What did Donald Trump do today?
He called anti-Tesla protestors "terrorists" and threatened to send them to the same Salvadoran slave labor camp he sent other "terrorists."Trump has spent an inordinate amount of time in the last few weeks working to halt a crash in the stock price of Tesla, the car company owned by his apparently indispensable political patron, Elon Musk. He held what amounted to an all-day Tesla car show at the White House, culminating in him "buying" a new Tesla. He dispatched his secretary of the Treasury, Howard Lutnick, to urge Americans to buy Tesla stock specifically. (Promoting stocks purely to pump up their price is generally illegal, and so is using government office to promote one company's stock in particular.)
Trump has even suggested that boycotts of Tesla—which is to say, individual people choosing not to buy one and urging other people to do the same—are somehow illegal.
It is not illegal not to buy a particular brand of car.
Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have also declared that actions against Tesla like vandalism or destruction of property are "terrorism" and will be prosecuted as such. Today, Trump posted this on his boutique social media website:
I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!
The mocking reference to El Salvador is significant. Trump recently sent some 300 Venezuelans to be imprisoned in an El Salvador slave labor camp, on unsubstantiated claims that they were members of a gang and hence a "terrorist" threat. (Many if not all of those claims now appear to be false.) Trump continues to maintain that he can do this to anyone he deems a "terrorist."
Putting it all together: Trump is lumping together calls to boycott Tesla and peaceful protests against Musk and Tesla with actual (but relatively minor) property crimes, calling the whole thing terrorism, and explicitly threatening to send Americans to the offshore labor camp he sent other "terrorists" to just this week.
Musk, ostensibly the world's richest man, has borrowed heavily against the value of his Tesla stock, meaning his business empire and political influence are threatened by a sudden drop in its price, as lenders will call in the debts faster than he can pay them back. As a result, he—and hence Trump, over whom he has enormous influence—are showing their desperation. In a recent companywide meeting, Musk himself practically begged Tesla employees not to sell their stock—or, in other words, to help keep its price propped up by passing on the chance to cut their losses.
But company insiders, required by law to report trades of Tesla stock, aren't listening. In the last three months, company officials with access to insider information about Tesla's future have sold 745,228 TSLA shares and bought zero.
Tesla protests are happening nationwide almost every day, mostly at dealerships. Those planned for tomorrow, March 22, include the following locations:
Tempe, AZ
Colorado Springs, CO
Seattle, WA
Renton, WA
Riverside, CA
Austin, TX
Liberty Lake, WA
Bellevue, WA
Portsmouth, NH
Chattanooga, TN
Rio Rancho, NM
San Jose, CA
Houston, TX
Devon, PA
North Hollywood, CA
Tysons Corner, VA
Rockville, MD
Washington, DC
Louisville, KY
Wexford, PA
Dedham, MA
West Chester, PA
Sacramento, CA
Portland, OR
Santa Monica, CA
Vallejo, CA
Delray Beach, FL
Superior, CO
Golden Valley, MN
Indianapolis, IN
Owings Mills, MD
Raleigh, NC
Santa Rosa, CA
Maplewood, MN
Reno, NV
Lisle, IL
Savannah, GA
Seaside, CA
Loveland, CO
New York, NY (Brooklyn and Manhattan)
Philadelphia, PA
Kansas City, MO
Pasadena, CA
Eureka, CA
San Francisco, CA
Corpus Christi, TX
San Antonio, TX
Salem, OR
Lynnwood, WA
Northbrook, IL
Boston, MA
Long Beach, CA
Alhambra, CA
Cranston, RI
Irvine, CA
Why does this matter?
- The government exists to protect the people and Constitution of the United States, not sell cars for the president's cronies.
- Nobody who threatens to send Americans to a foreign gulag is fit to serve the United States.
- Even by Trump's standards, this is dictator shit.