Politics
Elon Musk’s Use of X Mimics Hearst’s and Ford’s Manipulation of Media
An entrepreneur who revolutionized the automobile business decides he now needs to change how the world thinks, so he buys a media property to use as a megaphone. His rants validate many people’s worst impulses while also encouraging enemies of democracy around the world.
This sounds like Elon Musk and his social media site X in 2025, but it was also Henry Ford and his paper, The Dearborn Independent, in the 1920s. Ford, the inventor of the Model T, bought a suburban weekly and remade it to push his antisemitic views. The Dearborn Independent published a long-running series called “The International Jew,” which blamed Jews for the world’s ills, and publicized “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a hoax document. The Nazis gave Ford a medal.
Ford was perhaps the most blatant example in a long tradition of moguls who bought media platforms and then used them to promote odious views. These tycoons often used the latest in technology to reach the widest audience, whether it was high-speed newspaper presses or, in Ford’s case, his network of car dealerships.
Drive off in your new Model T and there would be The Dearborn Independent on the seat. Newspapers at the time were local businesses. With the dealerships, The Dearborn Independent became one of the highest-circulated papers in the country, printing more than 750,000 copies of each issue at its peak.
The biggest difference between Ford and other media titans like Rupert Murdoch was that the latter generally promoted their views by hiring like-minded editors and anchors. The Dearborn Independent announced on its cover that it was the “Ford International Weekly,” and it included a full-page editorial signed by Ford.
Mr. Musk’s actions signal a return to Ford’s personal approach. The Tesla and SpaceX billionaire has enthusiastically posted, reposted and endorsed incorrect or inflammatory claims on X that Social Security is fraudulent, that the Democrats are importing immigrants to win elections and that the federal judges who are ruling against the Trump administration should be impeached.
There are plenty of precedents for what Mr. Musk is doing with X. But he has taken the process to a level unimaginable even a short time ago. The site says he has 220 million followers, an assertion impossible to verify. Even if it is only a fraction of that number, X has been optimized to blast its owner’s posts as widely as possible. People see them and hear about them.
Mr. Musk’s $44 billion purchase of what was then Twitter in 2022 at first seemed to be a mistake, even to him. Then it was perceived as a billionaire’s toy. In last year’s election, it became a weapon. He used his political views to form an alliance with Donald J. Trump, which he then leveraged to put himself into the government expressly to shut down as much of it as possible.
The repercussions are still unfolding. But for Mr. Musk, it was a clear victory. In the name of government efficiency, agencies fired regulators who were in a position to oversee his empire. Mr. Musk now has a much freer hand with his cars and rockets. (An X spokesman did not provide a comment.)
“This is like nothing we’ve ever seen,” said Rick Perlstein, author of a four-volume chronicle of modern American conservatism. Noting Mr. Musk’s frequent use of memes and images, the historian added: “It’s the politics of the nervous system, not the higher functions of the brain. There’s no argument, just fear mongering.”
Moguls in the United States and Britain have owned media with the purpose of exerting influence since the creation of the modern newspaper in the late 19th century. During World War I, Viscount Northcliffe of Britain controlled roughly 40 percent of the morning circulation and 45 percent of the evening circulation there. His properties included The Daily Mail, read by the working class, and The Times, read by the elites.
The viscount, whose name was Alfred Harmsworth, played a crucial role in deposing Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in December 1916. Winston Churchill wrote that the press baron “aspired to exercise a commanding influence on events.” Viscount Northcliffe’s influence on the war was so great that the Germans sent warships to assassinate him in 1917, shelling his seaside home.
In the United States, the control of the media was often more of a local phenomenon. In West Texas in the early 1960s, the ultraconservative Whittenburg family owned The Amarillo Daily News, the NBC television station and the dominant radio station. There were few competing voices.
“If you feed people a far-right media diet, you’ll end up with a population almost exclusively on the far right,” said Jeff Roche, a historian who wrote “The Conservative Frontier,” a forthcoming study of the politics of the region. “Amarillo became the most right-wing city in America.”
“Media ownership and political influence have gone hand in hand since the earliest days of the newspaper industry,” said Simon Potter, a professor of modern history at the University of Bristol who studies mass media. “For just as long, people have worried about this intimate relationship between the media and politics — does it really serve the public interest?”
Behind that question is another: Does their megaphone really give them power, or is it shouting into a void? An American forerunner of Mr. Musk — William Randolph Hearst — provides an answer. Hearst, the owner of the upstart New York Journal, sent correspondents to Cuba in 1897 to cover a war with Spain. His interests were less humanitarian than promotional. He was in a circulation war.
One version of how that story played out showed Hearst as an all-powerful media magnate:
The Journal correspondents discovered there was no war. “Everything is quiet,” Frederic Remington, the paper’s illustrator, cabled Hearst. “There will be no war.” They wanted to leave.
Hearst replied: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” He then agitated in his papers for the war that President William McKinley in short order began. It liberated Cuba and acquired for the United States prized parts of the Spanish empire.
The story was first published in a book by a colleague of Hearst’s named James Creelman and later immortalized in Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.” It has been thoroughly debunked over the years. There was no evidence that Hearst ever said he would supply a war. The correspondents found plenty to illustrate. But the anecdote persisted because it showed a mogul so powerful that he could make wars out of nothing.
When Hearst tried to move on from his wartime endeavors to advance his own political career, he stumbled. He secured a seat in the House of Representatives in 1902, but bids to become the mayor of New York faltered twice. He lost a 1906 campaign for New York governor, too.
David Nasaw, who wrote “The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst,” thinks Mr. Musk’s use of X to rally supporters is as illusory as Hearst’s supposed creation of a war.
“I haven’t seen anywhere that Twitter gets out the MAGA vote,” he said.
Hearst, in Mr. Nasaw’s view, reflected the sentiments of his readers rather than leading them. But the historian agreed that something new was going on with Mr. Musk. Hearst, Ford, even Viscount Northcliffe and the other British press lords before World War II, all had something in common that ultimately limited them.
“They were outside the room, screaming,” Mr. Nasaw said. “Twitter was important for Musk but only to get him inside the room, into the government. He’s unique in being both inside and outside with no constraints on his behavior. There’s never been anything quite like that.”
Tesla sales are plunging. Hearst and Ford could have warned Mr. Musk: Courting controversy with hateful views is bad for your reputation and usually bad for your business, too.
Ford was sued for libel over The Dearborn Independent and became the subject of boycotts. He closed the paper in 1927, although he did not repent his views. A stain lingered.
Hearst went up against President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, putting his anti-Roosevelt screeds on the front page of his papers. As the editorials became increasingly abusive, readers had to choose: Whom are we going to support, the president or the publisher?
“They chose Roosevelt,” Mr. Nasaw said. “Which meant Hearst eventually destroyed himself and his newspapers.”
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FIRST ON FOX: A Senate Republican wants to know the exact cost of a partial government shutdown as GOP and Democratic leaders are at an impasse to keep the government open.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, called on the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to provide a detailed report on the sprawling impact that a partial government shutdown could have, including payments throughout the federal government and the possible broader economic impact.
The House GOP passed its short-term funding extension, known as a continuing resolution (CR) last week, but the bill was later blocked by Senate Democrats. For now, Republicans and Democrats in the upper chamber are at odds on a plan to keep the government open.
And the deadline to fund the government by Sept. 30 is fast-approaching.
TOP HOUSE DEM FIRES BACK AT TRUMP’S ‘UNHINGED’ SHUTDOWN REMARKS AMID COLLAPSE OF GOV FUNDING TALKS
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, called on the Congressional Budget Office to produce a report on the economic impact that a possible government shutdown could have. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Ernst, who chairs the Senate DOGE Caucus named after tech-billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, laid the fault of a potential shutdown on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in her letter to CBO Director Phillip Swagel.
“The same politicians who whined and complained about the Department of Government Efficiency laying off unnecessary bureaucrats just a few months ago are now forcing a government-wide shutdown themselves to expose who is and isn’t an essential employee,” she wrote.
Ernst requested a sweeping economic operational impact analysis from the agency, including how a shutdown could affect back pay costs for furloughed non-essential employees, military pay, congressional pay and the broader economic impact that the government closing could have on the private sector.
TRUMP CANCELS MEETING WITH SCHUMER, JEFFRIES OVER ‘RIDICULOUS DEMANDS’ AS FUNDING DEADLINE LOOMS
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks with reporters outside the Senate Chamber at the Capitol on Sept. 10, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
Specifically, she wanted to know how businesses could be impacted by a temporary stoppage of government services, like loans, permits and certifications, and how companies and businesses could recoup losses after a shutdown ended.
She also wanted information on lost efficiencies in the government and the costs that could accrue from unfulfilled procurements or allowing contracts to lapse, and whether the burden of keeping national parks open would fall onto the states or if they’d be shuttered, too.
The CBO did provide an analysis of the cost of the last time the government shuttered in 2019, when Schumer and President Donald Trump were at odds on providing funding to construct a wall at the southern border. That 35-day shutdown was the longest in U.S. history, and no funding for a border wall was granted.
The report, published in January 2019, found that the shutdown saw roughly $18 billion in federal spending delayed, which led to a dip in that year’s first quarter gross domestic product of $8 billion. The report noted roughly $3 billion of that would not be recovered.
THUNE SLAMS DEMOCRATS’ ‘COLD-BLOODED PARTISAN’ TACTICS AS FUNDING DEADLINE NEARS
President Donald Trump steps off Air Force One in Arizona after arriving for the memorial service for political activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium, on Sept. 21, 2025 in Glendale, Arizona. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
It also found that federal workers who received delayed payments and private businesses were the hardest hit.
“Some of those private-sector entities will never recoup that lost income,” the report stated.
It remains unclear whether Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Schumer can strike a deal. After Trump canceled a planned meeting Tuesday with Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., both Democrats blamed the president for the looming shutdown.
However, Democrats’ asking price for a short-term funding extension is too high for Republicans.
They want permanent extensions to Affordable Care Act subsidies, a full repeal of the “big, beautiful bill”s health care title, which includes the $50 billion rural hospital fund, and a clawback of the canceled funding for NPR and PBS.
“Once again, Donald Trump has shown the American people he is not up to the job,” Schumer said. “It’s a very simple job: sit down and negotiate with the Democratic leaders and come to an agreement, but he just ain’t up to it. He runs away before the negotiations even begin.”
As one way to keep tabs on President Trump’s state of mind, I’m on his email fundraising lists. Lately his 79-year-old mind has seemed to be on his mortality.
“I want to try and get to heaven” has been the subject line on roughly a half-dozen Trump emails since mid-August. Oddly, one arrived earlier this month on the same day that the commander in chief separately posted on social media a meme of himself as “Apocalypse Now” character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, satisfyingly surveying the hellish conflagration that his helicopters had wreaked, not on Vietnam but on Chicago. “Chipocalypse” was Trump’s warning to the next U.S. city that he might militarize.
Mixed messages, to be sure.
The president hasn’t limited his celestial contemplations to online outlets. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he told the hosts of “Fox & Friends” in August, by way of explaining his (failed) effort to bring peace to Ukraine. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well.”
Well, Mr. President, here’s some advice: I don’t think you’ll get to heaven by wishing that many of your fellow citizens go to hell.
The disconnect between Trump’s dreams of eternal reward and his earthly avenging — against Democrat-run cities, political rivals, late-show hosts and other celebrity critics, universities, law firms, cultural institutions, TV networks and newspapers, liberal groups and donors, government employees, insufficiently loyal allies and even harmless protesters at a Washington restaurant — was rarely so evident as it was at the Christian revival that was Sunday’s memorial for the slain MAGA activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.
Mere minutes after Erika Kirk, Kirk’s widow and successor as head of the conservative group Turning Point USA, had tearfully forgiven her husband’s accused killer, the president explicitly contradicted her with a message of hate toward his own enemies, and his continued determination to exact revenge.
Erika Kirk spoke of “Charlie’s mission” of engaging his critics and working “to save young men just like the one who took his life.” She recalled the crucified Christ absolving his executioners on Calvary, then emotionally added: “That young man. I forgive him.”
“I forgive him because it was what Christ did and what Charlie would do,” she said to applause. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer, we know from the Gospel, is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
Then it was Trump’s turn.
Just one minute in, he called the 22-year-old suspect “a radicalized cold-blooded monster.” And throughout, despite investigators’ belief that the man acted alone, Trump reiterated for the umpteenth time since Kirk’s death that “radical left lunatics” — his phrase for Democrats — actually were responsible and that the Justice Department would round up those complicit for retribution.
Trump acknowledged that Charlie Kirk probably wouldn’t agree with his approach: “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them.” Then Teleprompter Trump went off script, reverting to real Trump and ad-libbing: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.” He spat the word “hate” with venom. And he got applause, just as Erika Kirk had for a very different message.
Jesus counseled “turn the other cheek” to rebuke those who harm us. Trump boasts that he always punches back. “If someone screws you, screw them back 10 times harder,” he once said. Love your enemies, as Christ commanded in his Sermon on the Mount? Nah. You heard Trump in Arizona: “I hate my opponent.”
Trump might have some explaining to do when he seeks admittance at the pearly gates.
The Bible’s words aside, a president is supposed to be the comforter in chief after a tragedy and a uniter when divisions rend the American fabric. Think of President Clinton, whose oratory bridged partisan fissures after antigovernment domestic terrorists bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, and of President George W. Bush, who visited a mosque in Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in a healing gesture intended to blunt rising anti-Muslim reactions. (Later, of course, Bush would cleave the nation by invading Iraq based on a lie about its complicity.)
Trump, by contrast, is the inciter in chief. Just hours after Kirk’s death on Sept. 10, and before a suspect was in custody, he addressed the nation, blaming “radical left political violence.” He has repeated that indictment nearly every day since, though the FBI has reported for years — including during his first term — that domestic right-wing violence is the greater threat. “We have to beat the hell out of them,” Trump told reporters. When even one of his friends on “Fox & Friends” noted radicals are on the right as well, Trump replied: “I couldn’t care less. … The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible.”
All of this vituperation and vengeance suggests a big “what if”: What if Trump were more like Charlie Kirk? To ask is not to gloss over Kirk’s controversial utterances against Black Americans, gay and transgender Americans and others, but he did respectfully deal with those who disagreed with him — as he was doing when he was shot.
What if Trump, since 2016, had sincerely tried to broaden his political reach, as presidential nominees and presidents of each party historically did, to embrace his opponents and to compromise with them? What if he governed for all Americans and not just his MAGA voters? He might well have enacted bipartisan laws of the sort that Trump 1.0 promised on immigration, gun safety, infrastructure and more. In general we’d all be better off, less polarized.
And with a more magnanimous approach like that, Trump just might have a better chance at getting into heaven.
Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
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This is cobbled together from speaking to multiple sources on both sides of the Capitol.
The House is now aiming to vote Thursday on the “clean” interim spending bill which would fund the government through November 27. But Republicans must first get the bill through the House. Several senior House Republican sources said that they were still talking to the “usual suspects.” Republicans can only lose two votes pass a bill on their own. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) expressed confidence he could hold all of his Democrats together and oppose the bill. Jeffries said that will be the focus of a Democratic Caucus on Thursday.
TRUMP PRESSURES REPUBLICANS TO PASS A CONTINUING RESOLUTION TO AVERT A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
It is also still not a done deal that the House would move on Thursday. This could slip to Friday.
There is now the distinct possibility of a weekend session in the Senate, potentially Saturday.
Here’s why:
If the House approves the government funding package, this must go through two rounds of “cloture” to break a filibuster. That needs 60 yeas. It is advantageous to Senate Republicans to have the House approve the bill Thursday. If so, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) can file cloture to set up a test vote on Saturday. By rule, the Senate cannot take that test vote without an “intervening day.”
SCOOP: GOP RAMPS UP SHUTDOWN FIGHT, TARGETS 25 VULNERABLE DEMOCRATS IN NEW AD BLITZ
To wit:
Let’s say the House theoretically approves the bill on Thursday. Thune gets the bill on Thursday and files cloture to cut off debate and break a filibuster. Friday is the “intervening day.” That tees up a procedural vote just to get onto the bill (needing 60 yeas) on Saturday in the Senate.
A split image of President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune. ((Left) REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst, (Right) REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz)
But if the House votes (and passes) the CR on Friday, none of this can happen until Sunday.
There’s the rub:
Multiple Senate Republicans want to attend Charlie Kirk’s funeral in Arizona on Sunday.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., right, joined by Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., center left, leads a vigil to honor conservative activist Charlie Kirk who was shot and killed at an event in Utah last week, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, Sept. 15, 2025. (AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
So, a Saturday scenario is much better for the GOP.
Why not wait until Monday, you may ask?
GOP LAWMAKERS CLASH OVER STRATEGY TO AVERT GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN CRISIS
Well, the Senate is scheduled to be out for Rosh Hashanah next week. Same with the House. Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown Monday and runs through nightfall Wednesday. So the Senate could punt and deal with next Thursday. However, the Senate also needs to take another procedural vote down the road if it could ever get 60 yeas (more on that in a moment) to finish the bill. So it may be helpful to do this sooner rather than later.
That said, one senior Senate GOP source suggested to Fox that the Senate could remain in session through Rosh Hashanah to deal with the procedural steps. That could be interpreted as a direct sleight to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the highest-ranking Jewish figure in American political history.
Former Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.V., wanted Republicans to win the Senate in 2024 to halt Democrats from getting rid of the Senate filibuster. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
Keep in mind, the government is funded through 11:59:59 pm et on September 30. So they have time. But the period is collapsed because of the scheduled recess next week.
Regardless, the Senate needs 60 yeas to break a filibuster. Republicans only have 53 votes in the Senate. 52 if Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) opposes an interim spending bill.
This is why Republicans are trying to blame a potential shutdown on the Democrats. And Democrats are saying they need something (likely a renewal of Obamacare subsidies) in exchange for their votes.
And there will likely be a lot more drama between now and the end of the month.
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