You have probably heard by now that Elon Musk is attempting to dismantle the United States federal government. But that’s not quite all of it: Musk is trying to dismantle the government’s ability to improve Americans’ lives, as well as its ability to regulate large companies. He is happy to retain all of the benefits he receives from that same government, of course, from corporate subsidies to legal protections.
You have probably also heard that it’s not all going quite to plan.
Before he bought Twitter, cozied up to Donald Trump and become arguably the world’s most powerful manchild, Musk was perhaps best known his car company, Tesla, which made electric cars cool. But with Musk now synonymous with Trumpist autocracy and broader bigotry, many liberals—who make up a more receptive market to electric vehicles than MAGA conservatives—are understandably refusing to buy his vehicles. Many are going as far as to give up those they’ve previously purchased. If you’re someone who thinks that Musk is a dangerous, arrogant and erratic charlatan, after all, are you really going to trust a consumer product produced by a company he heads? Especially one as inherently dangerous as a car. Every Tesla sold puts money in Musk’s pocket, after all, and allows his influence—political and financial—to grow.
And the losses are real. Tesla stock has declined for nine straight weeks in a row, tanking by almost one-third of its value. One Tesla backer characterized Musk’s actions at DOGE as a “brand tornado crisis moment for Musk and Tesla.”
So toxic is Musk and his orbit that some opponents to his agenda are going further, through acts of vandalism, torching Tesla cars and charging stations. In response, U.S. attorney general and Trump appointee Pam Bondi announced charges against three people—not simply for vandalism, but, she said, for “domestic terrorism.”
This is chilling stuff. Arson and property damage are crimes, and people found guilty thereof should pay a price. But that punishment should be commensurate with their offense: Vandalism against someone else’s private property—not an attack on the United States of America, and certainly not an act of terrorism. Indeed, this extreme classification seems troublingly like an effort to use the Justice Department as a private law enforcement service for Musk and his private company.
“Tesla is a peaceful company, we’ve never done anything harmful… I’ve never done anything harmful. I’ve always done productive things,” Musk said recently during a Fox News segment. “They basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud,” Musk continued of those angry at his DOGE cuts, “and they want to hurt Tesla because we are stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government. I guess they are bad people. Bad people do bad things.”
Bad people do indeed to bad things—like the richest man in the world choosing to strip services and benefits from America’s poorest, or firing scores of government workers without cause.
Americans are justifiably livid at this behavior, including many Trump voters who apparently didn’t realize that they were voting for a massive government gutting led by an unelected and unaccountable multi-billionaire. But they’re also finding that there isn’t exactly a receptive ear for their discontent. Many Republican politicians have stopped holding town halls and other public events because, well, they really don’t like having to answer—if they even have answers—for what their party is doing and abetting.
Democratic voters are even more apoplectic, and their representatives in Congress can’t seem to coalesce around a single strategy, let alone mount a meaningful resistance to the Trump onslaught.
Part of that onslaught now seems to be protecting not just the unelected Musk, but shielding his company and its products. Musk, for his part, has been cagey about what his role even is, and who, exactly, is running and working at DOGE. It seems he wants it both ways: Ultimate power with little responsibility—certainly not the public accountability that comes when you’re an official who does things the public really doesn’t like—plus the punitive power of the feds if anyone objects.
This should perhaps not be surprising from a man whose company has received billions in government subsidies, loans, contracts, and other benefits, and who still thinks he deserves big tax breaks and little oversight from the same entity helping his company to thrive. If there is one defining characteristic of the Trump White House, itself a kind of two-headed Musk-Trump hydra, it is this: A desire to turn the federal government from an entity serving the people into an entity serving only the president and his favored men.
