The TV showed President Donald Trump on the White House lawn with his unelected Deputy President Elon Musk.
They were showing off electric vehicles made by Tesla, a Musk car company currently under much criticism. Trump himself bought one, although he often rants against “electric vehicle mandates” and generally rides in the back of a chauffeured limousine.
A few days later, again on TV, we saw scenes of orange flames engulfing a row of new Teslas in a Las Vegas parking lot. So Fox News Channel interviewed the international oligarch Musk, a South African by birth who is said to be the wealthiest person in the world.
Musk’s campaign cash helped Trump regain the White House. Currently, he is Trump’s hatchet man for firing government employees without due process through the recently invented “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Democrats, liberals, progressives and even a few conservative Republicans fear DOGE also could slash entitlements for Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Musk spoke while standing in front of the White House.
“I always thought that the left, Democrats, were supposed to be the party of empathy, the party of caring,” Musk told Fox, “and yet they’re burning down cars, they’re fire-bombing dealerships. They’re firing bullets into dealerships. They’re smashing up Teslas.”
Notice the clever conflation of both fact and unproven assumption in Musk’s wild accusation. Because Democrats are among Musk’s many critics, he assumes Democrats (a.k.a. “The Left”) must be the ones attacking Musk’s automotive products to protest his politics.
While that could be, the vandals might also be loyal government workers, unexpectedly fired for no good reason; or maybe they are needy military veterans, wary of Musk’s benefit cuts; or they could be bigots who hate presumably legal immigrants like Musk and fear his Third Reich salute.
They may even see him — in their paranoid, progressive, woke way — as a vandal from a foreign country, a cosmopolitan globalist bent on reshaping his adopted nation. They may resent his on-stage “humor” of waving a large chain-saw before a cheering, right-wing mob.
When I reached the Tesla showroom in Troy’s Somerset Collection mall last week, I noticed no demonstrators or vandals — and hardly any cars. There were two Teslas indoors for what used to be called tire-kicking and a few outdoors for test drives.
Greeting me was a young, enthusiastic salesman named Adrian, who told me business was good.
“Sold five last week,” he said.
Why, you might ask, would a skeptical liberal like me shop for a controversial car like a Tesla with so many other brands — electric and gasoline-powered — to choose from? It just seemed fair. I am in the market for a new car, preferably a mid-size sedan that doesn’t guzzle gasoline.
So I wanted to do my homework. I will probably shop a half-dozen brands and take a few test drives. It seemed logical to begin with one of the moment’s most-discussed vehicles. If you are car-shopping and column-writing in Detroit, Tesla checks a lot of boxes.
I explained this to Adrian, who swung the car out onto the roads around the mall. After telling me it could accelerate 0-to-60 miles per hour in less than five seconds, he proved it at the change of a traffic light from red to green.
The car jumped forward with a hop that felt like a ride at an amusement park or the takeoff of an airplane. I could not deny the tingle in my gut. I noticed my salesman looking for my reaction.
“This is a man’s toy, as well as a car,” Adrian said, with a smile and a nod. “Once you get into a Tesla, it’s kind of hard to get out.” (And I thought to myself: Good thing they didn’t have this technology in my first car, a 1965 Corvair I bought used for $500).
We discussed mileage range (300 to 363 miles per battery charge, he said) and various methods of charging. In response to my question, my salesman told me this Tesla uses eight television cameras to find blind spots and avoid crashes.
And Adrian added the car had only 20 moving parts compared to 2,000 in a gasoline car. He said all parts of this Tesla were manufactured and assembled in Fremont, California, and Austin, Texas.
We did not discuss how Tesla’s stock price has fallen by half recently or how Tesla’s Cybertrucks are being recalled because a glued panel might fly loose and cause crashes. (I was shopping its smaller sibling, labeled a compact.)
We did not discuss how Musk’s investments in places like China could create conflicts of interest as his political footprint grows. And we did not discuss how Trump’s determination to roll back environmental rules will damage demand for cleaner cars and hurt their resale value.
After our ride, Adrian showed me how the car “thinks for itself” by backing into a narrow parking space automatically without the driver even touching the wheel. He showed me not only the rear trunk but also the front “frunk.”
Voila! Front storage like my 1974 VW Beetle ($2,500 then), my first new car. Tesla’s battery, he said, is hidden beneath the undercarriage — well-balanced and a hedge, he said, against rollovers.
Adrian told me he could “get me into” this stealth gray Tesla 2025 Model 3 for $39,540, with the tax credit incentive that Trump — perhaps paradoxically — is trying to kill. Or, I could lease the same car for 24 months for $1,000 down, $3,000 at signing and a fee of $350 per month.
“What’s not to love about this vehicle?” Adrian asked.
As we know around Detroit, Musk is not the first auto tycoon to swerve outside his lane into politics and culture wars. The original Henry Ford — brilliant at manufacturing automobiles — tried to end World War I on a “Peace Ship”; ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate from Michigan; and backed antisemitic publications.
Tesla is a different kind of car and Musk is a different type of tycoon but he, too, is megalomaniacal. His rise to power is an example of what happens when wealth brazenly buys into government power to reshape a culture.
Musk makes an appealing product amid appalling politics; my car shopping will continue.
