Donald Trump used the White House driveway for a highly unusual event on Tuesday, praising the Tesla cars created by his adviser Elon Musk’s EV company, with the president claiming he was buying a Tesla himself as a show of support.
“I’m going to buy because number one, it’s a great product. As good as it gets. Number two, because [Elon Musk] has devoted his energy and his life to doing this, and I think he has been treated unfairly,” Trump told reporters.
The event was notable for a few reasons. It came at a time when Tesla stock was taking its biggest tumble in four years and Musk was reportedly planning a $100 million donation to Trump’s political operation.
The commercial-style showcase also saw the president promise to label vandals attacking Tesla cars and dealerships as domestic terrorists.
It was also the latest sign that Trump has done a complete 180 on electric cars, vehicles Trump was saying did not work and were part of “lunacy” and a “hoax” just a few years ago.
The first signs of a shift came in 2024, after Musk publicly endorsed Trump and became a major campaign supporter, ultimately contributing more than $290 million to the Republican.
“I’m for electric cars,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Georgia that summer. “I have to be because, you know, Elon endorsed me very strongly. So I have no choice.”
Despite the flip, Trump still maintained some of his hostility toward EVs and the Biden administration’s support for them, which Trump frequently and erroneously describes as pushing an EV mandate.
Trump has said he wants to get rid of a $7,500 EV tax credit from his predecessor.
“With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers,” Trump said in his inaugural address.
Go back even further, before a Musk check was ever in Trump’s campaign coffers, and the Republican was even more hostile towards EVs.
For his 2023 Christmas Day Truth Social post, Trump claimed “evil and ‘sick’ THUGS” were pushing for “electric car lunacy,” a group of people he hoped would “ROT IN HELL.”
Elsewhere that year, Trump spoke in front of a crowd of Michigan auto workers about what he called the “Electric Car Hoax,” an idea he said came from fascists.
“The electric vehicles are going to put you out of business, the things you make in Michigan they don’t need anything of it,” Trump claimed, adding, “They want it (high gas prices) so you go all electric so you can drive for 15 minutes before you need to get it charged.”
In 2022, Trump’s ire for electric cars included Musk himself, after the Tesla billionaire said Trump should leave politics and “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”
“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” Trump wrote in one social media tirade.
During his first term in office, Trump vacillated between supporting and bashing electric cars.
Henry Ford would be very disappointed if he saw his modern-day descendants wanting to build a much more expensive car, that is far less safe and doesn’t work as well, because execs don’t want to fight California regulators. Car companies should know....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 21, 2019
He tore into Detroit automakers for working with California to meet set high emissions standards.
“I’m all for electric cars,” Trump said in 2020. “I’ve given big incentives for electric cars. What they’ve done in California is just crazy.”
That same year, he railed against proposals for a Green New Deal climate package.
“They want you to have one car instead of two, and it should be electric, OK?” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference.
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