you don't think that trump/musk would be underhanded enough to cripple the competition for him to catch up?

The US government is clearly not interested in security of the models - otherwise they would not have only frozen the latest model (that is only a bit better than the previous), but all - and not only for US citizens, but for all people.

Given what's happening in the US, I suspect Musk is trying to slow down both companies and damage their funding. His goal is pretty obviously to get an advantage over Anthropic and OpenAI.