Trump’s U-turn on Tesla betrays a paranoid President
Trump’s Tesla U-turn is not the product of an economically literate president, it is the product of a paranoid one, writes Eliot Wilson
Last week, in a touching, almost paternal act of solidarity with his cost-cutting billionaire ally Elon Musk, President Trump purchased a cherry-red Tesla Model S (list price starts at $74,990). He declared it “beautiful”, though admitted he would not be able to drive it himself: the secret service does not allow current or former presidents to drive on public roads as a matter of security.
Trump takes a U-turn in EV
The President was motivated to make this public demonstration as “a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American”. Recently I wrote about the collapse in Tesla sales in Europe, partly a reaction against Musk’s political activities, but it represents a deeper problem. The company has lost $800bn from its share value since December, and there are widespread campaigns by those who dislike Musk’s Washington activities to boycott the company, including “Tesla Takedown” protests at dealerships.
This kind of activism angers Trump. He told reporters, “I said, ‘You know, Elon, I don’t like what’s happening to you, and Tesla’s a great company”. On his Truth Social platform, he let rip: “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.”
There have also been reports of vandalism against Tesla showrooms and vehicles, which Trump has announced will be treated as “domestic terrorism”, promising the perpetrators, with characteristic restraint, “we’re going to catch you and you’re going to go through hell”.
For Donald Trump to be standing foursquare behind an electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer demonstrates quite an intellectual journey. In 2023, he accused President Joe Biden of selling American autoworkers “down the river with his ridiculous all Electric Car Hoax” and called EVs “the idea of the Radical Left Fascists, Marxists, & Communists”. A few months later, at a rally in Iowa, he ridiculed them, saying “They don’t go far. They cost a fortune.”
Trump does not have an “economic” policy in any meaningful sense. He sees a range of rivals who treat him and the United States “unfairly”
If that is an example of Trump’s ideological flexibility, his outrage at consumers boycotting Tesla for political reasons is hypocrisy of a staggering degree. This is a president who has used tariffs – ”the most beautiful word in the dictionary” – to force Colombia to accept the repatriation of illegal migrants; sees them as a tool to compel Mexico to stop migrants and the opioid fentanyl crossing the US border; and has introduced them against Canada, ostensibly to combat an almost entirely imagined influx of more opioids, but more likely to destabilise a country he has publicly said he wants to annex.
How paranoia steers Trump’s politics
The most brutal demonstration of Trump’s willingness to use America’s economic power was his suspension first of military aid then of intelligence-sharing with Ukraine. There was no pretence about the purpose of this: it was to force the Ukrainian government to accept the “peace” negotiations between the United States and Russia. The President’s special envoy, Keith Kellogg, said: “The best way I can describe it is sort of like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose, you got their attention”.
Donald Trump would not be the first bully to be outraged by coercion being turned back on him. But this goes deeper than that, to his whole world view. Tariffs and boycotts are not part of an economic policy, because he does not have an “economic” policy in any meaningful sense. He sees a range of rivals who treat him and the United States “unfairly”.
These have included at various times China, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, the European Union, NATO, the US judicial system, the Republican Party, The Washington Post and Megyn Kelly. Only five months into his first term of office in 2017, he complained that “no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly” than him.
Trump’s behaviour is fundamentally shaped by this defensive paranoia. At every turn, he must not only work to counteract the policies of a malign world but also seek to punish it, to teach it a lesson. People who oppose Musk oppose him, and any views he may have had on electric vehicles are secondary at best to the larger threat.
As Donald Trump’s presidency rolls on – we are only eight weeks in – we all have to understand what drives him. It is not ideology or economics or trade. It is the fact that everyone is out to get him.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and strategic adviser