The Corruption Being Obscured by Trump’s Tesla Spectacle

This week, as the government teetered on the edge of a shutdown, as Trump’s tariff wars threatened to pancake the stock market and crash millions of Americans’ retirement investments, and as consumer confidence plummeted to its lowest levels since the onset of Covid-19, the president of the United States did an impression of a used-car salesman on the White House lawn.

In yet another of those surely-you’re-fucking-joking moments of the current administration, Trump took time out of his busy day wrecking democracy and the economy to hawk Teslas, the OGs of the electric vehicle universe. The same man who has spent years lambasting electric vehicles, and whose administration is moving heaven and earth to gut any and all government investments in EV infrastructure and in climate change mitigation. Why? Trump hoped his purchase would reverse the slump in Tesla’s fortunes that has followed the onset of a global consumer boycott. (In the UK, activists have taken to sticking “swasticar” decals on the unfortunate vehicles.)

And so it was that with five Teslas brought to the White House, America’s corrupter-in-chief put aside all legal and ethical restraints on public officials using their office to financially benefit particular corporations or individuals and, with Elon Musk sitting next to him, livestreamed his fulsome praise on Musk’s X social media site. Not only did the corrupter-in-chief declare the cars to be very fine machines, he also announced that the boycott was “illegal” and that he would seek to define protests against Tesla stores as “domestic terrorism.”

This came days after his administration announced it was pulling $400 million from Columbia University for allegedly failing to address antisemitism and arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate, and sought to deport him—despite his green card status—for his on-campus activism against the war in Gaza. In other words, Khalil was removed from his home and community and his eight-month-pregnant wife not for committing a crime but for the things he said and thought.

That’s really not too huge an intellectual leap from Article 58, which in 1926 criminalized the expression of any dissent in the Soviet Union and provided the legal justification for the populating of the gulag archipelago. But, given the lack of spine in Congress, it’s entirely possible that, after the administration finishes abducting activists with whom they disagree, regardless of their legal status, and defunding universities like Columbia for failing to protect its Jewish students from “persistent harassment,” the invertebrates Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Thune will greenlight some form of legislation to back up Trump’s fever dream of more generally and comprehensively criminalizing dissent, not just against the administration but also against corporations like Tesla.

Of course, Trump wasn’t touting Teslas out of the goodness of his heart. Musk invested more than a quarter of a billion dollars during the election to ensure Trump’s win. Arguably, it was that influx of cash and technology that got Trump over the hump in November, a mutually beneficial relationship that then ensured Musk’s access to the inner circles of decision-making in DC, and ultimately to his unprecedented position in charge of DOGE. That investment, in other words, allowed Musk the opportunity to gut public services and move an array of government functions into private entities run by… Musk. Sure enough, within weeks of DOGE firing up its chainsaws, Musk was on X denigrating the FAA’s multi-billion dollar contract with Verizon and demanding that that contract instead be shifted to his companies. Within days, federal FAA funding was being sent Starlink’s way. I doubt that will be the last time Musk determines that, for a hefty fee, he is the best person to deliver vital government services.

Shortly afterwards, media reports began circulating that Musk was preparing an enormous $100 million cash infusion into Trump-controlled political organizations. The cash will provide an ongoing war chest to push the Trumpian agenda, to promote the Trumpiest of political candidates, and to primary any Republican foolish enough to critique any of Trump’s policies or statements.

Again, the chainsaw-wielding, humanitarian aid-destroying, Musk isn’t making nine figure donations because he has been suddenly overwhelmed by the altruistic impulse. These are cold, calculated investments designed to consolidate his immense political and economic power.

I would call this the I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine partnership. But that phrase, really just a bastardized translation of the Latin quid pro quo, doesn’t really do any of this self-dealing justice. What we are seeing is, quite simply, the most grotesque mutual masturbation spectacle in history.

For the brazenly corrupt Tesla endorsement, after weeks and months of other corruption and civil rights violations that have been taken to a new, terrifying level with Khalil’s arrest this week, an impeachment investigation should be well underway. And in fact, more than 250,000 people led by the group Free Speech for People are demanding exactly that. If I had my way, Trump would be impeached every single one of the more than 1,400 days left in his presidency.

Of course, he won’t be, not once, not 1,400 times, not by this Congress. He won’t be, not least because the US Supreme Court has essentially given the president the absolute powers of a medieval monarch and this man-of-no-limits is determined to take full advantage of that extraordinary decision.

But karma has its ways of eventually making itself heard. Personally, Mr. President, I’d recommend you try the self-driving function of your shiny new Tesla. I hear it’s extraordinarily reliable and never accidentally speeds up as it heads towards stationary objects.