Elon Musk presents a new vulnerability for Donald Trump

 

Politics

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.

 

By Ally Mutnick, Holly Otterbein, Sam Sutton and Lisa Kashinsky

02/06/2025 10:20 AM EST

Updated: 02/06/2025 01:51 PM EST

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/06/democrats-elon-musk-donald-trump-00202833

 

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.

 

The survey isn’t a one-off, either. An Economist/YouGov poll published on Wednesday also found Musk’s approval rating underwater, 43 percent favorable to 49 percent unfavorable.

 

A poll by Garin’s Hart Research of 1,735 voters taken between Jan. 24 and Jan. 30 found that a majority — including 56 percent of independents — have a negative view of Musk.

 

In House Majority Forward’s internal polling, pollsters asked respondents for their thoughts on “the creation of a government of the rich for the rich by appointing up to nine different billionaires to the administration,” and found 70 percent opposed with only 19 percent in support — a stat that suggests Democrats have landed on a message that could gain traction with swing voters.

 

That data and focus groups held by House Majority Forward helped bring attacks on the administration into focus: Democrats “shouldn’t chide Musk, Trump, and others for being rich,” the group wrote in a memo, but point out Musk’s conflicts of interests as head of DOGE and note that he could undermine key safety net programs to enrich himself at the expense of American taxpayers.

 

“Participants laud Musk’s business acumen and aren’t opposed to the ideals of DOGE,” the memo said. But “Musk’s relationship with Trump — who they view as inherently pro-big business” makes them wary that the billionaire’s cuts “could include programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.”

 

Congressional Democratic leaders are seizing on that fear, suggesting repeatedly this week that Musk and his lieutenants’ access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems could compromise those programs and the sensitive personal information that’s tied to them.

 

“Nothing screams Democracy like having a secret squad of company men pull off a hostile takeover of Americans’ Social Security, tax information, in the dead of night,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a Tuesday press conference. “That is not democracy, Mr. Musk.”

 

Musk has emerged as a consistent target for Democratic lawmakers at a time when the party’s congressional leaders have struggled to keep pace in combating Trump’s rapid-fire edicts. In just a few weeks, Democrats have escalated from mocking Musk as a “shadow president” to casting him as a “Nazi nepo baby” engineering a “hostile” takeover of swaths of the federal government at a “Nobody Elected Elon!” rally outside the Treasury Department this week.

 

But their broadsides against Musk are more bark than bite. Democrats, locked out of power in Washington, have filed multiple pieces of legislation that seek to bar Musk’s Treasury access, though none are likely to gain traction among Republicans deferential to Trump. Their attempt to subpoena him in the Oversight panel this week also failed.

 

“Democrats shouldn’t be opposed to the idea of modernizing government,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.). “But we absolutely should be opposed to his tactics, his reckless tactics.”