Republicans Need To Figure Out Their Elon Musk Narrative

Democrats are clearly telegraphing their attacks for the fall

This isn’t hard to see. It’s no mystery how Democrats plan to attack Republicans over the coming year and a half: tie them to Elon Musk like a billionaire-sized string of dynamite. They’re doing it already, and intend to ramp it up to 11. Yet Republicans don’t seem to have an answer for how to deal with it – and saying “Musk isn’t on the ballot, I am” isn’t an answer.

There was a significant portion of time where Republicans struggled to figure out how to defend Donald Trump, but they’ve solved that problem. Trump’s poll numbers and popularity are now solid as a mountain – people love him or they hate him, and moving those numbers is very difficult, especially when there are dedicated well-funded ad campaigns promoting what he’s doing on a daily basis. So in lieu of running back their attacks on the President, Democrats have decided to shift to his radically autistic backer – making the case that Republicans aren’t working for the voters, but for the chaotic billionaire who robbed them of Twitter.

The idea is to turn Elon Musk into the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi, an omnipresent focus on the campaign trail framed as an avatar of selfish, out of touch excess of the American super-rich, bent on stealing your Social Security dollars away for purposes as yet unknown but certainly devious.

What seems somewhat astonishing is that Republicans haven’t figured out how to respond to these attacks yet. Partially this is because Musk makes DC nervous. They never know what he’s going to be doing next, and his personal oddities – how many DC political figures seek to have a “legion” of children for $15 million a pop? Or openly seek to pursue natalist ends not through child tax credits but acting like a consensual Genghis Khan? – are the stuff of legend. But he’s also an essential part of the GOP project, making the cuts Congress was loath to make and clearly on the winning side of the current tariff argument on the right. Even if he becomes a drag on Republican chances in Virginia’s fall elections, as he did in Wisconsin, the party needs him, his dollars and his followers – and GOP base voters don’t mind his antics at the moment.

Republicans need to start thinking of how they’re going to message about Elon Musk now, before the negative campaign everyone can see coming starts in earnest. Democrats spent one cycle after another hammering at Donald Trump, with ads and media and a lawfare agenda that ultimately all failed in 2024. Now they’ve moved on to a different rich guy, and Republicans should prepare to defend different ground in the fall and beyond.

Consider this WSJ report on Ashley St. Clair part of the overall push.