(Dobbs) Retaliation, Pure And Simple

The true colors of Donald J. Trump. They are not red-white-and-blue.

Not for the first time, and not likely for the last time, we have seen again this week the true colors of Donald J. Trump. They’re not pretty. They’re not red-white-and-blue. They are the colors of a man whose decisions are governed by who flatters him and who fights him. They are the colors of a man who puts conceit before country.

Yesterday, in the latest installment of the Big Beautiful Battle of Bulbous Egos over the Big Beautiful Budget Bill, Trump threatened deposed Best Buddy Elon Musk because Musk abruptly morphed from a flatterer to a fighter.

Trump told NBC News that if Musk helps fund the campaigns of Democrats who challenge Republicans who vote for the bill, “He’ll have to pay very serious consequences if he does that.”

Just think about that. Those “very serious consequences” he’s talking about aren’t demanding that Musk return the golden (not really a) key adorned with a White House insignia that Trump gave him during his Oval Office sendoff only a week ago. That’s when Trump proclaimed, “Elon’s service to America has been without comparison in modern history.”

How fast his colors change. Now, after declaring that the bright red Tesla he bought three months ago on the White House lawn when he shilled for his then co-president was "a great product, as good as it gets,” he says he might sell it.

No, the serious consequences Trump is talking about are to Musk’s businesses, first and foremost SpaceX. And that means, if he follows through, he won’t just hurt Musk. He’ll hurt America’s national security and American ambitions in space. He’ll hurt us.

Why? Because both the United States military and the U.S. space program, manned and unmanned, have no comprehensive alternative to SpaceX. Some analysts say, they could not progress without SpaceX. Right now Musk’s company has something on the order of $22 billion in contracts with the Pentagon and NASA. There are other spacecraft and rocket builders out there— including Boeing and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin— but so far they haven’t yet produced a reliable working product that the government knows it can count on. It was defects exactly a year ago with thrusters and helium leaks in Boeing’s Starliner capsule that turned two astronauts’ planned eight-day mission to the International Space Station into nine months. As it happens, it took a capsule made by SpaceX to safely get them back home.

Yet on Thursday, as the Trump-Musk bromance hit the rocks, Trump pompously posted on his website, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.” So the question comes to motive. Trump could never get away with claiming that SpaceX hasn’t taken state of the art to an incredible new level. Its rockets land on their targets backwards, for heaven’s sake. Having covered the space program for the last years that the shuttle flew, I know firsthand that SpaceX effectively saved us from a premature end to space research.

So just about the only motive left to even threaten to terminate contracts with SpaceX is to hurt Elon Musk. Those are the true colors of Donald Trump. Whether or not Musk deserves it is worthy of debate. But here’s the point: either SpaceX is the best company right now for the missions it carries out, or it is not. Either SpaceX is an asset to our national ambitions and our national security, or it is not. That should be the basis of the president’s decisions about whether to keep using SpaceX. Not his enormous and unquenchable ego. Not his fits of pique. Not a hissy fit with the world’s richest man that might have hurt the president’s prospects with his budget bill. It certainly has hurt his pride.

It all might come to naught. There is too much at stake for the nation— for the military and the space program— when there is still no overarching competitor to SpaceX. Even as self-centered as Trump is, he has to understand that.

But with Donald Trump, the nation’s best interests don’t always triumph. He doesn’t always put country before conceit. According to The Washington Post, just since Trump’s tantrum with Musk started, government officials have contacted other space companies— potential SpaceX competitors— asking how soon they could be ready to replace some of the services of SpaceX.

This sounds like retaliation, pure and simple. Those are the true colors of Donald J. Trump. They are not red-white-and-blue.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net