What Musk’s support means.
What Musk’s support means
W hen Elon Musk bounced onto stage with Donald Trump in Butler, Pa., last weekend, it underlined a new element of Trump’s appeal this year.
In 2016, the high-profile adopters of Trump were, first, personal enthusiasts and Buchananite populists, then, slowly but surely, conservatives and establishment Republicans.
This time, the party got on board almost instantaneously, but the Trump coalition has broadened to include an eclectic band of antiestablishment voices who have traveled right — most prominently, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk.
In 2016, Trump literally took over the Republican Party, becoming the most important figure in a party that still retained most of its traditional policy commitments and its pre-Trump leaders.
In 2024, Trump is leading something a little different, a disparate collection of supporters from the interventionist GOP elder statesman Mitch McConnell to the quasi-isolationist erstwhile Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, from the strongly pro-oil-and-gas Doug Burgum to the climate extremist RFK Jr.
It’s not clear how the new additions to the Trump coalition will affect — if at all — how he governs if elected, and obviously the vast majority of his supporters are simply Republicans. But from the perspective of just a few years ago, it’s bizarre to the point of unfathomable that Trump has attacked the Heritage Foundation and made Kennedy part of his transition team.
Kennedy, Gabbard, and Musk are different figures with divergent concerns and worldviews, but they’re broadly anti-woke, deeply suspicious or frankly paranoid about the elite establishment, hostile to groupthink, and fiercely opposed to efforts to curtail free speech or control the political debate.
They represent the same tendency that has alienated the likes of Bill Maher and Glenn Greenwald from the Left, although neither of them is going to appear on a stage with Donald Trump anytime soon.
The fundamental driver of this phenomenon is the lunacy and profound illiberalism of contemporary progressivism, which has tried, with some success, to take the exotic priorities and Cultural Revolution — like repressiveness of the elite college campus — into the American mainstream.
This has, predictably, engendered a reaction, including among people who used to be liberals in good standing. If you are a Democrat who still believes in free speech, due process, and fair media coverage, who believes in the gender binary and hates terrorism, who is not inclined to follow whatever is the bonkers party line of the hour, the changes in the Left have to be disorienting.
That shouldn’t necessarily throw anyone into the arms of Donald Trump. But the refugees from the Left (or in Musk’s case from somewhere in the middle) who have endorsed Trump are embracing him as an antidote to a stifling orthodoxy that so many centers of influence in America either work to enforce or are afraid to challenge.
In 2016, the unofficial slogan of Republicans who supported Trump early on was “At least he fights.” The unofficial slogan of Trump’s heterodox supporters might be “At least he’s not the blob” — the public-health blob, the foreign-policy blob, the media blob, or any other collection of people devoted to protecting a lazy conventional wisdom.
In their obdurate rejection of what they consider such dangerous groupthink, they are the coalition of the unwilling.
None of this justifies Trump’s outrageousness, and the heterodox trio is truly heterodox. Musk is a generational business genius whose political pronouncements can be half-baked or conspiratorial (he’s right to be freaked out about illegal immigration, but it doesn’t mean that this will be the last election we ever have if Trump loses). Gabbard’s foreign-policy views are noxious, and RFK Jr. is a flat-out crank, although an occasionally interesting one.
If Trump wins, presumably part of the story will be that he managed to turn out disaffected males who are immune to the usual political appeal but respond to unusual ones.
For the people Trump is trying to reach, “weird” is probably not a pejorative.