Donald Trump and Elon Musk Are Driving America Over the Edge

On Tuesday, Donald Trump shilled for Tesla on the White House lawn, reading what seemed to be a sales pitch for Elon Musk’s electric car brand. He did this as a show of support for his billionaire buddy amid what he described as the “very unfair” treatment of the world’s richest man.

The display was profoundly pathetic and brazenly corrupt. But the president may turn a profit from his spokesman gig: As the New York Times reported Wednesday, Musk is expected to pour another $100 million into the coffers of Trump’s political operation, a massive and “unheard-of” contribution from a White House staffer.

But then again, as the Times notes, the arrangement between Musk and Trump is itself unprecedented.

Musk—whose businesses have been propped up by nearly $40 billion in government contracts, as a Washington Post analysis last month found—essentially bought his way into Trump’s administration, and has used his ambiguous role as “efficiency” czar to recklessly gut the federal government, including parts of it that were in charge of regulating his companies. Trump, in turn, has used the purge to consolidate power, with Musk acting as a kind of enforcer for the president’s autocratic takeover of the US government.

Because it’s been so mutually beneficial for the two parties involved, it has endured in a way previous Trump governing alliances haven’t—even as Musk’s power and conduct appear to rankle other Cabinet loyalists. “Wow!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday. “People are loving Elon, a GREAT PATRIOT.”

Polling and angry constituents at Republican town halls would suggest otherwise. A new CNN survey, which also found broad disapproval of Trump’s handling of the economy, showed Musk’s approval nearly 20 points underwater, with only 35% viewing the DOGE chief favorably. Almost two thirds said Musk has “neither the right experience nor the right judgment to make changes to the way the government works.” Evidently, indiscriminate firings of federal workers—some of which he scrambled to hire back—and jumping around like a jackass, sometimes with a bedazzled chainsaw, do not foster trust.

The Musk backlash has bruised Tesla stocks, which have tumbled recently in the market downturn Trump precipitated with his foolhardy trade war and his casual suggestion that the United States could fall into a recession this year. It’s also led to protests at Tesla facilities, which Trump suggested Tuesday—as he supposedly purchased one of the vehicles outside the White House—would be treated as domestic terrorism. “Let me tell you, you do it to Tesla, you do it to any company, we’re going to catch you,” Trump said. “You’re going to go through hell.”

That can hardly be taken as an empty threat these days. Last weekend, federal agents arrested legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil at night on the campus of Columbia University, where the Palestinian-born 30-year-old had led protests against the US support for Israel’s war in Gaza. He was taken in front of his pregnant wife, an American citizen who was also threatened with arrest and was not immediately aware where he was being detained, and threatened with deportation on the flimsy pretext that he had engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” It was the “first arrest of many to come,” Trump promised.

But even a White House official acknowledged that the detention had no legal basis. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” the official told The Free Press, openly admitting that the case is meant to be a “blueprint” for future crackdowns on protest and the First Amendment. If the Trump administration gets away with it in this case, it will have broad authority to quash dissent.

The legal system will have its say, starting Wednesday when Khalil’s case goes before the judge who halted his expulsion. But the Trump administration has shown little regard for the separation of powers thus far, flouting court rulings in some instances and trampling over the legislative branch—with the blessing, of course, of most congressional Republicans, who have seemed only too happy to outsource the difficult work of lawmaking to Trump and his executive pen. It is hardly hyperbolic, at this point, to wonder if Trump will respect judicial orders—and if anyone with power in the first branch of government will do anything if he doesn’t.

Any Republicans with an inclination to push back would certainly be doing so at the expense of any political ambitions they harbor at this point: Musk’s latest infusion to the pockets of groups aligned with Trump—who, at least for now, is barred from running for reelection by the Constitution—will surely be used, in no small part, as a weapon of sorts to keep members in line. Adhere to Trump, and they may see some of that Musk money flow into their own piggy-banks. Break with him, and it may be used to prop up primary challengers, a threat that already seems to have gotten skeptical Republicans to approve Trump’s dangerous Cabinet picks, as seen in Thom Tillis and Joni Ernst coming around on Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary and physician Bill Cassidy ultimately voting to confirm vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

To this point, Republicans have put their interests—and Trump’s—above those of the country at every turn, and have given little indication that they have the willingness or courage to do so in the near future. And, in a matter of weeks, they’ve allowed this nation to go to some previously unthinkable places.

The scene outside the White House Tuesday summed it all up: Two wealthy demagogues using public posts for self-interest, while threatening anyone who would dare treat them in a way they regard as unfair—their avarice and illiberalism all in plain sight. “Wow,” Trump said, getting into the driver’s seat of a Model S with Musk. “That’s beautiful.”