Shiny golden shoes that retail for $300. Branded bibles. Combat-themed cologne. By now, the sight of Donald Trump shilling products is as familiar as his gravitationally improbable hairstyle or below-belt-length neckties. Most often, however, what he’s really selling is himself.
On Tuesday, Trump made a rare presidential sales pitch for a brand beyond his own, staging, on the South Lawn of the White House, a bizarre infomercial for the Tesla. In front of a scrum of reporters, he moseyed around a fleet of gleaming electric cars, like potential prizes on The Price Is Right, extolling their virtues from a scripted sales pitch. (“Everything’s computer!” he marveled at one point.)
What Trump was truly selling, though, wasn’t just Tesla, and for once it wasn’t even just himself. This time, he was selling the idea that the person most deserving of consumer empathy and cash right now is Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Don’t expect a lot of people to buy it.
The reasons the president might feel the need to come to Musk’s aid are obvious. Tesla’s stock, which hit an all-time high in December, has been tanking steadily in the months since. As the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired thousands of qualified workers, canceled popular programs, and ransacked private data since Trump’s inauguration—all while Musk remains an unelected government official—Tesla dealerships and individual car owners have become a frequent target for protesters and vandalism.
Although Musk has made the baseless claim that this backlash is being funded by George Soros, who has taken on a Thanos-like role in the conservative imagination, polling around Musk and DOGE appears to line up with the spirit of the protests and plummeting stock.
Tesla investors are souring on the company
After the publicly traded company’s shares dropped more than 15% on Monday alone, making it the worst performing stock in the S&P 500 Index, the president snapped into action. The attacks on his benefactor, who contributed more than $250 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign and countless free publicity on X, would no longer go unchecked. (It probably didn’t hurt that Musk reportedly signaled he’s interested in putting another $100 million into Trump’s political operation.)
“Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!” Trump wrote late Monday night in a lengthy post on Truth Social. “But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla.”
He signed off by announcing his intention to buy a brand-new Tesla the next day, “as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.”
At some point between then and Tuesday afternoon, the idea evolved from a social media post and subsequent car-purchase to a full-on televised infomercial from a sitting U.S. president.
The surreal event looked like a challenge from Trump’s old reality TV game show, The Apprentice, in which entrepreneurial contestants competed with kooky marketing gimmicks. It essentially amounted to a government-blessed version of one of those “Happy Honda Days” seasonal sales; a Toyotathon for Tesla.
In between rattling off features and pricing details, as if strolling through a dealership showroom, Trump made headlines with the chilling declaration that anyone caught vandalizing Tesla dealerships would now be considered a domestic terrorist. He continued showering Tesla with attention throughout the day, posting further endorsements on social media and speaking glowingly of the company during an appearance at a Business Roundtable event.
Shiller in chief
It was far from the first time Trump has advertised a public company in his capacity as president—or as an aspiring president, as was the case during last fall’s McDonald’s stunt. He has a history of supporting those that have supported him.
Just before taking office in January 2017, he tweeted a shout-out to L.L.Bean after one of the company’s heirs took some heat for backing him in the election. The following month, he promoted his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line after Nordstrom stopped selling it. (The company cited poor sales performance for the decision, not politics.) And perhaps most infamously, after the CEO of Goya incurred some backlash for praising Trump in the summer of 2020, the president shared a photo on Instagram of himself in the Oval Office, ensconced in Goya products, two thumbs way up.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by President Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump)
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by President Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump)
Like those other instances, the Tesla promotion was transactional. It was meant to return the favor to his most generous financial supporter. Indeed, Trump outright admitted during the stunt that he hoped it would raise Tesla’s flagging stock price.
The full-court-press Tesla festival even extended beyond Trump and over to one of his greatest allies in media, Sean Hannity—who made a similar show of buying a Tesla on Tuesday and announced a Tesla giveaway for his fans.
Were all the publicity and endorsements to achieve their intended effect and reverse the slumping Tesla stock, it would amount to a government bailout for Musk. So far, a noticeable Trump bump appears to have emerged, with the stock price surging 7% overnight. It does not seem destined to solve all the company’s woes, though. It’s a Band-Aid for a gunshot wound.
Can Tesla survive on MAGA support alone?
Despite Musk and Trump’s public insistence that the backlash is being astroturfed, deep down they both must sense that it’s very much real—and a direct consequence of their actions.
Although Musk personally commands a vast, loyal following of MAGA fans, electric vehicle owners tend to be more progressive. A 2023 Gallup poll, for instance, revealed that 71% of Republicans would not consider buying an electric vehicle, compared with 17% of Democrats.
In fact, just before his turnaround on Teslas, Trump himself had been deeply critical of electric vehicles for years. In other words, the people poised to be most enthused about the industry leader in electric vehicles are also the people most likely to be outraged by Musk’s work with DOGE.
Musk seems to understand as much himself, even if he’s loath to publicly admit it. When he went on Larry Kudlow’s Fox Business show Monday night, he appeared distraught almost to the point of tears while discussing the Tesla backlash. If he truly thought Soros was spending billions to create the mere appearance of a backlash, he would’ve probably seemed angrier.
Instead, in that Kudlow appearance, Musk betrayed the kind of sadness that comes when his information bubble is punctured and true public sentiment seeps in—like the time in 2022 when he was loudly booed during an appearance at a Dave Chappelle show and reacted so harshly that some of his employees reportedly considered calling the police to do a wellness check on him.
It remains unclear whether Trump also realizes that the protests are not being staged. If he did, perhaps he wouldn’t have landed on a solution that highlights the association between Tesla and the White House.
Also, unlike Goya beans, Teslas don’t come cheap. The fact that Trump thinks hawking them on TV will solve the company’s woes suggests that he is governing for the kind of people who, amid a stock market in free fall, can casually afford to spend anywhere from $32,000 to $125,000 on a new car.
Anyone paying close attention then should understand exactly what Trump is selling here, and who he’s selling it to. And that should lower their own personal buying temperature.
No comments