The Political Malpractice Of Elon Musk

Chip Somodevilla/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

 

This week’s action in the Senate yielded a predictable setback for the SAVE America Act, a bill that would impose identification requirements for voter registration nationwide. Conservatives had hoped to use the bill to test the filibuster, but the most recent vote confirmed what had been clear for a while: There aren’t 50 Republican votes for passage in the first place.

Why, then, has the bill garnered so much attention? In part because it’s a familiar priority of conservative activists, and in part because of Donald Trump’s eagerness to suggest that American elections aren’t on the level.

But the bill’s prominence also owes a great debt to Elon Musk. After the unwinding of his Department of Government Efficiency and his brief third-party flirtation, the SAVE America Act became the billionaire’s most notable political priority, at least judging by the attention he’s devoted to it on social media. And like DOGE’s failure to move the spending needle, the voter-identification debate is a study in squandered influence, with the world’s most successful businessman engaging in politics in a profoundly ineffective way.

At this phase of the second Trump administration, Trump himself is primarily to blame for his escalating problems. But when the history of Trump 2.0 is written, Musk’s political malpractice will loom large — because at the outset of the administration, no figure in the inner circle was so well positioned to play a shaping role. 

Unlike much of the second-term cast, Musk was not a creature of Trump’s influence: He had his own fame, power base and funding. The social network formerly known as Twitter gave him a unique influence over the national conversation. His embrace of anti-wokeness gave him credibility on the grass-roots right that most rich Republicans do not enjoy.

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This leverage seemed as if it could be brought to bear on the territory Musk knew best: space travel, technology policy, overregulation and its discontents. (One could even hope that his unusual personal commitment to pronatalism would yield some kind of policy interest as well.) And his devotion to dynamism seemed like a potential check on Trump’s zero-sum mentality around tariffs and trade wars.

I don’t want to say that Musk has had no influence along these lines. The fact that a SpaceX associate is running NASA, for instance, seems like what an optimist might have expected.

But Musk certainly didn’t moderate Trumpian trade-warring; that role was played primarily by the bond market. And my personal hope that he had become involved in politics as a step on the ladder up to colonizing Mars gave way to the realization that he wanted to be involved in politics in order to push hard for some of conservatism’s least plausible ideas.

The first of these ideas was the notion that there exists some immense quantum of discretionary spending — on foreign aid, waste and fraud, ideological grant-making — that can be pruned away without the public minding, yielding major fiscal savings. This conviction drove the DOGE hype and ultimate failure, in which Musk’s team repeatedly cut deeper than just the layer of spending that could reasonably be called “woke,” yet still achieved nothing meaningful in the larger budgetary picture. 

This was not an unexpected outcome, and it was strange to watch a man of Musk’s capacities burn political capital and the energy of his apprentices just to discover that the real money is in big popular entitlements that can’t be cut by presidential fiat.

Then, in a different key, Musk decided to do it again with the SAVE America Act, embracing (and hyping, with a strong dose of paranoia) the conceit that elections are rigged against Republicans because some vast number of noncitizens are casting illegal votes.

We have years of investigations by Republican administrations and years of evidence from voter ID laws to indicate that this is not the case. There are sound reasons to think that ID requirements don’t have the dramatic vote-suppressing effects alleged by left-wing critics. But neither do they have the election-protecting effects promised by their conservative champions. Voter fraud is just not an important reason that Republicans lose elections. (Moreover, now that the Republican coalition includes more low-propensity and downscale voters, any effect of ID requirements might actually cut against conservative turnout.)

In Musk’s defense, one could note that voter-ID provisions often poll well, and DOGE was far from the least popular thing the Trump administration has embraced.

But the problem in both cases is not unpopularity per se but simple waste — of time, attention, effort, opportunities. Of all the causes to rally behind, Musk chose two that were distant from his core competencies, detached from his most admirable ambitions and disconnected from the serious challenges facing the country. 

Many of Musk’s critics expected his involvement with the Trump administration to be defined by self-interest and self-dealing. The failure has been otherwise: He threw himself into causes unrelated to his business empire, and the country would probably be better off if he’d just played the tycoon’s part.