Contra Trump
주체사상
On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States of America, we noted the parallels between that wannabe Occidental autocrat and Mao Zedong, that infamous Oriental despot (see publication of A Monkey King’s Journey to the East). Over the years, the reverberations inside the tyrant’s echo chamber only become more disorienting.
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The rubric of this chapter in Contra Trump is ‘self-reliance’ — 주체사상 juche sasang, or 主體思想 in Hanja.
Juche is the core of Kimilsungism–Kimjongilism, the state ideology of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, i.e., North Korea.
In many respects, juche is similar to Mao Zedong’s wartime policy of self-reliance in China, one that was originally encapsulated in the slogan 自己動手 豐衣足食 zìjǐ dòngshǒu fēng yī zú shí, ‘rely on our own labour to feed and cloth ourself’. During the High Maoist era, when China was caught in a spiral of self-isolation, the old slogan was reformulated as 獨立自主 自立更生 dúlì zìzhǔ zìlì gēng shēng — ‘pursue independence and self-reliance, stand on our own two feet and increase productive capacity’. Both Korea’s juche and China’s ‘self-reliance’ have their origins in Stalinist Russia.
China’s post-Mao leaders have emphasised the importance of self-reliance and the Third Resolution on Party History, released by Beijing in November 2021, went so far as to declare that ‘self-reliance is the spiritual core of the Chinese nation’ 獨立自主是中華民族精神之魂. China’s policy of self-reliance has borne fruit in the Xi Jinping era while North Korea is crippled by juche. Both Beijing and Pyongyang now champion ‘people-first policies’.
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The work of Nick Catoggio, a staff writer at The Dispatch who is based in Texas, has previously featured in Contra Trump. See, for instance, If you elect a cretin once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect him twice, you’re the cretin. We also quoted Catoggio in Ready Player One — the Narrenschiff of American Gods:
Every American knows what it’s like to be governed by a regime whose agenda is foolish and whose ambitions are hubristic. What’s new is being governed by a regime whose intentions are, transparently, malign.
— Patriotism in an Age of Villainy, 18 February 2025
Here we add Catoggio’s discussion of ‘Trump juche’ to our Contra Trump series, but not before quoting Fintan O’Toole on the otherworldly ambitions of Elon Musk, with illustrations from the @OverthrowMusk initiative in London, the slogan of which is ‘Fight the oligarchs. Defend democracy. Overthrow Musk.’
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
14 March 2025
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Update
We have added ‘Kill Tesla, Save the Country’, published by Rick Wilson on 19 March 2025, to this chapter.

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‘We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars’
This Martian mission in turn shares a genealogy with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which the title character is a caricature of Wernher von Braun, the Nazis’ leading rocket scientist, who went on to work on the American ballistic missile program and on NASA’s space missions. According to Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, his unusual first name was inspired by Project Mars, a novel Braun wrote in the immediate postwar years. Braun describes the political system of the colony:
The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
In the novel, the colonization of the red planet is part of God’s plan to create the Übermensch, whose development was cut short by the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. It is “a mission whose ultimate object was planned by God Himself” to bring together “the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism.”
— Fintan O’Toole, From Comedy to Brutality, New York Review of Books, 13 February 2025
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Trump Juche
Sacrificing for the greater good.
Nick Catoggio
Imagine you owned a car company, and that company was experiencing a bit of an image problem. There are two ways you might go about fixing it.
One is to stop doing the things that caused the problem. Stop giving wink-wink Nazi salutes, stop calling supporters of Ukraine “traitors,” stop gutting federal agencies to no obvious end except as trollish culture war theater.
The other is to stage a live televised infomercial for your product in the White House driveway with the president himself reading the sales pitch off of handheld cue cards.
It seemed significant to me that Donald Trump and Elon Musk chose the second route yesterday, beyond the obvious reason that it’s laughably corrupt for the head of state to use his office to advertise his top adviser’s business. Laughable corruption is priced in with Trump; to reproach Republicans with a “what if Democrats did it?” hypothetical is to resume a game the right forfeited years ago.
The significance of the presidential Tesla infomercial was how it reflected Trump’s instinct to solve economic “problems” by injecting himself into them. The United States has a trade imbalance with Canada? That’s nothing that a few on-again off-again on-again White House tariffs can’t remedy. Congress has appropriated money wastefully? That’s nothing that some dubiously legal executive impoundment can’t undo.
Tesla is becoming despised by everyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Greene? That’s nothing that Donald Trump acting as the company’s new spokesman can’t fix.
Which raises an interesting question. Who was the Tesla infomercial aimed at, exactly?
For obvious reasons, a consumer who has chosen to boycott Elon Inc. out of disgust for Musk’s MAGA politics won’t be persuaded by the president. I think Trump’s pitch was directed at Republicans, offered in essentially the same spirit as his endorsements in congressional primaries. In order to make America great again, I need you to vote for this candidate—and to buy this comically ugly Cybertruck.
The appeal isn’t primarily commercial. How could it be when he’s been trash-talking electric vehicles for years? It’s political. He’s asking right-wingers to spend tens of thousands of dollars on Teslas to bail out the richest man in history from the financial repercussions of having alienated most of the country. In case the setting didn’t make that clear, Trump elaborated in a Truth Social post afterward—bizarrely accusing left-wingers of boycotting Tesla “illegally” and vowing to buy one of Musk’s cars himself to support DOGE’s work.
He won’t be able to drive it, but so what? This isn’t about driving. It’s about making America great again. “When somebody is a great patriot, they shouldn’t be hurt,” the president said yesterday of his decision to buy one of Musk’s cars. “He’s a great patriot.”
The idea that MAGA supporters should buy not just American-made cars but a particular make of car in order to advance the nationalist cause is a weird, totalizing approach to politics. (Spare a thought today for Ford and General Motors.) Not only does it introduce Donald Trump’s political needs and Elon Musk’s financial needs into kitchen-table decisions, implicitly it nudges the president’s fans to sacrifice for the greater good. Rather than buy the car you really like, shouldn’t you take one for the team and spite the godless left by choosing an Elonmobile instead, fellow patriot?
That appeal to patriotic sacrifice isn’t the only one that Americans have heard lately from the president and his toadies, though. The lower the stock market sinks and the more tenuous his reputation for an economic Midas touch becomes, the more the White House sounds like it’s promoting what we might call “Trump juche.”
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Self-reliance.
Juche is the governing philosophy of the Kim dynasty in North Korea. The basic idea is self-reliance: Only by remaining economically unentangled with other countries can the glorious North Korean nation resist imperialist influence and remain independent.
It’s Stalinist autarky. And it’s worked out exactly as well as the phrase “Stalinist autarky” would lead you to assume.
One way that the Kims have kept the population docile amid mass privation is with pitiless violence against dissenters, a communist favorite. But the culture of juche also conditions North Koreans to remain obedient despite terrible hardship and global isolation. Because the leader controls everything, and because he’s worshipped fanatically and unquestioningly, personal suffering becomes a form of patriotic sacrifice to advance his vision.
Donald Trump is no communist and America is too rich to experience privation during his presidency. But he did, by his own admission, fall in love with North Korea’s leader and seems to have picked up a few of his boyfriend’s habits, as happens with lovers. He cultivates fanatic obedience among supporters, he aims to maximize personal control over everything happening in government and the economy, he’s obsessed with self-reliance, and he disdains alliances—except with illiberal North Korean chums like Russia and China.
Why, he even sounds a bit like a commissar bleating about crop yields in some of his Truth Social posts.
Trump juche imagines an America that’s autarkic, alienated from the West, dominated by an all-powerful leader, and backed by a population that’s willing to endure hardships foisted on it by that leader as noble, necessary sacrifices to realize his vision of national greatness.
Listen to some of the president’s cronies talk lately about the rising cost of living and the declining price of stocks and you’ll hear distinct juche-ian echoes. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Americans to expect a “detox period” economically as Trump DOGE-s and tariffs his way to prosperity, for instance, and at one point callously declared that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” (Bessent is worth $500 million.) Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went one better by advising consumers worried about egg prices to buy chickens and raise them in their backyards, taking the concept of self-reliance to its logical conclusion.
Other Republicans (some even before the election!) have rationalized the economic pain with vague assurances that, somehow, some way, it’s all worth it. House Speaker Mike Johnson compared Trump’s tariff helter skelter to the initial break in a game of billiards, justifying sending balls rocketing in every direction without any sense of where they’ll end up as a necessary “shake-up” before the economic game can begin. A Trump voter interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about Americans’ retirement savings melting down analogized the policy chaos to a splint that helps a broken bone heal correctly. It’s unclear why she thinks the metaphorical bone was broken in the first place, but no matter: “If you set it, it’s going to hurt, but it will be stronger than it was before.”
Asked about the possibility of a recession, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went as far as to say “it’s worth it” (before adding that a recession would be Joe Biden’s fault, of course). There areimportant fiscal goals, like a solution to our debt crisis, that might reasonably justify risking an economic downturn—but we’re not getting that solution from Trump, lord knows.
Some MAGA boosters have even tried to justify the recent economic pain on non-economic grounds. One commentator cheered the president for trying to build an economy based on love of country and encouraged business leaders to thank him as their market capitalization erodes. A Newsmax host saluted Trump for having the “balls” to undo the “globalist economic agenda,” reducing America’s basic welfare to theater for the president’s bravado. On Tuesday Lutnick turned up on television to boast that his latest supposed victory in the pointless, destructive trade war he started with Canada is proof that “you can’t tackle Donald Trump.”
Trust our leader. Admire his boldness. Accept the suffering he’s inflicted on you, and the suffering he may yet inflict, as a patriotic duty. Believe with all your heart that what he’s doing will lead to greater American prosperity even though no one can say how. Ignore the fact that most of the rest of the world’s wealthiest countries are royally pissed off. We can achieve self-reliance if only we have the will.
Backlash.
That’s Trump juche. Judging by the market’s recent performance, I suspect this week’s slide will be remembered as the moment investors realized that the White House is serious about it and reacted accordingly.
Disillusionment is beginning to turn up in polling too. On Wednesday CNN released a new survey that found the president’s job approval down to 45-54, but more notable was his rating on the economy. Trump scored consistently well in that metric in his first term, never drawing majority disapproval of his economic policies. That’s now changed: He’s down to 42-56, his worst number ever, and falls further to 39-61 when respondents are asked how he’s handling tariffs specifically.
His friend Elon stands at 35-53 on favorability, by the way, in case you’re wondering how likely that Tesla infomercial is to pay off.
All presidents live or die politically by the state of the economy during their term (ask Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) but the issue holds special potency for Trump. For him economics is the Great Redeemer, the issue that almost singlehandedly gave American voters the excuse they needed last fall to overlook his moral, civic, intellectual, and temperamental unfitness for the job and to roll the dice on him again. His TV image as a business genius who’ll bring economic growth with him to the presidency was seemingly borne out by the pre-COVID numbers in his first term, and voters didn’t forget.
So long as that Midas touch continued in his second term, minor details like extreme graft and authoritarian power grabs could be overlooked. This feels like the week when Americans began to consider the possibility that he doesn’t have that touch after all, that Trump 2.0 might not deliver the same results as Trump 1.0, that Never Trumpers had a point when they warned that he’d burn the country to the ground without the comparatively responsible advisers of his first term around to restrain him.
The selloff on Wall Street might be investors’ way of stepping up and trying to restrain him in their absence. If his new deputies are too stupid or too cowardly to make him think better of tariffs, maybe Trump having to watch his reputation as “the economy president” go up in smoke will sober him up.
But if it doesn’t, and he continues to tariff his party into economic and political disaster, the cope from populists will be interesting.
It’ll proceed in stages, I expect. The first stage, which we’re seeing now from the likes of Bessent, is that the current downturn is temporary—or “transitory,” to borrow an ominous term that bedeviled the last administration. But if it drags on and starts to seem not so transitory, Trump apologists will shift toward emphasizing Mike Johnson’s rationale that the disruption is necessary, even intentional. It’s all part of a plan, eight-dimensional chess. In juche America, we sacrifice now to reach prosperity later.
That might work for a while but Lutnick’s cavalier nonsense about a recession being “worth it” won’t cut it for swing voters. At some point, if the pain keeps up as the midterms approach, MAGA will begin looking around for scapegoats.
There’s no shortage to choose from. Biden is an obvious target: The economy he left Trump was more terrible than expected, we’ll be told (falsely), and in any case it was propped up by extravagant spending like the COVID relief bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. Populists will also seek fall guys within the administration to take the blame instead of the president, with Howard Lutnick an early leading candidate for patsy-in-chief.
Trump himself, though, will probably do what he does best and resort to gassy theories about a conspiracy to bring down his administration. The “globalists” sold off their stocks en masse knowing that a market dip would wreck his popularity, he’ll say, or the Ukrainians did. His scummiest fans online will detect the hidden hand of Hebrews behind the decline. You know how it goes by now.
But maybe I’m wrong and the right will remain at the “Trump juche” stage of cope for longer than expected. It would make sense. Nationalists are tribalists and their movement is a cult, so it won’t offend them nearly as much as it would offend conservatives to sacrifice a meaningful portion of their wealth to some peacetime political project spearheaded by their hero. If forced to choose between admitting they made a catastrophic error by trusting Trump’s economic judgment and smiling serenely while he immolates a chunk of their retirement savings, many will reassure themselves that it’s all part of a plan and will go down with the ship.
Many—but not enough to prevent a Republican electoral bloodbath. Which, it pains me to say, feels a tiny bit unfair to the president.
Be careful what you wish for.
“The people who voted Donald Trump back into office wanted him to bring back 2019,” Charles Cooke wrote at National Review on Tuesday. “They did not sign up for a trade war with Canada, the resurrection of William McKinley, or an endless game of red light/green light that tanks their 401(k) and makes it harder for their kids to buy a house.”
That’s all true. But they did sign up for chaos, broadly speaking.
They couldn’t have known the form that chaos would take. I’ve written about Trump nearly every weekday for the past 10 years, for example, and even I didn’t anticipate his “51st state” insanity toward Canada. I assumed he’d wreck NATO and end the Pax Americana but I didn’t foresee it happening in the first six weeks. I expected a trade war but did not imagine the main theater would be North America.
Trump is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get, but there’s a high likelihood it’ll be nutty.
The problem with the “we didn’t vote for this!” argument is that the president was a loud-and-proud tariff enthusiast in his first term and as a candidate last year. In fact, as time has gone on, his faith in tariffs as an economic panacea has grown to quasi-mystical proportions. This is a man so besotted that his thoughts turn to them as a solution to child-care costs, who imagined them perhaps even replacing the federal income tax against all logic and basic math.
It’s hard to fault him for assuming that the electorate gave him permission to get crazy with the protectionist Cheez Whiz.
Frankly, it’s hard to fault for him assuming that the electorate gave him permission to get crazy, period. Americans didn’t sign up for the resurrection of William McKinley but they did sign up for placing an unstable, conspiratorial coup-plotting criminal atop the executive branch. Government by whim, relentless policy chaos, gleeful norm-breaking, and Trump as the daily “main character” in all facets of public life: That’s what Americans signed up for, undeniably. Everyone old enough to vote last November 5 was also old enough to remember January 6.
So why should we fault the president for assuming that they signed up for Trump juche? It’s the endgame of his brand of politics, placing the leader at the center of everything and expecting sacrifice in the name of whichever goals he, in his paternal wisdom, sets. You may not have envisioned Teslas being hawked on the White House lawn but don’t you dare claim you’re surprised.
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Source:
- Nick Catoggio, Trump Juche — Sacrificing for the greater good., The Dispatch, 12 March 2025
Kill Tesla, Save the Country
Rick Wilson
19 March 2025
Tesla is no longer just a car company; it’s a bank for fascists, a goose-stepping hedge fund bankrolling the political fever dreams of Elon Musk and his DOGE dreams of controlling the ruins of the American government to launch his dreams of being the world’s first trillionaire and the Emperor of Mars.
Musk’s power and wealth are inseparable from Tesla’s absurdly inflated stock price. If the Tesla bubble pops, so does Elon’s ability to keep throwing money around like a drunken Russian oligarch in a Macao casino.
Need proof?
Look no further than how Musk leveraged his Tesla shares to snap up Twitter (bless its heart) and bankroll Republican electoral operations with zero regard for the carnage he’s leaving in his wake.
Silicon Valley once cast him as Tony Stark, the plucky genius saving humanity. Reality check: he’s more of a ketamine-juiced Gordon Gekko, hopped up on shitlord memes and waging a culture war from the comfort of his hollowed-out volcano lair.
In his mind, he’s Elon the Hero, a scrappy entrepreneur, not merely a guy who bought other companies. He declared himself their inventor and prime mover (to wit, Tesla and SpaceX, famously), full of noise, hustle, and “hardcore mode” self-aggrandizement.
None of his companies have actual corporate governance, and Musk has milked one to pay the other repeatedly. However, Tesla has been the cash cow buoyed by oceans of government subsidies. Speaking of a lack of corporate governance, did I mention that this man once secured a headline-grabbing $54 billion “pay package”?
Even the otherwise supine Delaware Chancery Court balked at that piece of highway robbery. Meanwhile, Musk’s toxic money saturates our politics like an oil spill, suffocating the flawed old system of SuperPAC fundraising (trust me, I know) with an avalanche of personal checks larger than some countries’ GDPs.
The net effect? Musk has become the Republican Party’s brand-new fear engine. You used to hear whispers of “so-and-so gave $20 million—better not cross them.” Now, $20 million is a polite down payment. Almost no one, right or left can compete with Elon.
Elon can carpet-bomb you with $200 million, and once those big checks start rolling in, GOP leaders scuttle into line, terrified of finding themselves on Musk’s revenge list. Just ask poor Tom Tillis, who clammed up like his reelection depended on it (which it absolutely does) during some key appointment fights.
Musk’s 2024 spree was staggering:
- $239 million to America PAC to boost Trump and fuel the ground game in Pennsylvania.
- $20.5 million to RBG PAC, ironically named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, aimed at softening Trump’s abysmal image on abortion.
- $10 million right into Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund, ensuring The Turtle stays firmly in Elon’s shell.
And that’s just the disclosed qwan. Musk’s loyal (and by “loyal” I mean “venal”) consultants—those who keep feeding his titanic ego and greasy illusions—got very, very rich. Not “nice beach house” rich, but “I just bought a Gulfstream” rich.
Here’s the political physics of it all: Pressure on Tesla is pressure on Musk. Break Tesla’s stock, and you start to break Elon’s ability to bankroll authoritarian fantasies…and if that kneecaps Trump in the process, well, boo-hoo.
Corporate pressure campaigns generally work when a company still cares about rational brand management, market cap, and sales. Tesla is about to learn to care.
I’ve forced major firms to tuck tail and change their ways with campaigns that directly hit their brands, including Toyota, AT&T, and others who shall remain unmentioned because of NDAs.
If you can capture the right cultural moment and reshape their precious image and brand, you can carve them up, or if they behave, let them keep their image intact.
And guess what? The cultural moment for Tesla has arrived. Why?
- Tesla’s Stock Is Perched on a Cliff
Tesla was once the darling of Wall Street, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the FAANG gods in their prime. The stock soared to record highs in December 2024, right after Elon helped Trump secure the White House. Now, it’s flirting with that big red “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE INVESTED HERE” sign. One good shove and this rickety stock goes into a potentially unrecoverable free fall. It’s off 50% from its peak and losing more by the day. - Elon & DOGE Are Poisoning the Brand
Musk’s swashbuckling raids on the American government spawned lurid accusations of fraud, only to reveal that his so-called “cognitive elite” can’t read a balance sheet to save their lives. They’re too busy stuffing the idiot maws of the culture-war window-lickers with tales of Peruvian trans operas or similar nonsense. People are noticing that what DOGE is truly accomplishing is chaos, destruction, and firing of the parts and pieces of the government we need (air traffic controllers, VA doctors, etc.), all while planning to torch Social Security to the ground to pay for a tax cut for Elon and his friends.Elon’s bad behavior is Tesla’s burden to bear, and he’ll keep acting like America’s Mad Tech King because he feels like this can go on forever.
It can’t.
- Nazi-Adjacency Is Famously Bad For Market Share
I’m not saying Elon’s goose-stepping around Boca Chica. But c’mon—he reposted a claim that “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people.” He’s out there giving winks and nods to white nationalist Twitter accounts like they’re not brimming with neo-fascist bile. Consumers might love a tech-forward EV, but they don’t want to drive around in a car that screams, “I’m tight with America’s alt-Reich sugar daddy.”I’m not saying his South African roots are showing, but Musk’s obsession with race is becoming one of his most notable characteristics. - Even the Rats Know the Ship Is Sinking
Musk’s Tesla board, comprised of besties, bootlickers, and his brother are dumping their Tesla shares like they’ve seen the iceberg and are frantically looking for lifeboats. Robin Denholm, Trump’s all-time biggest fangirl, sold off $75 million in just a few weeks. That’s not exactly a gesture of confidence, folks. - A Product Line Ranging from Dull to Cringe
The “Douchepanzer” (a.k.a. Cybertruck) might amuse a tiny sliver of wannabe Chad MAGA men with small-dick-energy fantasies, but it’s a shoddily built flop. The damn thing is literally glued together, and its alleged toughness has trouble surviving things like a carwash or a rainstorm.Meanwhile, Tesla’s aging Model 3, Y, S, and X feel about as fresh as 2017’s iPhone. You can only patch so many software updates onto a platform before buyers realize they’re paying top dollar for a product that has barely evolved since the pandemic started. - Tesla: Welfare Queen ExtraordinaireFor all of Musk’s libertarian posturing, Tesla is a creature of government subsidies. If states like California decide to flex—pulling tax breaks, removing EV mandates, or refusing to buy Tesla fleets—it’ll cut a big chunk out of Elon’s war chest. Be sure to remind Republicans Elon has suckled at the teat of Ma Government like an eager little piggy as he’s accumulated his billions. And if you think he won’t squeal like a stuck pig, you haven’t been watching.
- Institutional Investors: This is Your CueBig banks, hedge funds, state retirement funds, and other money titans are waking up to the risk and reputational stink clinging to Tesla. If they pull out, Musk’s rickety financial empire will wobble like a Jenga tower in an earthquake.
No one’s asking me to design a war plan here—though if some billionaire wants me to, we can whip up a doozy. But the bullet points above write their script for how to keep hitting Tesla right in the P/E ratio.
Think about peaceful (and very public) protests at Tesla showrooms—who’s wants to waltz in for a test drive when the dealership’s ringed by protestors holding signs about Elon’s Nazi-curious Twitter behavior?
And if we’re really serious about neutering Elon’s political kingmaking, then we need a coordinated effort:
- Buy An EV, Just Not A TeslaFree markets, baby.If you’re buying an EV, you’ve got excellent options right now, all at the same price point—in many cases, much less—as Tesla. If BYD gets an American foothold, Tesla is cooked. From Rivian to Polestar to EV versions of almost every significant traditional auto mark, the offerings offer more range, style, fit-and-finish, and comfort than anything in the Tesla line. When you do, tell your friends.
- Cement Tesla to Musk’s Outrages in Ads, Social, and Earned MediaEasy enough, but linking every excess and insanity of DOGE and Elon to the brand makes it harder and harder to reboot Tesla’s stock price.
- Shareholder LawsuitsExpensive, yes, but they unearth documents and depositions that cost Tesla a fortune in time, money, and brand equity.
- Ending Blue-State SubsidiesCalifornia, New York, the EU, or any place that can dim Tesla’s gravy train of incentives and government purchases should do so without blinking. As discussed above, there are plenty of EV companies that don’t come with a bonus rousing rendition of the Horst Wessel song as their corporate theme.
- Divesting Public FundsState pension systems and municipal treasuries should be pressured to stop feeding the beast that’s eating our democracy from the inside out. Buying more Tesla stock now is a bad bet; it is better to cash out now before it falls below $100.
It’s true that the front line in this war is still stopping Donald Trump from burning down Washington and using the Resolute Desk as kindling.
But sometimes, you find a strategic weak point in the authoritarian vertical—like Tesla—where a single, well-placed shot shakes the entire edifice.
Tesla is Elon, and Elon is Tesla. You can’t separate them.
If we tear down that brand—if we make it socially and financially toxic—it won’t reduce Elon Musk to homelessness. Still, it’ll sure slow him down from more nine-figure spending sprees to resuscitate Trump’s political career and shred every norm left in our democracy.
It’ll send a thunderous warning to companies sniffing Trump’s ass like submissive dogs and to the politicians worshipping at Elon’s feet: the market can be weaponized against you, and politics is still downstream of culture.
When the culture shifts, the money follows. And when the money goes, the illusions of genius and power vanish, leaving only the bitter whiff of hubris.
Break Tesla, break Elon. Break Elon, break Trump.
And maybe—just maybe—we save what’s left of our democracy by using the magic of the marketplace, not just politics.
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Source:
- Rick Wilson, Kill Tesla, Save the Country, Rick Wilson’s Intel and Observations, 19 March 2025
Note: Rick Wilson wrote that ‘The delicate, soft-handed snowflakes of MAGA mass-reported it [the essay above], even though the article is about a social marketing campaign, not violence. They offered to restore it if I deleted the tweet.’ See here.
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Attorney General Pam Bondi labeled the recent vandalism targeting Tesla dealerships and cars as “domestic terrorism” and added the Department of Justice (DOJ) has already charged “several” alleged perpetrators. Some could face up to five years in prison. “The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism. The Department of Justice has already charged several perpetrators with that in mind, including in cases that involve charges with five-year mandatory minimum sentences,” Bondi said in a statement released Tuesday.
— The Hill, 19 March 2025
President Donald Trump insisted that the vandalism of Tesla products is far more serious than the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when rioters tried to stop the counting of electoral votes and thus overturn the will of American voters. Trump issued a blanket pardon for those rioters, including those convicted of violence against law enforcement officers, but today he posted about Tesla vandals on social media: “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
— Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from An American, 21 March 2025
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