Elon Musk presents a new vulnerability for Donald Trump.
The billionaire’s strategy of moving fast and breaking things isn’t going over so well with the public.
Democrats are starting to wake up and sketch out a plan to help them win back the working class: Turn the world’s richest person into their boogeyman.
They’ve set their sights on holding Elon Musk to account. Armed with new polling showing Musk’s popularity in the toilet, key Democratic leaders are going after the top adviser to President Donald Trump who is dismantling the federal government. They are attempting to subpoena him and introducing legislation to block him from receiving federal contracts while he holds a “special” role leading Trump’s cost-cutting crusade.
This guy who says he’s your champion has hired a billionaire from South Africa who doesn’t give a damn about you or your family and is proving it every hour of the day,” said Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the Oversight committee who tried to subpoena Musk. “He will prove to be profoundly unpopular with the public and will be an albatross around Trump’s neck.”
In a sign of how toxic Democrats believe Musk is, even the most conservative members of their party are joining progressives in bashing him Moderate Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who represents the reddest district in the House held by a Democrat, called Musk an “unelected, weirdo billionaire” on the social media site X and said he has “been getting a lot of calls over the past few days” about him.
In an interview, Golden said he doesn’t plan to respond to “every utterance of the president or even every executive order” but the speed at which Musk is attempting to make wholesale changes to the government prompted him to comment.
“He’s just moving at the speed of light. He’s seemingly swinging left and right and smashing things,” Golden said of Musk. “It’s in the interest of working-class people to have waste eliminated or fraud rooted out of the government. But you go too far, you go too fast, you make a mistake, ‘Oops, I froze Social Security payments.’”
There’s not much room or margin for error,” he said.
Even Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents Silicon Valley and has had a relationship with Musk for years, is distancing himself from him. Khanna posted Wednesday on X that Musk’s “attacks on our institutions are unconstitutional.” Khanna previously likened Musk to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “dollar-a-year men,” the corporate leaders who helped the government mobilize for WWII, and said he texts with him.
Democratic strategists argue that Musk is a liability for Trump when it comes to his political superpower: his working-class base.
“If you oppose Donald Trump, making Elon Musk the face of his administration is the smart way to go,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “Where the rubber really hits the road on all of this is for people who are inclined to be supportive of Donald Trump and they, for whatever reason, think Donald Trump is on their side. But many of them have a different view of Elon Musk.”
Democrats are also protesting him in Washington over his swift efforts to put federal employees out of work, making the calculation that the idea of an unelected billionaire wreaking chaos on the bureaucracy will be unpopular with voters. And they have some data fueling their efforts.
New internal polling, conducted on behalf of House Majority Forward, a nonprofit aligned with House Democratic leadership, found Musk is viewed negatively among 1,000 registered voters in battleground districts. Just 43 percent approve of him and 51 percent view him unfavorably. The poll, conducted by the Democratic firm Impact Research and completed between Jan. 19 to 25, also found that Musk evoked strong negative feelings. Of the 51 percent who disapproved of him, 43 percent did so strongly.
Per Politico.
