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Musk literally gave Trump a script for desperate ‘Tesla ad’
(www.thedailybeast.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Elmo thinks this will help sales? Maybe among MAGA, but overall, I think this would accelerate the decline. Maybe RFK jr lent him a brain worm.
I find the idea of Elon trying to pitch his cars to Trump's cult so fucking funny, because these are the exact same people who roll coal in their pickups and intentionally block electric chargers just to stick it to anyone who likes having a habitable planet. They've made hating electric cars part of their identity.
Which means there's two possible outcomes here, and both are amazing:
This whole sales pitch falls dead flat against the wall of anti-environment propaganda these assholes have willingly swallowed whole. Elon continues to piss off the only people who were ever going to buy his products in order to pander to the only people who were never going to buy his products and Tesla collapses completely, taking most of Musk's fortune with it.
The MAGA cult download the software update en masse and suddenly decide they love electric cars now, resulting in a massive expansion in electric vehicle use, huge amounts of additional electric vehicle infrastructure, and a withering away of traditional gas vehicle infrastructure in a change that will ultimately become very hard to reverse even after Musk inevitably falls out of Trump's favour.
There's also option 2b, which is that MAGA refuses to go electric, so Trump is forced to switch out every government car to a Tesla, which results in government departments installing huge amounts of supporting equipment to manage this new electric car fleet, to the point where switching back would become a ridiculous notion. The whole US government now uses electric cars.
I want to see Elon face plant so bad, but even if he doesn't, the mass electric car-ification of America is a pretty fucking cool alternative.
Considering they adapt to tesla. A problem I see is them removing any need to have a common infrastructure to support all electrical vehicles. And just have charging stations and such that only work with tesla. So people are semi forced to buy it because government made infrastructure for it and other electric car companies can't use that and can't build all that for their cars. Don't be that optimistic when they are literally there only for their benefits
Sure, this defacto would make Tesla the standard electric car for the US. But I'll note that the rest of the car world is already adopting the Tesla plug as their physical standard, so a future government (assuming you guys have any) could just pass a law that says Tesla cannot restrict the use of their charging stations, or add any extra fees for non-Tesla vehicles.
And either way, the mass conversion of the US to electric vehicles is still a good consolation prize, even if it locks in a regional monopoly for Tesla. Sometimes you take the wins where you can get them.
I'm also curious to see if Trump's cult leader power can overcome decades of oil and gas brainwashing. Conservatives have proven they'll quickly throw away their beliefs when Trump tells them to, but it's not always reliable.
For example, in 2020 conservatives were all for Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" to find a COVID vaccine. But as soon as Biden won and the vaccines rolled out in 2021, many conservatives took an antivax stance. Later, Trump got booed at one of his rallies for suggesting that people get vaccinated.
So he can steer the cult agenda, but not always successfully. I guess we'll see how this plays out.
Yeah, my feeling is this one will fail. While they can paint the backlash against Tesla as the "radical left", the adoption of electric cars more broadly is still very much seen as a lefty, pro-environment kind of thing. Since they're still very much against all those things, I think it'll be hard to square that with the idea that Teslas are suddenly great.
Plus, even his base don't really seem to love Elon all that much.
Looks like TSLA is up 8% today. So seems to have solved Elon's immediate problem of the stock tanking.
I imagine many MAGA diehards have been bled broke already buying all of Trump’s scam items from watches, sneakers, bibles, meme coins and whatnot.
That's why they have financing at 29.9%
I’ve been saying option 2 was in full force after Elmo went right wing years ago. You see it here in Arizona. The Trump right wingers are not principled outside of religion, and even then there’s an argument against that. If there’s a lack of principals, and their opinions are handed to them by Fox News and Newsmax, then option 2 is entirely conceivable. Anecdotally, I see a lot more conservatives going electric now that they have a brand that shares their values. Anyone remember how right wing people hated social media a decade ago? They didn’t really hate social media, they hated that their views weren’t popular there.
Let's not forget that most of MAGA stand behind Trump because they can't afford eggs and they think he's going to fix it.
Most of them can't afford a brand new $50k Silverado, there's no way they'll pass a credit check for an $80k Cybertruck.
lol yeah this is only going to speed up the free-fall of the stock price