As tribes continue to battle the Trump administration for the coronavirus relief they were promised by their trustee, is there another CARES Act dispute brewing in America?

It certainly looks like it, judging from the way Twitter lit up on the evening of May 6, 2020. It started when Axl Rose, the famed frontman of recently reunited Guns N’ Roses, criticized Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, whose handling of the $8 billion coronavirus relief fund remains the subject of litigation in federal court and of criticism in Indian Country and on Capitol Hill.

“It’s official!” singer and occasional pianist Rose wrote in a post that has garnered more than 79,000 likes and more than 10,000 retweets as of the time of the screenshot above on the morning of May 7. “Whatever anyone may have previously thought of Steve Mnuchin he’s officially an asshole.”

It’s official! Whatever anyone may have previously thought of Steve Mnuchin he’s officially an asshole.

— Axl Rose (@axlrose) May 6, 2020

Rose, notably, did not mention Mnuchin through Twitter’s “@” function. Nor did he attempt to draw anyone else into what was then a rather vague yet pointed post.

That didn’t stop Mnuchin from getting involved even as he faces off against tribal nations at one court hearing on May 7 and more of them in another one on May 8.

“What have you done for the country lately?” Mnuchin responded. He followed it with an emoji of a flag that looked like America’s good ole red, white and blue.

Except it wasn’t. It was the flag for Liberia. Twitter noticed. So did Rose.

“My bad I didn’t get we’re hoping 2 emulate Liberia’s economic model,” Rose clapped back.

Mnuchin, whose short “Following” list includes U2 along with a bunch of Republicans and fellow Trump acolytes, eventually deleted his Liberian patriot post. He replaced it with one showing the flag of the country he swore to protect — hand on the Bible and all.

What have you done for the country lately? 🇺🇸

— Steven Mnuchin (@stevenmnuchin1) May 7, 2020

He also used Twitter’s reply function, making sure that everyone knows what he’s talking about while the Trump administration promotes its “whole-of-government” approach to the coronavirus, which the White House says includes the first Americans.

By the time the dispute attracted even more attention, Rose had already gotten ahead of the game by explaining to his newly expanded following what prompted his original missive, which was only the third on his Twitter account since the “official” start — at least in the eyes of the president — of the pandemic.

Rose was upset about Mnuchin encouraging people to travel domestically: “but on the real unlike this admin I’m not responsible for 70k+ deaths n’ unlike u I don’t hold a fed gov position of responsibility 2 the American people n’ go on TV tellin them 2 travel the US during a pandemic.”

Mnuchin’s remarks, incidentally, aired on Fox Business on May 4, the same the Department of the Treasury finally formalized a distribution formula — sort of — for the $8 billion coronavirus relief fund that was promised to tribal governments more than a month ago. The announcement about the distribution of a portion of the money was made on the morning of May 5.

The rest, as they say, is history.