After Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly pledged $180 million ($45 million per month) to Trump’s campaign—which would be the largest financial commitment in this presidential race by a tune of $130 million—some thought the billionaire could change Trump’s mind on electric vehicles (EVs), which he hates.
“Elon's out founding Super PACs and telling donors to give money to Trump and so I think, you know, Trump—in his kind of calculating—is like: ‘Well, I better lay off EV stuff,’” Michael Murphy, a Republican strategist and CEO of the EV Politics Project, previously told Fortune.
But after Trump’s “EV-bashing” at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, where he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency, Murphy believes Trump has “betrayed” Musk.
Trump “had backed off [on criticizing EVs for a few weeks], and then the speech came, and one of his wide-eyed assistants stabbed in the prompter, so he gleefully went off on a big EV-bash,” Murphy said.
On Thursday evening, Trump said his presidency would reverse the “green new scam,” particularly by ending “the electric-vehicle mandate on day one,” thereby saving “the U.S auto industry from complete obliteration,” and “U.S. customers thousands and thousands per car.”
It isn’t clear exactly what the “electric-vehicle mandate” is. Murphy, who is an expert on EVs, didn’t know either, but suggested it could refer to the Biden administration’s subsidies for the vehicles, which he says has led to larger growth of manufacturing jobs currently than under Trump.
“And then Trump says, ‘Well, it's all government boondoggle.’ Well, that's what the Chinese are doing,” Murphy said. “The Chinese have written much bigger checks to build a huge EV industry that loses money to come in and unfairly compete and put Americans out of work. So Trump doesn't have the policy heft to understand the issues, he just does applause lines that are based on complete ignorance.”
Trump also focused on the large amounts of spending on EV chargers, citing a statistic that the administration spent $9 billion on eight EV chargers, which is factually incorrect (the government spent $7 billion on eight charging sites across six states, with no indication that any of them have broken).
The rhetoric could harm Musk and his company, even though Trump threw in a half-hearted bone to the EV industry during the speech (“And if you are 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 application.”). Musk has received billions of dollars in subsidies for several of his companies, and Trump even previously said Musk would be “worthless” without them due to Tesla’s safety issues in its self-driving program and Musk’s private space firm SpaceX for launching “rocket ships to nowhere.”
Yet Musk himself recently called for the elimination of subsidies for the electric industry.
“It will only help Tesla,” Musk posted on X, shortly after endorsing Trump. “Also, remove subsidies on all industries!”
Trump has, in the past, repeatedly bashed Musk, claiming in 2022 that he “could have said, "drop to your knees and beg" and “[Musk] would have done it.”
Now that relations between the two are cozier—Musk has gone all in on supporting Trump since the former president survived an assassination attempt last Saturday, while Trump called Musk “fantastic” in a recent Bloomberg interview—Murphy hopes the world’s richest man can make an impression on Trump.
“I think Elon will have a positive influence on Trump, but it'll take time,” Murphy said. “The more that American voters understand that the EV issue is a consumer choice and a jobs issue, the more voters will not reward this kind of rhetoric. You know, it's misleading and demagogic, and it only helps the Chinese.”
