The long-awaited break-up between US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk was as personal and petty as anticipated, and yet it’s a sign of something much more than a conflict between two of the world’s most powerful and mercurial men.

It’s a signal that Trump is not finding it easy to hold his populist conservative coalition together.

Then president-elect Donald Trump, with Elon Musk and J.D. Vance at a college football game in December.Credit: AP

At the beginning of the year, Trump’s coalition did not seem so vulnerable. To an extent unmatched since at least Ronald Reagan, it seemed as if Trump could enact a conservative agenda and find considerable support from the public. By raising tariffs on China, deporting immigrants lacking legal status, increasing oil production, cutting spending or fighting the “woke” left, he could stay on solid political ground.

Whether it’s because of his own limitations as a manager of competing players, the excesses of his own policies or the growing challenge of the national debt, it doesn’t appear to be so straightforward for Trump to hold the gang together.

Trump won a second term with a much broader political coalition than the one that brought him to the presidency in 2016.

Trump attends a UFC-316 mixed martial arts event in New Jersey on Saturday (US time), after his blow-up with Elon Musk.Credit: AP

He added millions of young and non-white voters to his base of older, white, working-class populists and stalwart........

© WA Today