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Why Trump’s Tesla Showcase Mattered to Elon Musk
It wasn’t so long ago that Elon Musk couldn’t even get an invitation to the White House.
The year was 2021, and President Joe Biden was announcing tighter pollution rules and promoting his electric vehicle policies.
Behind him on the lawn were gleaming examples — a Ford F-150 Lightning, a Chevrolet Bolt EV, a Jeep Wrangler — as well as the chief executives of the companies that made them. But the nation’s biggest electric vehicle producer was nowhere to be seen.
“Seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited,” Musk tweeted before the event.
The Biden White House explained the snub by noting that the automakers that had been invited were the nation’s three largest employers of the United Automobile Workers, a powerful union, and it suggested that the administration would find other ways to partner with Tesla. (Union animus toward electric vehicles later became a problem for Biden.) But today, the moment is seen as a turning point in a feud between Musk and Biden that some Democrats say they have come to regret deeply.
“They left Elon out,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who is working to get his party to embrace electric vehicles, “and now he hates ’em.”
It was hard not to think about that episode yesterday when Musk and Trump lined up Teslas, including Cybertrucks, on the White House driveway and proceeded to rattle off their benefits like denizens of a suburban showroom.
“I love the product,” Trump said.
“Try it,” Musk said. “You’ll like it!”
Musk now has the White House attention and promotion that he wanted several years ago — and with it, a pile of potential benefits for some of his companies — but it’s come at a price. He donated some $300 million largely through his own super PAC to help Trump get elected. My colleagues Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman reported yesterday that he’s signaled a willingness to put another $100 million into groups controlled by Trump’s political operation.
His alliance with Trump has also eaten into his customer base. Before the election, Murphy said, Democrats were four times more likely than Republicans to buy an electric vehicle. Now, sales of Teslas are slumping, and some Democrats are turning theirs back in to dealers.
Musk may be hoping to find a new market on the other end of the political spectrum. Trump, who has spent years denigrating electric vehicles, insisted he was buying one, with a check. Sean Hannity, the Trump ally, said he, too, would buy a Tesla Model S Plaid as a show of solidarity with Musk.
“This thing rips,” he said on his show, “and you can go 400 miles without a charge.”
AGENCY REPORT
47 percent
That’s the size of the staff cuts at the Education Department, an agency that Trump has said he wants to eliminate. The department announced on Tuesday that it was firing some 1,300 employees. Another 572 employees took separation packages offered in recent weeks, and 63 probationary workers were terminated last month. The department started the year with more than 4,100 workers.
The cuts struck a blow to efforts that measure achievement in U.S. schools. At least 800 Education Department research employees and outside partners have lost their jobs.
More on government agencies
MEANWHILE on X
$TSLA
Musk is using his X account as a megaphone. My colleague Kate Conger guides you through his most important messages in recent days.
Musk initially celebrated his White House car show on Tuesday, but his posts on X eventually took a darker turn.
By Wednesday, he was promoting theories that protests and vandalism at Tesla dealerships were part of a Democrat-funded effort to undermine him.
“The dirty tricks campaign against me & my companies happened exactly as predicted,” he wrote, re-sharing an old post that predicted Democrats would turn on him because of his support for Republicans.
Musk shared posts from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, in which she called for an investigation into Democratic advocacy groups that she claimed were paying for protests against Tesla.
Soon “$TSLA” was trending on X, as Tesla investors celebrated the stock’s rally after losses earlier in the week. Shares in the electric vehicle maker rose seven percent after Musk’s White House appearance, showing the power of his proximity to the president to help his companies.
— Kate Conger
BEHIND THE STORY
The meaning of Musk’s suit
Elon Musk did something unusual last week: He put on a suit and tie, twice. My colleague Shawn McCreesh, a White House reporter, took that to be a sign of a demotion. I asked Shawn to tell us a little more.
Why does it matter so much that Musk decided to wear a suit last week?
I think there is a costume element to Musk’s marauding through the capital — that “Tech Support” T-shirt he constantly wears, and the little joke he tells when he wears it, is very much part of the whole shtick.
This sudden change of wardrobe coincided with a few other things happening around him last week that sure looked like the beginning of a power clampdown. That this most classic and essential of Washington symbols — the gray suit and tie — should also be the symbol of his subjugation was fascinating.
Musk was back to the old blazer-and-T-shirt look at the Tesla event yesterday. What does that mean?
It’s his look, which I guess Trump will continue to tolerate. That he does says a lot about Musk’s power and influence in Trump’s court, because Trump absolutely loves suits. He has written about his love of them in several of his books over the years. It is his costume. It is what people wear when they dress up as him for Halloween.
Rulers throughout history have had strict rules about how their courts are allowed to dress. King Louis IV, for example, had a rule that only a select group of noblemen could wear a certain blue silk jacket like his. Louis also loved diamonds, brocaded coats, elaborate wigs and shoes with red heels that symbolized the blood of his enemies whom he vowed to crush under his feet.
Some people in Washington who dress slovenly on purpose — like John Fetterman and, to a degree, Bernie Sanders — do so to signal that they are one of the people. Musk strikes me as the opposite. His informality seems to be about reminding everyone that he is in a league of his own.
Tell us, Shawn — when do you wear a suit?
Well, after writing about this topic, I felt it’d be rather hypocritical not to wear one. So I’ve got a suit on today.
new video loaded: How Trump Is Prioritizing White People as Refugees
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Gilad Thaler, Stephanie Swart, Jon Miller and Whitney Shefte
May 8, 2026
An image recorded on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission in 1969 shows the shadows of astronauts, along with a highlighted area above the horizon showing “unidentified phenomena,” according to the Defense Department.
NASA/via Defense Department
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NASA/via Defense Department
Cold War reports of mysterious rotating saucers; recent sightings of metallic elliptical objects floating in mid-air. Those and other reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs — the military’s term for UFOs — are described in a trove of documents released by the Department of Defense on Friday.
In all, the Pentagon released more than 160 records, citing President Trump’s call for unprecedented transparency in giving the public access to federal and military records related to unexplained encounters with strange phenomena.
President Trump said via Truth Social that with the documents and other records available to the public, “the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”
The records are posted to a specialized web portal, war.gov/info, which will house additional files as they’re released on a rolling basis.
“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Defense Department posting on Facebook as it made the files public.
Friday’s action “is the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said.
One document cites unusual phenomena arising during the debriefing of the Apollo 11 technical crew in July of 1969, attributing three observations to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, from that lunar mission: “one, an object on the way out to the Moon; two, flashes of light inside the cabin; and three, a sighting on the return trip of a bright light tentatively assumed by the crew to be a laser.”
One of the oldest files dates from November 1948. The report from the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence is marked Top Secret, and it notes recurring instances of unidentified objects spotted in the skies over Europe.
“They have been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded,” the report states, “and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking.”
The report goes on to say that U.S. officers consulted their peers in Sweden’s intelligence service about the objects, and they were told, “these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth.”
That document is seemingly free of redactions. But many details in a more recent entry are obscured, as it relays the account of a woman with deep experience with U.S. military aircraft and drones who reported an inexplicable sighting in September of 2023, in an area where airspace had been closed for testing purposes.
Materials related to that incident include a composite sketch of an ovaloid metallic object floating above a treeline, with a bright light at one end of the object.
“They watched the object for five to ten seconds and then the object just disappeared,” the report states.
Several people in at least two cars corroborated the sighting, according to the report. It states that the unidentified woman who spoke to the FBI ” would not have reported the object if she had seen it by herself.”
And hinting at the stigma that is seen as a prevalent challenge to collecting and discussing such eyewitness accounts, the report states, “Several of her co-workers subsequently made fun of her due to her report.”
Some records include venerable witnesses — such as a well-known case in 1955, when a group led by then-Sen. Richard Russell, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time, reported that they saw two strange objects from the window of a train in the former Soviet Union. The group, which included U.S. Army Lt. Col. E. U. Hathaway, reported seeing what looked to be “flying disc aircraft.”
The U.S. Air Attache who prepared the report describes the witnesses as “excellent sources.”
That 1955 sighting was described in records previously released by the CIA. But that report, based on a cable received from the U.S. Air Force, seems to have been partially redacted.
The report of the unidentified object isn’t the only bit of intelligence that the American visitors brought back: the folder also includes descriptions and a diagram of a jet bomber, and accounts of a railroad switching system designed to resolve the differing widths of Russian and Czech train tracks.
A coalition of voters and Democratic candidates sued Tennessee officials in federal court late Thursday over its new congressional map, arguing that it was unconstitutional to implement new district lines this close to the state’s August primary.
It was the latest twist in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling last week on the Voting Rights Act that declared congressional districts in Louisiana to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The ruling set off a frenetic scramble in Tennessee and several other Republican-led states to redraw their districts for partisan advantage on the assumption that they are no longer required to preserve Black majority districts.
The Republican supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly muscled through a new congressional map on Thursday that carves up the majority-Black city of Memphis, home to the state’s lone Democratic-held seat.
The lawsuit and its outcome took on heightened stakes after the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved map that created four Democratic-leaning districts in the state. If Tennessee’s map holds — and if other Southern states approve new maps that dilute majority-Black seats held by Democrats — Republicans will have established a structural advantage across multiple districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“Changing the rules midstream will create chaos for voters and throw communities into upheaval,” Rachel Campbell, the chairwoman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, which is also part of the lawsuit, said in a statement. “We will fight these racially gerrymandered maps tooth and nail because the future of democracy in Tennessee, across the South, and throughout this nation depends on it.”
The lawsuit centers on the constitutional right to vote under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and it argues that both the voters’ and candidates’ constitutional rights were harmed by changes to the congressional map that undermined months of campaigning and voter education based on the old map.
The lawsuit also references a legal doctrine known as the Purcell principle. That principle, stemming from a contested 2006 Supreme Court ruling in Purcell v. Gonzalez, discourages changes to voting rules and procedures close to elections.
The lawsuit was filed overnight by a cluster of voters, as well as four Democratic candidates: Representative Steve Cohen of Memphis, whose district was divided up among three new Republican-leaning districts; State Representative Justin J. Pearson, who had challenged Mr. Cohen for the Memphis seat; Mayor Chaz Molder of Columbia, a lead challenger to Representative Andy Ogles in what was once a solely Middle Tennessee seat; and Chaney Mosely, a candidate for a Nashville-area seat.
A second lawsuit is already underway in state court, filed Thursday afternoon by the NAACP Tennessee State Conference.
Spokeswomen for Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, and Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit also names Tre Hargett, the secretary of state, and Mark Goins, the Tennessee coordinator of elections, in their official positions. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
In their brief filed before the district court for the Middle District of Tennessee, the candidates and voters argue that the sudden shift of the congressional districts just months before the primary “will wreak chaos on the electorate, will cause significant voter confusion” and will affect election officials’ ability to administer the election. They asked the court to stop the implementation of the map before the 2026 election.
Tennessee was the first state to draft and approve a map after the Supreme Court’s ruling raised the bar for challenging district lines under the Voting Rights Act. Within a week, Mr. Lee summoned lawmakers to Nashville for a special session, and Republican leaders had drawn and approved a new map that gives the party an advantage toward electing an entirely Republican congressional delegation.
The map carved up the Ninth Congressional District, where two-thirds of the voting-age population is Black, into thirds, most likely eliminating the state’s lone Democrat-leaning district. It also moved district lines around the Nashville area in an apparent bid to shore up Mr. Ogles.
Candidates now have until noon on May 15 to file papers with the secretary of state’s office. Those who already qualified may remain in the new district with the same number. At least one Republican, State Senator Brent Taylor, has already announced his candidacy for the new Ninth Congressional District.
All four congressional candidates on the suit warned that they would have to “to expend more resources identifying, associating with, and campaigning to voters who live in the newly-enacted district.”
They also pointed to litigation filed in February 2022 after a new map of State House and State Senate districts that year was challenged, prompting a push to delay the qualifying date from April to May. At the time, Tennessee officials argued against moving the qualifying date. The State Supreme Court agreed.
Seamus Hughes and Katherine Chui contributed research.
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