Trump’s Crazed Midnight Tirade Over Musk’s Unpopularity Shows Weakness
Trump hates green energy—but he loves Teslas, which he’s now pathetically pleading with his followers to buy as a show of loyalty and devotion to Elon Musk.
Donald Trump absolutely despises green energy. He regularly boasts that he is killing the “green new scam,” which means he’s terminating as many of his predecessor’s investments in renewable energy as he can. That could have an immensely detrimental impact, leading to far fewer electric vehicles on our roads—and far fewer factory jobs constructing them.
But after careful deliberation about what truly serves the national interest, Trump has now made one considered exception to his dislike of green technologies. Early Tuesday morning, just after midnight, Trump unleashed a wild rant endorsing Elon Musk’s signature electric vehicle. Trump pledged to buy a Tesla himself as a “show of confidence” in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whose actions have grown ever more destructive and politically toxic.
This bizarre eruption is worth dwelling on, because it opens a window on the perils of what political theorists describe as our national descent into “clientelist” rule. It attempts to reduce the federal government’s actions and functions to instruments for rewarding friends and punishing enemies. This mode of governing is not just diametrically opposed to the ideals of liberal democracy; it may also be producing unexpected political vulnerabilities for Trump.
He erupted as follows:
To Republicans, Conservatives, and all great Americans, Elon Musk is “putting it on the line” in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s “baby,” in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for.
Trump concluded of Musk: “Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???”
Why does Trump care about Tesla’s sales, anyway? Most crudely, Trump doesn’t like it when charts and metrics reflecting on his presidency go in the wrong direction. Right now, Trump is contending with charts showing the markets tanking over his tariffs, charts showing his net approval sliding, and now, charts showing Tesla’s stock plummeting. Charts going down look weak. Charts going up look strong. If Trump can goose Tesla sales upward with a single tweet, that will show he is winning. Charts going up make Trump look very, very powerful!
But beyond this, Trump’s endorsement of Teslas should be understood in the context of Trump’s assault on former President Joe Biden’s efforts to decarbonize our economy. Trump is moving to roll back federal subsidies for electric vehicles, attempting to cripple plans to build charging stations nationwide, and reversing tailpipe pollution regulations meant to encourage the E.V. transition.
According to a new Repeat Project study, all this could cause E.V. sales to drop by 40 percent in 2030, relative to Biden’s policies. That could mean as many as eight million fewer E.V.s and plug-in hybrids on our roads by that date, and a steep drop in the percentage of light vehicles sales that are E.V.s—meaning more carbon emissions.
Those policies could perhaps theoretically hurt Tesla as well. But Musk, whose companies enjoy billions of dollars in federal contracts, is already extensively benefiting from Trump’s governing: His firings in many cases have hobbled ongoing oversight of Musk’s business empire.
Now Trump is using the power of the presidential bully pulpit to encourage people to buy electric vehicles that happen to be the leading product of his top billionaire crony and campaign benefactor—as a display of loyalty to both of them. This jarring contrast—E.V.s are bad, and the federal government must not incentivize them; but buy Teslas because Trump’s top ally deserves gratitude and devotion—shows that there’s no discernible conception of the national interest animating any of this.
Which brings us to what’s known as “clientelism” in government. As Damon Linker and Francis Fukuyama explain, under Trump we’re seeing a wholesale retreat from the ideal of the impersonal, bureaucratic state that theoretically treats all citizens as equals and operates out of some conception of what’s in the public interest. It’s founded on the ideal of what Linker calls “depersonalized bureaucratic rationality.” Even if this is not always achieved, it is nonetheless held up as an ideal to be met. It’s a great human accomplishment that underpins high living standards in modern, complex societies.
Trump is dispensing with all that, including explicitly scrapping the ideal itself. Instead, he’s instituting a system based on favoritism and graft, while openly sabotaging procedures designed to safeguard neutrality in public service. Trump’s undisguised vow to shape energy and tax policy to benefit wealthy donors, his firing of inspectors general who are insufficiently dutiful to him, his mass purges of civil servants to give way to loyalists, his selection of top law enforcement officials who openly promise to target his enemies—all these reflect this change. As Fukuyama notes, it’s all “characteristic of modern-day authoritarianism,” which regards “legal institutions as obstacles.”
Musk’s ascension represents a striking twist to all this. Trump has delegated him extraordinary power over the government, yet he is almost entirely unfettered from mechanisms of basic accountability. Trump’s rule is often described as “personalist” as well as “clientelist”—in which Trump is synonymous with the state—but the government is now shaped around the personal interests and whims of not one man but two.
What Trump has discovered is that his own public standing is yoked to Musk’s. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has observed that in empowering Musk, Trump is putting his presidency in the hands of a figure “who is accountable to no one but himself,” and if the consequences of his DOGE cuts strike, “Musk can walk away,” leaving the mess with Trump and the GOP.
I’d add that we’re already seeing evidence of this dynamic. In a recent Oval Office meeting, Trump agency heads angrily ripped into Musk, complaining that his cuts were imposing undue burdens on their agencies. What this really meant was that Trump’s own agency heads were admitting—privately, of course—that Musk’s hatchet-wielding is threatening to unleash unforeseen disasters on the public, and they don’t want to be the ones held accountable for them.
Trump notoriously does not believe polls. But one metric he pays attention to is business success. The president knows his fortunes are now inextricably entangled with whatever Musk authors, and the stories about Tesla sales tanking are a metric of Musk’s failings that are clearly cutting deep with Trump. As his angry midnight rant displays, he knows that metric is very much going in the wrong direction.
Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimed book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.
