Trump’s speech at Republican National Convention denouncing electric vehicles betrayed Elon Musk despite his $180 million pledge, Republican strategist says
After Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly pledged $180 million ($45 million per month) to Trump’s campaign — reportedly the largest financial commitment in the presidential race, at $130 million — some speculated that the billionaire might change Trump’s mind about electric vehicles (EVs), which he hates.
“Elon is setting up Super PACs and telling donors to give money to Trump. So I think Trump, in his kind of calculus, is saying, ‘Well, I better stop caring about electric vehicles,’” said Michael Murphy, a Republican strategist and CEO of the EV Politics Project. Fortune.
But after Trump’s “bashing” of electric vehicles at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, where he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president, Murphy believes Trump “betrayed” Musk.
Trump “had backed off (in his criticism of electric vehicles for a few weeks), and then the speech came on, and one of his wide-eyed aides stabbed the teleprompter, so he gleefully launched into a big attack on electric vehicles,” Murphy said.
On Thursday night, Trump declared that his presidency would reverse the “new green scam,” including ending “the electric vehicle mandate on day one,” thereby saving “the American auto industry from total destruction” and “thousands and thousands of American customers per car.”
It’s unclear what the “electric vehicle mandate” means. Murphy, who is an expert on electric vehicles, also doesn’t know, but suggested it could refer to the Biden administration’s subsidies for vehicles, which he said have led to more manufacturing job growth now than under Trump.
“And then Trump says, ‘Well, this is all government waste.’ Well, that’s what the Chinese are doing,” Murphy said. “The Chinese wrote much bigger checks to build a huge, money-losing electric vehicle industry to compete with Americans and put them out of work. So Trump doesn’t have the political clout to understand the issues, he just gives applause speeches based on complete ignorance.”
Trump also focused on the large sums spent on electric vehicle chargers, citing a statistic that the administration spent $9 billion on eight electric vehicle chargers, which is factually incorrect (the government spent $7 billion on eight charging sites in six states, with no indication that any of them are broken).
That rhetoric could hurt Musk and his company, even though Trump did throw a half-hearted dig at the electric vehicle industry during his speech (“And if you’re going to do this all over our country, this crazy electric Band-Aid… And by the way, I’m all for electric. They have their apps.”) Musk has received billions of dollars in subsidies for several of his companies, and Trump has even previously said that Musk would be “worthless” without them because of Tesla’s safety issues with its self-driving program and Musk’s private space company, SpaceX, for launching “rockets to nowhere.”
Yet Musk himself recently called for the elimination of subsidies for the electric industry.
“This will only help Tesla,” Musk wrote on X, shortly after endorsing Trump. “And remove subsidies in all industries!”
Trump has repeatedly criticized Musk in the past, saying in 2022 that he could have said, “Get on your knees and beg” and “(Musk) would have done it.”
Now that relations between the two men are warmer, Musk has thrown his support behind Trump since the former president survived an assassination attempt last Saturday, while Trump called Musk “fantastic” in a recent post. Bloomberg Interview — Murphy hopes the world’s richest man can impress Trump.
“I think Elon Musk will have a positive influence on Trump, but it will take time,” Murphy said. “The more American voters understand that the issue of electric vehicles is a consumer choice and a jobs issue, the less they will be supportive of this kind of rhetoric. You know, it’s misleading and demagogic, and it only helps the Chinese.”
