How Tesla Became the New MAGA Hat

“It’s Tesla, baby!” tweeted Lily Tang Williams, posting a video of herself in a tie-dyed sweatshirt inside her brand-new Tesla Model Y. A twice-defeated Republican congressional candidate in New Hampshire, Williams told her X followers that she had bought the car to support Elon Musk and DOGE. “We, the free people, must defeat the leftists/Marxists/communist mobs or they will destroy America!” she wrote.

When I caught up with Williams a few days later, she told me she hadn’t even driven the car yet. “I need to practice. I’m not a very good driver,” she laughed. But she said it was important for conservatives to support Tesla and its CEO now that the left had turned against them. “We must win, as a free people,” she said.

Because of Musk’s support for Trump—and the Tesla CEO’s subsequent role as the president’s hatchet man—many liberal Tesla owners have been desperate to sell their once-prized cars. Indeed, in the past few days, more radical Musk-haters have gone much further, spray-painting graffiti on Teslas, setting charging stations on fire, and even throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla vehicles.

On Tuesday, President Trump, once a vociferous critic of electric vehicles (“They don’t go far. They cost a fortune”), got into the act, turning the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom during a half-hour news conference. After prompting Musk to give a sales pitch about the wonders of full autonomous driving—a feature he has promised for years—the president said that he planned to buy a Tesla himself, a red Model S. Without asking for a discount, the president added.

“I think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people,” Trump said of Musk. “And I just want people to know that he can’t be penalized for being a patriot.”