Trump’s Tesla U-turn is not the product of an economically literate president, it is the product of a paranoid one, writes Eliot Wilson

Last week, in a touching, almost paternal act of solidarity with his cost-cutting billionaire ally Elon Musk, President Trump purchased a cherry-red Tesla Model S (list price starts at $74,990). He declared it “beautiful”, though admitted he would not be able to drive it himself: the secret service does not allow current or former presidents to drive on public roads as a matter of security.

Trump takes a U-turn in EV

The President was motivated to make this public demonstration as “a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American”. Recently I wrote about the collapse in Tesla sales in Europe, partly a reaction against Musk’s political activities, but it represents a deeper problem. The company has lost $800bn from its share value since December, and there are widespread campaigns by those who dislike Musk’s Washington activities to boycott the company, including “Tesla Takedown” protests at dealerships.

This kind of activism angers Trump. He told reporters, “I said, ‘You know, Elon, I don’t like what’s happening to you, and Tesla’s a great company”. On his Truth Social platform, he let rip: “Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby’, in order to attack and do harm to Elon.”

There have also been reports of vandalism against Tesla showrooms and vehicles, which Trump has announced will be treated as “domestic terrorism”, promising the perpetrators, with characteristic restraint, “we’re going to catch you and you’re going to go through hell”.

For Donald Trump to be standing foursquare behind an electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer demonstrates quite an intellectual journey. In 2023, he accused President Joe Biden of selling American autoworkers “down the river with his ridiculous all Electric Car Hoax” and called EVs “the idea of the Radical Left Fascists, Marxists, & Communists”. A few months later, at a rally in Iowa, he ridiculed them, saying “They don’t go far. They cost a fortune.”

Trump does not have an “economic” policy in any meaningful sense. He sees a range of rivals who treat him and the United States “unfairly”

If that is an example of Trump’s ideological flexibility, his outrage at consumers boycotting Tesla for political reasons is hypocrisy of a staggering degree. This is a president who has used tariffs – ”the most beautiful word in the dictionary” – to force Colombia to accept the repatriation of illegal migrants; sees them as a tool to compel Mexico to stop migrants and the opioid fentanyl crossing the US border; and has introduced them against Canada, ostensibly to combat an almost entirely imagined influx of more opioids, but more likely to destabilise a country he has publicly said he wants to annex.