Trump Demanded Steve Bannon ‘Lay Off’ Attacking Elon Musk, Maggie Haberman Says

(Graeme Sloan/Jose Luis Magana/Lenin Nolly/AP photos)

President Donald Trump reportedly intervened in the ongoing feud between Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, asking his former chief strategist to dial back his attacks on the billionaire.

The revelation, first reported by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman on Sunday, comes amid growing tension within the MAGA movement as Trump navigates competing loyalties between the populist wing and the ultra-wealthy allies who now occupy key roles in his orbit.

Bannon has railed against Musk in recent months, dismissing him as a “parasitic illegal immigrant” and a “truly evil person.” For Bannon, the stakes are more than just personal grievances. He sees Musk as a symptom of what he calls the “globalist infiltration” of MAGA — an ideology he has spent years fighting against.

“He’s still not a populist nationalist, he’s a globalist,” Bannon told The New York Times last month. “He and I have a chasm that is probably insurmountable.”

The former White House strategist has regularly been sounding alarms over Musk’s growing influence in the Trump administration, warning that his presence is shifting the movement away from its anti-establishment roots.

“It’s not that yet, but it’s trending — that is starting to affect everybody,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast, a program that Haberman reported is closely watched by both Trump allies and the president himself.

But Trump, who has sought to maintain good relations with both men, reportedly told Bannon in mid-February to “lay off” the attacks on Musk, sources told The New York Times. The president even suggested the two meet privately, though that sit-down has yet to happen.

Bannon, a Tea Party-era firebrand who helped engineer Trump’s 2016 victory, has long positioned himself as the ideological enforcer of the movement.

Musk, meanwhile, has gone from a critic of Trump to the public face of his cost-cutting initiative, DOGE. Musk emerged as one of Trump’s most powerful backers during the presidential race, contributing $288 million to his campaign and using his control of X to reshape the conservative media landscape as well as amplify Trump’s message.

Musk, for his part, has largely ignored Bannon’s attacks. But in a rare public jab, he dismissed the former Breitbart executive as a “great talker, but not a great doer,” writing last month: “What did he get done this week? Nothing.”