Elon Musk achieved platinum meme status and got ridiculed on Saturday Night Live for gleefully leaping onstage at a Trump rally over the weekend. But a photo of Trump glowering as the Tesla tycoon flung himself skyward was far from Musk’s most egregious moment at that rally.
What’s more disturbing is Musk’s hard-launch of a new line of attack against Kamala Harris and the Democrats, one that should be familiar to anyone paying close attention to this election.
During his speech, Elon Musk claimed that Trump must win in order “to preserve democracy in America,” predicting that if Harris wins instead, “this will be the last election.” It’s the exact obverse of the terms some Democrats employ to frame the dangers of Trump winning—and it’s a perfect encapsulation of Musk’s reckless, childish approach to politics.
Elon Musk: And then make sure they actually do vote. If they don't, this will be the last election. That's my prediction. pic.twitter.com/dEEUhdZdwM
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 5, 2024
Musk provided no evidence in his speech for why, if Harris won, this election would be America’s last. When he previously floated this idea on X, however, he did indeed build in an explanation. On September 29, Musk tweeted the same “last election” rhetoric from the rally, adding that “If even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible, that would be about 2 million new legal voters in 4 years.” He went on to suggest without proof, in the same voluminous tweet, that the Biden administration has been flying in, and fast-tracking citizenship for, asylum seekers in swing states, in an effort to change the electoral map and create “a one-party state.”
In other words, Elon Musk’s professed reason for why a hypothetical Harris administration would mean the end of democracy in America is essentially just The Great Replacement Theory. While Democrats have called Trump a threat to democracy because he still won’t concede losing the 2020 election, and occasionally embraces the title of “dictator,” Musk is doing it because of a radical conspiracy theory—one that was once considered a fringe fantasy until people like Musk and Tucker Carlson mainstreamed it in recent years.
Of course, Musk’s stated justification for using this language might not be the whole story. The real reason is probably much simpler: that it’s a standard troll-move to simply accuse the other side of doing whatever they’ve accused your side of doing. (This also happens to be a classic Trump tactic.) According to recent national polling from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 81% of likely voters in the U.S. believe that democracy is under major threat. If both sides are hurling end-of-democracy rhetoric at those voters, it dilutes the potency of the accusation and confuses the issue. Any undecided folks encountering the allegation on both sides are liable to throw up their hands and dismiss both charges as equally overblown—even though one side’s charge has no basis in fact.
The timing couldn’t have been more chaotic, either. While Harris has largely favored a “We’re not going back” message over Biden’s “Democracy is on the ballot” approach since assuming the nomination back in July, she’s recently emphasized Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after he lost the 2020 election. If Musk continues with his counterattack while stumping for Trump, voters may be saturated for the next four weeks with the sound and fury of anti-democracy accusations on all fronts.
What’s also alarming about Elon Musk’s rhetoric is that many prominent Republicans, including the two at the top of the ticket, blame Democrats’ identical rhetoric for inspiring recent assassination attempts on Trump. But if their premise is that this kind of talk is beyond the pale, isn’t Musk knowingly endangering Harris’s life? (It wouldn’t be the first time—Musk previously tweeted that “no one is even trying to assassinate” Biden or Harris, a tweet which brought Musk to the Secret Service’s attention.) It’s not as if he is unaware that Republicans have painted Democrats’ rhetoric in that light; on X, Musk has accused Dems of “actively encouraging people to kill Trump.” He either believes that making such allegations might incite direct action, and he’s still doing it anyway, or he doesn’t believe it, and he’s inadvertently exposing the GOP’s blame game as a bad-faith attempt to shame Democrats into dropping one of their talking points.
Considering his recent actions, Musk has made it abundantly clear he’s brought his ferocious, fact-avoidant X persona to the campaign trail, rather than the savvy entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX. And with just four weeks remaining in the race, the worst may be yet to come.
Over the weekend, Musk reportedly annexed the X handle “America” and started using it for his own well-funded pro-Trump Super PAC, America PAC. He is now directing users to @America in the bio of his account, the most followed account on the entire platform. Previously, Musk took the X handle “X” from its original owner, but that appeared to be a clear-cut business decision. The same could not be said about appropriating the @America handle in order to boost Trump.
It’s hard not to see a metaphor in the world’s richest man claiming America for his own purposes, just because he can. As Musk himself might say, “Extremely concerning!”