Pool via AP
President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speak to reporters in front of a red Model S Tesla vehicle on the South Lawn of the White House, March 11, 2025, in Washington.
Two kinds of voters put Donald Trump back in the White House last year. There were the MAGA Faithful, whose chief desire was to see Trump own the libs and their assorted ilk. For these voters, Trump has exceeded all expectations, not least by blasting through once-sacrosanct constitutional barriers.
But the MAGAnauts never numbered nearly enough to reinstall Trump. His second coming required support from a different set of voters, who’d experienced a sinking sensation in trying to keep up with the cost of living during Joe Biden’s presidency and hoped a Trump economy would prove more buoyant. Trump owes his victory to the economically anxious, but all he’s done for these voters is increase their anxieties.
That becomes increasingly evident in each new poll. A CNN poll from last Wednesday showed that 56 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy, while just 44 percent approved. That dragged down Trump’s overall approval rating to 45 percent, the lowest of any president this early in his term, save only Trump’s at this point in his first term. A CBS/YouGov poll from late last month showed that nearly 80 percent of Americans said their incomes still lagged behind rising prices.
Trump’s inattention to the cost of living, save for imposing tariffs that invite retaliatory tariffs, both of which will raise prices, has been particularly damaging. The University of Michigan’s monthly survey of consumer sentiment shows Americans to be more pessimistic about their family’s economic prospects than they were during Joe Biden’s final year in office. Meanwhile, the school’s survey on consumers’ long-term inflation expectations jumped to 3.9 percent, the highest figure since 1993. As Trump was elected precisely to dispel those anxieties, the fact that he’s only increased them has reportedly struck some of his non-MAGA supporters as something between a disappointment and a betrayal.
Compounding this growing sense of economic abandonment is Team Plutocrat—the billionaires and centi-millionaires in Trump’s inner circle. None is more prominent, of course, than Elon Musk, of whom 35 percent of Americans expressed a positive opinion in that same CNN poll, while 53 percent viewed him negatively. Musk’s ascent to the pinnacle of Trumpworld and, hence, to the pinnacle of federal policymaking, has combined with Trump’s neglect of bread-and-butter concerns to produce dissension and dismay even in MAGA’s ranks, not least with former Trump consigliere Steve Bannon.
But there’s one important subset of voters for whom Trump’s romance with Musk betrays one of Trump’s signature promises—one that played a crucial role in his ability to win the votes of autoworkers who in turn helped him carry the swing states of the industrial Midwest.
Trump owes his victory to the economically anxious, but all he’s done for these voters is increase their anxieties.
Even as Joe Biden’s subsidies for electric-vehicle factories created new jobs for autoworkers, and even as his joining a UAW picket line when the union was striking the Big Three was the kind of pro-union commitment that no previous president had ever made, Trump delivered what seemed to many autoworkers, even UAW members, to be a firmer guarantee of their continuing ability to make a living. He pledged, repeatedly, that he’d oppose the production of electric cars—because, he said over and over again, it required fewer workers to make them than the number required to make fuel-powered vehicles.
Beyond predicting that EVs would mean fewer autoworkers, Trump also made clear he was no fan of electric cars as such. They couldn’t go very far because they needed recharging after just a couple of hours on the road. “Electric cars are good,” Trump once said, “if you have a towing company.”
There were reasons, I suppose, that Trump EV opposition sounded credible. First, EV buyers were disproportionately upper-income, enviro-conscious consumers—in a word, libs. Besides, it was some prominent libs—Biden, Gavin Newsom, and other Democrats—who spent public dollars subsidizing the purchase and production of these cars. Besides, Trump was Big Oil’s big friend, vowing to drill, baby, drill, in return for the industry’s vast financial support for his campaign. And finally, Trump was palpably nostalgic for an older America of oil fields, sooty skies, and, who knows, maybe tail fins.
So the subsidies for EV purchasers and EV factories would be rolled back once Trump returned to the Oval Office. And there’d be no reduction in the number of autoworkers needed to make a car (well, except those that resulted from management’s ongoing robotization of production). The old order, in which men were men and cars were gas-guzzlers, would regain its rightful place in America’s socioeconomic order.
But for Elon Musk.
Last Tuesday, President Trump repaired to the White House drive, where he had summoned five new Teslas to be on display. With Musk at his side, Trump toured the display and touted the Teslas. He settled himself into the white leather seat of a bright-red Model S, marveled at the control panel, and exclaimed, “It’s beautiful!” Following 30 minutes of such effusions, Trump said he’d buy a red Model S like the one he’d sat in. “Everything’s computer,” he added.
The Tesla, he enthused, is “a great product, as good as it gets.” Worse yet, from an autoworker’s perspective, he seemed to say that the domestic production of EVs was a national necessity. “Our country had to do this,” he said. “They had to go and do this. Other countries have taken away our business, they’ve taken away our jobs.”
What Trump was telling those autoworkers who’d voted for him was that their support was all well and good, thank you very much, but it was as nothing compared to what Musk had done for him: putting more than a quarter of a billion dollars behind his presidential bid, continuing to use his financial clout to intimidate any elected Republican who was thinking of voting against a Trump policy, and performing a world-class version of owning the libs by decimating the federal government, even though many of those left jobless weren’t libs at all.
Besides, since Musk and Trump had joined at the hip, Tesla sales had plummeted in Europe and sagged in the United States. Tesla’s stock price had sagged, too, and demonstrators were starting to show up at Tesla storefronts and charging stations to protest Musk’s heedless dismantling of government services on which they relied. The ever-transactional Trump recognized he was getting so much from Musk, in his dual roles as funder and hatchet man, and that if Musk’s largesse was to continue to flow his way, he probably needed to do something to boost the fortunes of the world’s richest man. “I just want people to know,” Trump said, “that he can’t be penalized for being a patriot,” adding, “you should cherish him.”
So where does this leave those autoworkers who voted for Trump because they thought he had their back? If they belong to the UAW, they’re particularly screwed.
Our new president will surely continue to oppose the tax breaks Biden provided to the car companies for new EV factories—factories whose workers, Biden told the companies, should be free to join or form unions, as, in fact, some of them have. Even as a number of these new EV workforces go union, however, that won’t be the case at Tesla. Musk, after all, told a New York Times DealBook event that he was opposed to the very “idea of unions,” and one of the companies he owns, SpaceX, is currently in court arguing that the National Labor Relations Board, which has been conducting workers’ unionization elections for the past 90 years, is unconstitutional. It’s not clear that the newly Trumpified NLRB will even oppose SpaceX’s case.
At minimum, then, Trump supports the non-union production of EVs, and appears determined to find a way to oppose the production of EVs when the workers have a union. I doubt this is what those UAW members who voted for Trump expected of him, but then, neither did those voters who thought he’d bring down the price of eggs.
