginative stories and escapades in the woods and fields of the Hudson Valley he called home.”

In his free time, Tim enjoyed tending and growing fruit, such as strawberries and blueberries, and was a beekeeper. His faith was important to him, his brother said.

Tim was a member of the Bruderhof Communities, a Christian community in which people share all their possessions, including money, its website states.

“At church gatherings, Tim was a regular contributor, not only as a lay pastor but as a gifted storyteller, bringing life and vitality to familiar Bible stories and making them relevant to the issues of the day,” Joe said. “At home, he was the consummate host and loved nothing more than lively conversation and a great laugh.”

Esther was quiet but “deeply sensitive,” Joe said.

“She loved reading and writing, with a particular fondness for the poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edna St. Vincent Millay,” her uncle said.

She kept a WordPress blog and wrote posts on the platform Substack. On Saturday, she wrote a post on Substack that she and her father were in Maine for a sales trip and had planned a hike, WMTW reported. She said she was “a little nervous” about the hike because of everything she had read about the Abol Trail, according to the news station.

Joe Keiderling confirmed to NBC News that the pair had traveled to Maine for work for trainings for therapists on adaptive equipment for kids with disabilities. He said they decided to take a weekend vacation and “climb a mountain that had always attracted them.”

The park said the pair went missing Sunday after they left Abol Campground to hike the summit. The trail’s difficulty is listed as very strenuous on the park’s website. Water is limited after the first mile, and the trail is fully exposed after two and a half miles, it says.

Authorities launched an extensive search Monday after their vehicle was found parked in a day-use lot. A park official said Thursday that the medical examiner’s office will determine how the pair died.

There is no evidence of criminal activity, the official said, and investigators are trying to determine why the bodies were found apart.

The mother of three girls who officials say were killed by their father is calling for reforms to Washington state’s Amber Alert system after her daughters’ bodies were discovered and as officials search for the man.

Whitney Decker believes her daughters may still be alive had the Washington State Patrol issued an Amber alert for them last week, her attorney told NBC affiliate KING of Seattle on Thursday.

“It’s very important to Whitney to get that fixed,” said attorney Arianna Cozart.

Evelyn, 8, Paityn, 9, and Olivia Decker, 5, were found dead on Monday, several days after their mother reported them missing. Their father, Travis Decker, 32, is wanted on first-degree murder charges in connection with the killings.

Authorities began searching for the girls Friday night after Whitney Decker filed a complaint that her ex-husband did not return the children after a planned visit, according to police.

Washington State Patrol issued an Endangered Missing Persons Advisory for the girls on Saturday. Unlike an Amber alert, the advisory does not send a text message to all cell phones in the surrounding area about the missing children.

A spokesperson for the Washington State Patrol did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday.

Cozart said that her client’s ex-husband had mental health issues and that local police relayed his illness to Washington State Patrol while pushing for an Amber alert unsuccessfully.

Court documents show that Whitney Decker told detectives she agreed to a parenting plan with her ex-husband in September. However, he refused to sign the document after he became homeless, according to the affidavit.

The agreement was contingent on Travis Decker seeking mental health treatment and domestic violence anger-management counseling, according to the affidavit. The military veteran never did, according to court documents.

The three girls were found zip-tied and with plastic bags over their heads near a campground in a remote part of the state, roughly 130 miles east of Seattle, according to the court document.

It is unclear if Travis Decker is armed, but officials said he is considered dangerous. Authorities said relatives informed them that Travis Decker has skills to survive outdoors for long stretches and would sometimes go “off-grid” for months.

Procter & Gamble will cut 7,000 jobs, or roughly 15% of its non-manufacturing workforce, as part of a two-year restructuring program.

The layoffs by the consumer goods giant come as President Donald Trump’s tariffs have led a range of companies to hike prices to offset higher costs. The trade tensions have raised concerns about the broader health of the U.S. economy and job market.

P&G CFO Andre Schulten announced the job cuts during a presentation at the Deutsche Bank Consumer Conference on Thursday morning. The company employs 108,000 people worldwide, as of June 30, according to regulatory filings.

P&G faces slowing growth in the U.S., the company’s largest market. In its fiscal third quarter, North American organic sales rose just 1%.

Trump’s tariffs have presented another challenge for P&G, which has said that it plans to raise prices in the next fiscal year, which starts in July. The company expects a 3 cent to 4 cent per share drag on its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings from levies, based on current rates, Schulten said. Looking ahead to fiscal 2026, P&G is projecting a headwind from tariffs of $600 million before taxes.

P&G, which owns Pampers, Tide and Swiffer, is planning a broader effort to reevaluate its portfolio, restructure its supply chain and slim down its corporate organization. Schulten said investors can expect more details, like specific brand and market exits, on the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call in July.

P&G is projecting that it will incur non-core costs of $1 billion to $1.6 billion before taxes due to the reorganization.

“This restructuring program is an important step toward ensuring our ability to deliver our long-term algorithm over the coming two to three years,” Schulten said. “It does not, however, remove the near-term challenges that we currently face.”

P&G follows other major U.S. employers, including Microsoft and Starbucks, in carrying out significant layoffs this year. As Trump’s tariffs take hold, investors are watching Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report for May for signs of whether the job market has started to slow. While the government reading for April was better than expected, a separate reading this week from ADP showed private sector hiring was weak in May.

Shares of P&G fell more than 1% in morning trading on the news. The stock has fallen 2% so far this year, outstripped by the S&P 500′s gains of more than 1%. P&G has a market cap of $407 billion.

Earth’s atmosphere now has more carbon dioxide in it than it has in millions — and possibly tens of millions — of years, according to data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the University of California San Diego.

For the first time, global average concentrations of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, exceeded 430 parts per million (ppm) in May. The new readings were a record high and represented an increase of more than 3 ppm over last year.

The measurements indicate that countries are not doing enough to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reverse the steady buildup of C02, which climate scientists point to as the main culprit for global warming.

“Another year, another record,” Ralph Keeling, a professor of climate sciences, marine chemistry and geochemistry at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement. “It’s sad.”

Carbon dioxide, like other greenhouse gases, traps heat from the sun and can remain in the atmosphere for centuries. As such, high concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to higher global temperatures and other negative consequences of climate change, including rising sea levels, melting polar ice, and more frequent and severe extreme weather events.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen sharply since preindustrial times, owing mostly to human activities that pump greenhouse gases into the air.

Decades ago, crossing the 400 ppm threshold was unthinkable. That meant that for every 1 million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, more than 400 were carbon dioxide. The planet hit that grim milestone in 2013. And now, scientists have warned that levels of CO2 could reach 500 ppm within 30 years.

But human society is already in uncharted territory.

The last time the planet had such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was likely more than 30 million years ago, Keeling said, long before humans roamed Earth and during a time when the climate was vastly different.

He said it’s alarming not only how high CO2 levels have climbed, but also how quickly.

“It’s changing so fast,” he told NBC News. “If humans had evolved in such a high-CO2 world, there would probably be places where we wouldn’t be living now. We probably could have adapted to such a world, but we built our society and a civilization around yesterday’s climate.”

Carbon dioxide levels are typically represented on a graph known as the Keeling Curve, named for Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, who began taking daily measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1958 with instruments atop the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

The Keeling Curve famously shows a steep climb since the Industrial Revolution, owing to human-caused climate change.

Ralph Keeling and his colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that average concentrations of atmospheric CO2 in May were 430.2 ppm. NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, which has conducted separate daily readings since 1974, reported an average of 430.5 ppm in May.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are closely monitored to gauge how much humans are influencing Earth’s climate. The readings are also an indicator of the planet’s overall health.

“They’re telling you about your whole system health with a single-point measurement,” Keeling said. “We’re getting a holistic measurement of the atmosphere from really a kind of simple set of measurements.”

IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.