Elon Musk is a genius and a great American to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude. Any one of his myriad achievements is enough to make him a legend. His purchase of Twitter broke the back of the leftist narrative dominance. SpaceX has revolutionized rocketry. Tesla has not only created a fantastic vehicle and thousands of jobs, but has also made a significant amount of money for many regular shareholders like me. Starlink was saving lives in Texas this weekend. But his idea for a third party is a bad idea, and he’s going to see that soon enough, and he’s going to realize that he is not a movement, but rather, a part of a coalition, and he’s going to come back and rejoin us.
And we’re going to welcome him with open arms.
Elon Musk’s challenge is that he is an engineer. He sees politics as a problem to be solved, not an art to be mastered. It’s very American to dislike the idea of politics. It’s hard to find a more American idea than that politics suck besides baseball, apple pie, and an AR-15 in every home. But that’s always been a flaw in the America psyche. Politics is simply the process of governance, and unless you’re an anarchist or a libertarian, we’re going to have to have a process of governance, and that means we’re going to have a process by which we create policies and collect the resources to execute them. This process requires deals and compromises. It just does.
Elon Musk finds this messy and inefficient, and he is absolutely correct. Politics is always dirty and inefficient. This is because it’s politics. Now, Musk has a very clear picture of what right objectively looks like. Obviously, we should not be spending more money than we take in, and the national debt is a looming disaster just waiting to detonate at some point in the future. But the problem with politics is that what right objectively looks like doesn’t matter. Politics is not an objective process. It’s a subjective process where individual and group interests take precedence over what a technocrat applying his ideology might prefer.
I like the free market, but the free market has flaws, those flaws being effects that I don’t prefer. For instance, if we had a completely free labor market, that would necessitate a completely free system of migration, allowing people to move to take advantage of economic opportunities wherever they arise and businesses to import the cheapest workers possible. Milton Friedman might think that’s a great idea. We don’t think that’s a great idea because we would prefer not to have the entire Third World move here and bring the entire Third World problem set here.
Oh, wait, we kind of had that – unofficially and without voters approving it.
But life is more than economics. That understanding is one of the secrets of Donald Trump’s success. The Republican Party used to be purely focused on economics – tax cuts, budget cuts, and deregulation. Trump understood how important the economy is, but he also understood that our society was in such a sorry state – torn apart by millions of illegal aliens, crime, perverts and perversions, and the Chardonnay fascism of the Democrat Party – that our priority stopped being how to make a buck and started being how to break the left’s stranglehold on our culture. Almost all of us are willing to sacrifice some degree of theoretical economic efficiency to preserve our culture and make America great again.
What Donald Trump did was take a bunch of disparate groups with a few things in common but some differing interests and bring them together in a coalition to take on the establishment. Elon Musk and his tech bro contingent were just one of those coalition partners. However, it was not the key coalition partner. The coalition will survive without him and his faction. We’d rather have his group with us, but it’s not going to be the sole driver of Trump 2.0 policy. Right now, what’s driving America First policy is getting rid of illegal aliens, fixing our military, suppressing crime, and doing the undoing of the commie nonsense that Biden put into place, like trans idiocy, DEI, and all the other cultural fascisms the Chardonnay women wish to impose upon us.
Sure, the debt is important, but our coalition decided that other things are more important at this moment. That’s why the Big Beautiful Bill had to pass. It had an economic component, continuing the tax cuts, but also cultural components, like increasing the ability to enforce immigration laws. Would it add to the deficit? Well, there’s a lot of ambiguity there because of creative Washington accounting that considers not stealing citizens’ money to be a “cut,” but yeah, we’re going to keep spending more than we take in for a while. There’s simply no constituency to not do that at the moment. Who is the voter who is in favor of a 40% cut to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, the real drivers of debt? There are some. Probably about 5% of voters. There is a huge theoretical constituency for balancing the budget today, and nearly zero constituency for doing the things required to make it happen.
Elon Musk felt betrayed by this, which he wasn’t. His coalition faction just didn’t get everything that it wanted. The idea that he’s now going to go out and attempt to create this America Party operates under the assumption that a significant number of Americans share the particularized view of Elon Musk’s sliver of the America First coalition to such an extent that they will abandon the America First coalition, embrace policies that have almost no constituency, and rally to his third party in what history teaches us is going to be certain defeat. That this would have a substantial chance of helping the Democrats is the mayo on this Schiff sandwich.
Here’s Elon Musk’s challenge. The Republicans are a little annoyed with Musk, though we would love nothing more than to make up, break bread, have a beer (or a Diet Coke for DJT), and hug it out. But the Democrats hate him. They want to destroy him. The Democrats’ catspaws are using violence to attack his business interests. Before Trump came in, the Democrats had weaponized agencies across the board to persecute him and his companies. If they don’t murder him outright – we’ve already seen how they tried twice to kill Trump, how their allies have and are hurting and killing opponents, and how they are openly advocating violence in response to not getting what they want – they will imprison Elon Musk forever. As with Donald Trump, political success is a matter of life and death.
And for what? It’s not clear how much effect this new America Party is going to have. Is there a significant constituency out there for austerity on the part of regular Americans but continued lower tax rates and subsidies for Silicon Valley tech bros? Are there millions of voters clamoring for increased H1-B visas so indentured serf foreigners can replace American workers? Who is his constituency? He’s already attracted leftist Mark Cuban, teen gadfly Andrew Yang, and national joke Anthony Scaramucci. That’s inauspicious. It’s entirely possible that the America Party will become the home of disaffected Democrats since the statistics say there just aren’t many disaffected Republicans. I mean, there’s Thomas Massie, who only proves that sometimes you can have addition through subtraction.
Why would a Republican leave Trump to go to Musk even if American third parties were not doomed to failure structurally, practically, and historically? Elon Musk is outstanding on free speech, but just a few years ago, he was telling us he doesn’t believe in gun rights. Is he for or against abortion? What does he think of a basic income? The fact is that he’s a political newcomer. His views on key cultural issues, assuming we like them (and we can’t necessarily assume that), are not firmly set. Trump’s are. There are videos of him from 40 years ago talking about the same things in the same way that he’s putting into practice right now. A decade in office has shown us that Trump knows what he believes, makes it policy, and keeps his word. This isn’t a hit on Elon. Elon doesn’t have Trump’s track record. Musk is new to politics, and Americans probably aren’t going to take a chance that his current set of beliefs, even if voters liked them, aren’t going to change.
The America Party’s strategy appears to be spending an inordinate amount of money on key races to either win them outright or swing them. Winning is tough; who is the popular candidate who’s going to forgo a major party campaign to run under this novelty banner? How many Republican voters are going to abandon a loyal MAGA candidate for a loyal Musk candidate? Not many, but maybe enough to swing the election to a Democrat. Again, that’s very annoying for us Republicans, but that’s very dangerous for Elon Musk.
Trump and Musk have thrown punches at each other, some under the belt, but there was once friendship there, and there should be again. It makes no sense for them to be in opposition. Inside the tent, Musk can at least get a hearing. Outside, he gets nothing – or worse. It doesn’t need to be that way. The America First coalition can almost certainly survive without Musk and his faction, but why should it? Musk is a huge asset to our coalition, and frankly, Musk has nowhere else to go.
Eventually, he is going to come home. When he does, we should slaughter the fatted calf and welcome him.
Look, Elon Musk and President Trump need to bury the hatchet, Musk needs to end his American Party nonsense, and we need to welcome him back into our America First coalition. We can't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and allow Democrats to win elections and disrupt Trump's MAGA agenda. Musk can't afford that, either. It's time for him to come to his senses. Help us continue the fight for our great nation and the policies the American people voted for. Enlist in Townhall VIP right now and get access to a bunch of great stuff, including my extra Wednesday column, my weekly Stream of Kurtiousness videos every Friday, and my Unredacted podcast every Monday! Use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off.
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