Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade struggled to comprehend just how badly President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s bubbling feud dramatically escalated during Thursday’s back-and-forth.
“The Epstein file thing was way over the top and just crazy—to say that Trump was in the Epstein files. I mean, what are you doing?” Kilmeade said Friday morning. “Sometimes when people get drunk, they do crazy things. But this is a total escalation.”
The simmering tensions between Trump and Musk reached a very public boiling point as the pair exchanged a series of threats and attacks on social media.
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This included Trump saying Musk went “crazy” over his plan to remove an electric vehicle (EV) mandate from his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and suggesting the “easiest way to save” billions of dollars from the budget would be to terminate the government subsidies that Musk’s tech companies receive.
Musk retaliated in a series of posts on X, including claiming, “Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” and reposting calls for the president to be impeached and replaced with JD Vance.
Musk also suggested Trump’s sweeping tariffs will cause the U.S. to fall into a recession before dropping the “really big bomb” that escalated the feud even further.
“Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public,” Musk wrote.
Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier, died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting federal sex-trafficking charges. He was known for having a series of high-profile friends, such as former President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew.
Epstein and Trump were at the very least acquaintances, with the pair sometimes hanging out together at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in the 1990s.
In a 2002 interview with New York magazine, Trump praised Epstein as a “terrific guy” he had known for 15 years. “He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump said. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
The Justice Department has vowed to release files related to Epstein. So far, Attorney General Pam Bondi has only authorized the release of documents “previously leaked but never released in a formal capacity” by the government in February.
There is no evidence Trump was connected to or aware of Epstein’s crimes, with the pair said to have fallen out over a Palm Beach real estate deal in 2004.
Discussing the bust-up between Trump and Musk, Kilmeade suggested that the tech billionaire’s opposition to Trump’s mega bill shows he doesn’t know how to achieve compromise in politics.
“He doesn’t understand that Donald Trump has to make [Republican Congressman] Mike Lawler happy in New York, and he’s got to make every conservative congressman in Texas happy,” Kilmeade said.
“He’s got to conduct an orchestra where the bassoon is having a fight with the oboe and the trumpets don’t like the saxophone. All Trump has to do is get the song done. And what Musk does is say, ‘If I don’t agree with the saxophone and the oboe, I don’t want to play.’”
