For eight years, Democrats saw Donald Trump as the most toxic brand in politics, a singular figure who unified their disparate factions and filled their political coffers with campaign contributions. The limits of that strategy became evident in November.
They are now turning their attention to a new supervillain: Elon Musk.
In the early weeks of the second Trump administration, Democrats are seeking to highlight the prominence of Musk, the polarizing technology mogul, in the new administration.
The strategy is the first sign of unified opposition for a rudderless and leaderless Democratic Party. As I recently reported with my colleague Reid Epstein, Democrats do not agree on a vision for the future, on what issues to prioritize or on how to confront a Trump administration that is carrying out its right-wing agenda with head-spinning speed.
So as their party struggles to settle on a message against Trump, Democrats have turned to Musk as an easier — and far more politically vulnerable — proxy.
Attacking a ‘puppet master’
Since Trump has returned to the White House, Musk has dispatched a fleet of young men from his companies to gain access to closely held financial and data systems, shutter specific programs and encourage federal employees to quit their jobs. He has used X — his own giant social media platform — to shame and attack those who have tried to block his efforts.
Liberal activists once waved signs depicting cartoonish mops of orange hair. Now, demonstrators outside government buildings carry hand-painted placards announcing that “nobody elected Elon.” On Tuesday, outside the Office of Personnel Management, protesters chanted: “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Elon Musk has got to go!”
And in Congress, Democratic lawmakers representing the party’s progressive and centrist wings alike have cast Musk as the chief architect, executor and beneficiary of the new administration, portraying him as an unelected oligarch who is steamrolling the Constitution and stealing from taxpayers.
“In the building behind me, Elon Musk is seizing power from the American people,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, told protesters outside the Treasury Department this week. “He is here to seize power for himself. We are here to fight that.”
The next day, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, offered a meandering explanation on his social media account of how Musk posed a major danger to American democracy and voters.
“The guy who’s running the show right now — Elon Musk — needs to take control of America’s foreign policy in order to pad his pockets,” said Murphy, who has emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of the new administration.
Even Representative Jared Golden of Maine, a moderate Democrat who works hard to appeal to Trump’s supporters, posted on X that Musk seemed to be stepping on the president’s toes.
“My constituents, and a majority of this country, put Trump in the White House, not this unelected, weirdo billionaire,” he wrote.
On Friday, Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader who has urged Democrats to be judicious in their attacks on the new administration, made it clear that he saw this one as a potential winner. He described Musk as an “unelected, unaccountable, out-of-control billionaire puppet master” as he rolled out legislation that he said would protect taxpayers’ personal data from Musk and his team’s incursions into government payment systems.
Musk dismissed the Democratic accusations as “hysterical” in a post on his social media network. “This is how you know that @DOGE is doing work that really matters,” he wrote.
A polling dip for Musk
For almost a decade, Trump has campaigned as a populist, promising to take down a political establishment that ignores the concerns of working-class Americans. Democrats have spent much of that time trying, and largely failing, to argue that what Trump actually cares about is protecting the country’s richest families — and using government to enrich his own.
In Musk, Democrats see a fresh opportunity to undercut a central piece of Trump’s political appeal.
Some early indicators suggest that such tactics are wearing a bit thin with voters, including Republicans. A series of polls since the election have shown declining support for Musk’s intervening in government.
The share of Republicans who want Musk to have “a lot” of influence on the Trump administration has declined 20 percentage points since November, to 26 percent, according to a survey from The Economist/YouGov released on Wednesday. That’s a view shared by just 6 percent of Democrats and independents.
For now, Trump appears happy to allow Musk to take the heat. Speaking to reporters this week, Trump said Musk was acting with the “approval” of the White House. He also made clear that Musk was leading the charge on the administration’s most aggressive efforts to slash the federal government.
“He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs,” Trump said. “We’re trying to shrink government, and he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else — if not better.”
A key election official eyes the new Trump era
As President Trump tightens his grip on power and openly defies the law, many Democrats have grown newly worried about how Republicans might try to reshape the country’s election system. Nick Corasaniti spoke with a man who will be at the center of that fight: Adrian Fontes, the secretary of state of Arizona and the new leader of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State.
NC: In the 2024 election, Democrats called Trump a threat to democracy, but he won fairly handily. Do voters still think of democracy as a leading issue?
AF: I don’t think he won fairly handily. Across the board, folks who were running on democracy issues did pretty well. Americans like having choices. They like having actual elections, and they like having political power in their own hands, not in the hands of a few folk who buy the ear of certain high-placed politicians.
A lot of national Democrats are signaling that they want to focus heavily on the economy and kitchen-table issues. Are you worried that they won’t hammer home arguments about democracy and voting rights?
This is more than just about the economy, though I think that will probably be one of the things we talk about. But it’s also going to be about how government functions. The assault against governance generally is assault against democracy. You’ve got unelected billionaires, and they’re wiping out, or pretending to completely eviscerate, some of our government agencies. We’ve never seen that in the history of the nation.
Have any of Trump’s election proposals particularly alarmed you?
Dismantling the part of the F.B.I. that monitored foreign influence in our elections, that is a little bit concerning. Are you basically, from the White House, inviting foreign governments to interfere in our elections?
Running elections is supposed to be apolitical. Yet the 2020 election thrust partisan politics onto that role. Trust in elections remains low. How can that be fixed?
We’ve got to act like grown-ups. We’ve got to stop pretending like you have to have absolutely puritanical eunuchs running our elections who have no interest at all whatsoever in the outcome of the elections.
Election administrators can do their duty while independently maintaining their political preferences. And that, for generations and generations, has been the American way.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
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