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.
He erupted as follows:
Trump concluded of Musk: “Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???”
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 EV transition.
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.
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.
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.
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 to 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.
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