When a bromance ends, the world just becomes less beautiful.

Imagine if John Lennon and Paul McCartney never split up how many more timeless Beatles songs we’d have. If Abbott and Costello stayed together, we’d have a sequel to “Who’s on First.” And if Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were still around, train robbery would still be cool. It’s all good stuff.

The breakup of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk might be the most heartbreaking of all. These two incredible disruptors, one who upended politics and the other who upended technology, could have been the Lennon and McCartney of governmental reform. Now they’re just doomed to be lyrics for another lovesick Taylor Swift song.

They broke up over Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” And in a way they both had it right.

Elon did not respect the art of the politically possible. Getting a super-tenuous Republican majority to pass, well, anything is near-impossible. Getting the bill through took mastery of intimidation, seduction and deal-making. Don’t underestimate the Donald.

Likewise, Trump had no respect for Elon’s alarm over debt. Without true budgetary reform soon, the nation will run over a cliff, potentially ending this near-250-year experiment in self-governance. Politicians have no incentive to face this fiscally unsustainable path that will destroy us. It’s enough to drive a rich guy who can do simple math nuts.

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Rich guys can buy frivolous things. Instead of a super-yacht or a losing sports franchise, Elon is going to buy his own political party. It’s been done before, and it almost never ends well.

I don’t know how to send rockets to Mars, build a global satellite communications network, or create a revolution of robot cars. But I do know government doesn’t run like private enterprise. The incentives are all different.

Diffused taxpayers have little political influence, especially the yet-to-be-born ones who will be stuck paying for our spending spree. Insatiable and ravenous concentrated special-interests hold most all power.

Politics is the art of addition, not subtraction. To build a political movement, and particularly to build a political party, people need to come together for a common cause, for something. Ross Perot’s Reform Party experiment is instructive. His supporters knew what they didn’t want, the usual two parties, but they couldn’t agree on what they did want.

A political movement must have a shared goal, a clear finish line, an end zone where you can spike the football. The original Republican Party wanted abolition. The gay movement wanted marriage equality. Elon Musk’s America Party’s purpose seems to be, “we hate both parties.”

“We hate both of them” is a feeling, not a political goal. It is not a vision. If Elon wants a party that is fiscally conservative yet socially liberal and proven to spoil elections, he need look no further than the Libertarian Party. It’s been around for half-a-century, legally set up and ready to roll in every state.

Elon, you took over Twitter and turned it into X instead of building a brand-new platform from scratch. This isn’t much different.

The Libertarian Party is dysfunctional. Libertarians would rather win an argument than an election. That’s a particular shame in Colorado given a small-l libertarian sensibility that runs through most voters here. Colorado is a pro-abortion, pro-gay, pro-weed state but when voting on issues we’re not pro-tax, pro-regulation or pro-crime (it’s just our progressive Democrat elected officials are).

Like the Libertarian Party, the America Party, should it get off the ground, will not find much success in Colorado. The biggest hurdle will be Musk himself. Colorado’s Trump haters, which is most of our swing voters, will never forgive Elon for his bromance and helping Trump win in the first place. The Trump faithful will never support a party formed by a man who publicly went after their hero. Elon’s party will be disliked from both sides.

And thanks to the media chorus, most Colorado swing voters will also see his DOGE experiment as a net negative, needlessly disrupting all those wonderful bureaucrats, paper-pushers and scientists who exist to tell us the sky is falling, thus we need more scientists.

Coloradans are past political parties. They’re not just sick of the two major ones. They’re sick of party politics altogether.

When, not if, Colorado jettisons its two-party political primary system, independent candidates will become mainstream.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.