As Tesla Goes Down, So Does Trump’s United States?

Donald Trump and Elon Musk clearly form the world’s most inflammatory mutual admiration society. The current U.S. president feels a particular emotional bond.

In his recent speech before Congress, he professed in reference to Elon Musk that “he doesn’t need to do this, he doesn’t need to do this.” It was as if Trump was also sending a message to himself that he too didn’t need to shoulder the burden of taking on the U.S. presidency.

Beyond the (b)romance

The globally most relevant question about their (b)romance, however, is one that cannot please either man: To what extent could the creeping self-dismantling of Tesla, as indicated among other factors by its tumbling stock price, foreshadow the path the United States will take regarding its standing and power around the globe?

Both Tesla and the U.S. were once regarded as world beaters, way ahead of their respective competition. With Tesla’s stock down almost 50% over the past three months, this does not augur well for the United States under Trump/Musk management.

Musk’s new drug

In Tesla’s case, its path of decline started long before Musk became hyper-fascinated by his role as America’s new Doge.

When he engaged in ever more activities way beyond Tesla’s remit, he lost the eye on the ball. For a while, Musk managed to pump up the stock price of Tesla with all sorts of grandiloquent talk about robots and AI.

By now, though, Tesla’s technology leadership in the markets first stalled and is now vanishing. Musk simply lost the focus on the Chinese competition and became a talk master of promises.

His new drug is clearly having political power.

The “pigeon style” of management

Musk’s management style is utterly imperious and, not so coincidentally, similar to Donald Trump’s. It is aptly described inside Tesla as the “pigeon style” of management: Elon flies in, shits on everybody, and then quickly flies out again.

One result is that many self-respecting senior managers at Tesla have left or are at least contemplating leaving – provided, of course, that they haven’t been fired by Musk first.

They are also rightfully afraid at this stage of guilt by association and the related tarnishing of their professional reputation, if not an outright fear of future unemployability if they stay with Musk any longer.

Tesla and the U.S. on the way down: The parallels

The main hypothesis proposed here is that Tesla’s declining sales and stock price are a leading indicator for what’s ahead for the United States as a whole.

Just consider that Tesla, once considered so cool, now faces a rising level of consumer boycott in the United States and the western world.

Meanwhile, its products are increasingly squeezed out of the Chinese market due to a lack of technological innovation and too high a price point.

Other U.S. brands

The trouble is that this consumer boycott in the Western world is beginning to extend beyond Musk and Tesla.

Jeff Bezos’s shameful edict at the Washington Post is leading people to consider moving away from Amazon, as convenient an online purchasing tool as that is. Not to mention the spineless submission recently exhibited by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

The key difference between Tesla and the United States

The key difference between Tesla and the United States, of course, is that Musk just got distracted, while Donald Trump is completely focused on turning himself and his reign into a one-man domestic and international destruction society.

Trump’s obvious goal is to hollow out just about anything that the United States was well regarded for around the world.

Trump’s incessant sense of personal peeve

With his Nero-like abandon and an incessant sense of personal peeve, Trump seriously believes that the United States – after all, the emperor of the age of globalization – has been profoundly wronged by the rest of the world.

The only semi-logical explanation for this is that Trump, who never overcame the brutal slighting at the hand of his imperious father, now wants to have the entire world pay for his sense of feeling slighted.

The other non-logic of his approach is more than evident in his approach to tariffs. By that tool, he aims to punish the world – and does not even realize (or care?) that he will very likely punish cash-strapped American consumers.

The Trump disease: “Total fact immunity” (TFI)

The trouble is that no facts in the world will ever get Trump to reconsider what is emblazoned in his calcified brain.

His predecessor Joe Biden‘s problem may have been that he was senile and didn’t recall facts. Donald Trump is worse in his constant penchant to recall non-facts that underpin his very curious way of seeing things.

The disease that Donald Trump evidently suffers from may be best described as “total fact immunity” (TFI).

Mental imperialism as a shield

Unperturbed, and using mental imperialism as a shield, the Trump team bets on its ability to execute a master plan and impose its will on the rest of the world.

At present, the danger is far greater that it can impose its will mostly just on the American people. The presumably rock-solid set of domestic checks and balances may turn out at best to have been a pile of Swiss cheese that mostly consists of holes.

The extent to which a right-leaning, Roman Catholic-dominated U.S. Supreme Court will stand in the way of the power takeover by the Trump team is a very weak reed on which to base the future solidity of American democracy.

Choosing “America Alone”

Much like Tesla, a great deal of the past success of the United States was based on it being the harbor of global imagination and aspiration. Once that is gone, that is hard to recover.

The “trumpet” administration has chosen a course of “America Alone,” although Trump somehow fancies himself to be the buddy of both Putin and Xi.

Trump viewed from China – and Russia

Both of those leaders are determined to exploit the shortsighted foibles and delusions of the American leader for their own national gains.

Let no one forget that, in China, Trump would have never made it beyond the level of a mayor of a second-tier city.

And Putin in Russia still can’t believe how their Manchurian candidate delivers on Russia’s long-time goal of separating the alliance between the United States and the European nations.

Trump, to Putin, must be a gift from God, making up for a lot of the shame that the ever destructive Mr. Putin feels for the political work of the actually very constructive Mikhail Gorbachev.

Do they even care?

The failure of Tesla would be of little consequence to Musk. He already thinks he has much bigger fish to fry than Tesla. Although Musk’s much-heralded SpaceX rockets have the disturbingly common habit of exploding soon after takeoff, scattering debris all over the red state of Florida.

Just as in Russia, the United States’ Trump-camp oligarchs don’t care about the bad economy, as long as they can extract profits.

Trump is no different. He doesn’t and won’t much care about a bad U.S. economy, as long as he and his clan can extract what they want out of it. It’s the same mindset he has applied to Ukraine – it’s all a matter of extraction.

There are already the first reports about the – potentially very lucrative – method behind the Trump team’s madness.

Creating chaos throughout the public sector and prospects of auctioning off considerable parts of the U.S. government’s real estate holdings, including the U.S. Department of Justice headquarters, could very well be part of the Trump design.

This effort to crash a booming U.S. economy has been dubbed a “curated failure.” America’s oligarchs could acquire public sector assets and from squeezed individuals at very low prices.

Who can stop them?

There is no doubt that Trump will be emboldened with each new legally doubtful action he gets away with, especially knowing that the Supreme Court has granted him full immunity while in office.

During Trump’s first term, the American people launched massive demonstrations, but they are exhausted. Those who oppose Trump have largely gone into “inner emigration”. Meanwhile, private militias are taking people into custody when they protest at Republican town hall meetings.