In a shocking1 turn of events, the Trump/Musk bromance is on the rocks. And before either of them has even entered the White House, too! Even more shocking—it’s over MAGA xenophobia actually applying to all foreigners, including the little Cybertruck Princeling and the immigrants that he wants working for him.

This all started late last week, when Musk tweeted positively, beautifully, and informatively about his support for H-1B visas. His DOGE co-co Vivek Ramaswamy and no other Republicans rode to his defense with an epic poem of a tweet, deriding the American workforce for its mediocrity.

(This is not the point, but Ramaswamy’s cultural references in service of his point are the most hilarious thing anyone has ever seen. Like, it’s very tiresome millennial gifted kid stuff, but it’s also the stuff of weirdos. Like…who exactly is venerating Stefan Urquelle? Why is Cory Matthews in it?2 Does he know that things happened both before and after the 1990s, even if he didn’t experience them personally?? I’m being so serious.)

Anyway. Ramaswamy committed the cardinal sin of talking to white people like they’re Black people. And he didn’t even have the humility to be white when he did it. He took aim at white America’s most sacred pillars of culture—prom queens, jocks, and Zach Morris I guess—and called them mediocre. He said that, actually, they have a culture problem. He wants to know where the parents were. But Americans in general and Trumpmericans in particular cannot stand being called mediocre. They’ve spent their whole lives believing that they’re participating in a meritocracy, and that they only thing preventing them from succeeding in said meritocracy is built-in favouritism towards the insufficiently American. (They’re literally so close to getting it.)

Trump stayed out of the scuffle for as long as he could before delivering a typically brainless ramble about how much he actually does like visas. But MAGA is still upset, and still proudly xenophobic and racist, so this is bound to be only the first of many fissures. despite decades of successful PR to the contrary, Republican leadership is disorganized and tribal as fuck.

So now, the worst people you know are all fighting each other. Elon Musk is championing freedom of speech3 by withdrawing blue checks and deactivating accounts on his little platform. Conservatives are suddenly championing federal investment in education and job training. Matt Yglesias is “defending” Ramaswamy by declaring Alzheimer’s a thing of the past. The schadenfreude is so undeniable that you could almost forget that thousands of people’s material well-being hangs in the balance every time these people squabble. Almost.

Now, I love to watch a terrible friend group collapse. I love stories about petty little gossips who bicker and backbite until the walls cave in. It’s part of why I loved Conclave, and the back half of Goodfellas. And it’s why The Death of Stalin has been on my mind ever since the election.

As the title would suggest, the movie is a black-hearted satirical take on the struggle for power amongst the Soviet Politburo after Stalin’s death. Spoiler alert for history you may have only learned in AP Euro4—the struggle ends with Nikita Krushchev at the top of the heap, after leading a successful coup with Marshal Zhukov against Minister Beria. The Death of Stalin comes from Armando Iannucci, the same man who gave us The Thick of It, In the Loop, and Veep. With that resume, you generally know what to expect: bumblingly conniving government types who are incompetent at everything except creatively blistering insults. Everything in Iannucci productions is intentionally unglamorous and pathetic—very anti-West Wing vibes.

Again, you can almost forget that these people are massively powerful. Even though they’re recklessly glib about it, their squabbles affect thousands of lives. Unlike with most of Veep et. al., though, The Death of Stalin doesn’t let you forget the stakes. We are constantly seeing civilians get rounded up for imprisonment, execution, or rape. The threat of state violence hovers over every sweaty conversation, even about whether to call back “17 minutes after you picked up the phone, or 17 minutes after you said you’d call back in 17 minutes?” Life feels extraordinarily cheap.

By the end, the sweatiest and most frustrated striver manages to convince and coerce a coalition together. As soon as the power dynamic is clear, every person we’ve seen currying favour with the biggest bully in the room turns on him with a passion. They “arrest,” “try,” and “convict” him for behavior they’ve spent the whole movie condoning and participating in themselves (the definition of “anti-Soviet behavior” genuinely changes from sentence to sentence, depending on who’s talking). The formal accusations of rape and pedophilia, which are absolutely, horrifyingly true, really leapt out at me on this viewing. Like, there’s no way that we’ve seen the last of shit like this from this cohort, right? It’s the worst kind of murderer’s row.

And like, look. It’s going to be a terrible four years at the very least. Some days I have the grace to be hopeful. Many other days, all I have the energy for is the gallows humour that you find when you know your hangman is a wildly stupid toad who can’t trust the stupid toads he’s working for. Like the characters in an Iannucci joint, the incoming administration will be led by bumblingly conniving monsters who will break as much as they can, either by design or flagrant incompetence. And hopefully, they’ll also tear each other apart in the process.

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