There is no escape from it—but…
At the end of last week, Donald Trump and Elon Musk were locked in a very public spat. Since both are businessmen, the core of their political quarrel was, unsurprisingly, money. Musk didn’t like a government-proposed tax bill. Trump responded by implying that Musk’s criticism was self-serving—that the bill would strip him of tax benefits. “You want to save a few billion dollars? The bill shows the way,” Trump said with a sly jab.
It’s worth recalling that when he was elected, Trump handed Musk a symbolic “sword” in the form of the Government Efficiency Fund (DOGE), which was meant to cut government spending, sometimes through what could only be described as personnel purges. Trump’s message now was clear: there are better ways to help the state budget than protecting billionaires’ profits.
And then things escalated.
“Who funded your election campaign?”
“Oh, I’ll cancel billions in state contracts with SpaceX and Tesla.”
“Oh, I’ll take down my satellite working with NASA.”
“You’ve lost your mind—I won’t even ride your red Tesla.”
None of these were stated verbatim, but that was the subtext.
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Musk even dug up a kind of “brother” for Trump — the disgraced billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of sex crimes. With that, Musk hinted that Trump had ties to those stories. In doing so, he decided to go after Trump’s moral image — echoing the very tactics Trump has used himself.
This move was almost comical in its resemblance to Armenian political theater: much like how Prime Minister Pashinyan obsessively posts about the Catholicos’s celibacy vow, Musk now seemed fixated on Trump’s alleged moral failings. The message is the same — if you can’t beat your rival politically, shame them on moral grounds.
Given that Musk is the world’s richest man and owns the largest social media platform—X (formerly Twitter)—and Trump is the figurehead of the most powerful nation on Earth, the sides are almost equally matched. Their feud could go on for some time. Musk could, for example, rally members of Congress to vote down the controversial bill—or even go as far as encouraging impeachment talk.
But what really interests me is not the Musk-Trump drama itself. It’s the way such incidents once again reveal the essence of politics: politics is something that divides people.
That has always been true, for centuries, and we in Armenia have seen it many times—though, of course, the reasons here differ from those behind the Trump-Musk clash.
Between 1988 and 1991, who would have imagined that in the 1996 presidential election, Levon Ter-Petrosyan and Vazgen Manukyan would become bitter rivals? In 1992, it was unimaginable that Ashot Manucharyan would call his former comrades-in-arms “whores” just two years later.
Politics flings people into different corners, where they take up the posture of boxers—stepping into the ring to punch each other. And this doesn’t happen only at the top levels of power. It happens to us, ordinary citizens, too. Almost everyone has a story of a family dinner or friendly gathering that turned sour when political differences came up. People instinctively try to avoid these topics, knowing full well how quickly they can spiral into hostility—even to the point where friends and relatives stop speaking to each other over being “pro-Nikol” or “anti-Nikol.”
This division, needless to say, suits the current authorities. In fact, they are doing everything they can to deepen it.
Politics cannot be abolished. It will always be an integral part of modern life. You can’t simply shut your eyes and ears to it, even if you’re lucky enough to stay off Facebook.
But you can live in parallel with another life—one shaped by spiritual and intellectual values that unite rather than divide.
For me, those are first and foremost Christian values.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
