And so it came to pass, last Tuesday, shortly after lunch, that Donald Trump finally became the car salesman we always knew he was.
The White House had been transformed into a Tesla showroom, and the most powerful man in the world could be seen clutching a price list of the different models—complete with financing options—as he urged Americans to buy the cars made by his largest political donor, “First Buddy,” and go-to hatchet man, Elon Musk. With the brio of an experienced dealer, Trump even said he would buy one himself.
This was not a conflict of interest; it was a catastrophe of interest. Back in 2017, Kellyanne Conway was reprimanded by the Office of Government Ethics for inadvertently telling Americans to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff.” But Trump fired the director of O.G.E. last month. Who was there to stop his shilling for “Elon’s baby”? (How Musk’s 14 publicly known children felt about that choice of words is anybody’s guess.)
The extraordinary scene followed a string of protests at Tesla showrooms across the country. Company charging stations were set ablaze in Boston. Shots were fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon, and at another, in Manhattan, arrests were made following a nonviolent protest. Back in January, a picture of Musk performing his Nazi-style salute was projected onto the Tesla Gigafactory just outside Berlin, along with the word “Heil.”
But more worrying, at least for Musk, are the growing calls to boycott his products. In 2022, before Musk decisively entered politics, 22 percent of shoppers surveyed said they would “definitely consider” buying a Tesla, according to the automotive consulting firm Strategic Vision. By last summer that number had dropped to seven percent. It’s probably even lower now. In Europe, Tesla sales are down 50 percent from last year.
It’s not hard to see why. Musk’s support for far-right parties in Europe, insulting of American war heroes, promoting of anti-Semitic conspiracies and racist pseudo-science on X, and haphazard slashing of government departments have driven a wedge between him and the environmentally conscious, wealthy progressives who were once his most devoted customers. Those who aren’t putting their Teslas up for sale are buying bumper stickers that read: I bought this before Elon went crazy or Vintage Tesla: Pre-Madness Edition. Some have even tried to disguise their Teslas with other brands’ logos.
If one wants to imagine how this might play out, just look back 100 years, to when the richest man in the world, Henry Ford, also found his cars boycotted to protest his political views.
In the early 1900s, Ford enjoyed immense popularity, as Musk did a century later. His pronouncements received the kind of publicity usually reserved for heads of state, and public-opinion polls named him the greatest living American. (Musk was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2021.)
Problems started in 1919, when Ford bought The Dearborn Independent, a weekly newspaper that billed itself as “Chronicler of the Neglected Truth.” He used the publication as his megaphone to peddle all manner of vile conspiracy theories, many of them based on the notorious anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
“Ford’s anti-Semitism was frightening not so much for its viciousness,” wrote Ford biographer Steven Watts, “as for its combination of ignorance, unpredictable absurdity, utter conviction, and naïveté.” In Ford’s view, World War I was started by Jewish bankers, Benedict Arnold had been an agent of Jewish powers, and brass was a “Jew metal” and was forbidden in the manufacturing of his company’s best-selling Model T.
Ford wielded The Dearborn Independent to cudgel his enemies, both powerful and weak. He accused William Howard Taft of being a “Gentile front” for the Jewish conspiracy when the former president spoke out against the newspaper. Similarly, he waged a years-long campaign against a decorated Jewish soldier who had been falsely accused of murdering his commanding officer.
The Dearborn Independent declared itself to have a circulation of close to one million, which would have made it the second-most widely read paper in the country. This was partly helped by Ford’s insistence that the newspaper be carried in his company’s salesrooms.
A spontaneous boycott of Ford’s cars began in cities with large Jewish populations, first in the Northeast but soon spreading across the Midwest through Texas and into California. The spontaneity was important; the American Jewish Committee didn’t want to answer Ford’s charges of a conspiracy with a planned attack. The committee’s co-founder, Louis Marshall, declared that any self-respecting Jew would know what to do “without being told.”
Jewish newspapers were soon refusing Ford advertising. Some dealerships canceled their contracts with Ford outright. There were fights between those selling Ford’s paper and those protesting it. When a Jewish community in Connecticut held a 400-car parade honoring Albert Einstein, it announced, “Positively no Ford machines permitted in line.” The humorist Will Rogers wrote that the boycott “may not be a complete success yet—but it will be as soon as someone learns how to make a cheaper car.”
Attacking Ford’s sales was quickly seen as the best form of defense. When the Jewish film producer William Fox heard he was about to be libeled in The Dearborn Independent, he sent a letter to Ford saying that his newsreel service—which was sent to thousands of movie theaters twice a week—would now regularly feature footage of Ford cars involved in serious accidents. Ford relented.
Christian groups soon joined the boycott. “Why can’t people realize that a cheap, petty, ignorant man who has grown rich can get just as crazy as any poor devil of an inmate of a lunatic asylum?” wrote one commentator. As the boycott grew, sales of Ford’s Model T declined by 20 percent in 1926 and more the following winter and spring. Ford was beset by letters from salesroom managers urging him to drop his anti-Semitic columns, but still he refused.
As a new, inexpensive Chevrolet appeared in 1927 and The Dearborn Independent was sued for libeling a number of Jewish businessmen, Ford threw in the towel and apologized. “To my great regret I have learned that Jews generally, and particularly those of this country, not only resent these publications as promoting anti-Semitism, but regard me as their enemy.... I am deeply mortified … henceforth they may look to me for friendship and goodwill.”
The Dearborn Independent was shuttered, and the Socialist politician Norman Thomas declared, “Ford’s backdown was good evidence of what a consumers’ boycott … can do in the way of educating a man who has heretofore been impervious to history.”
Ford never regained the level of market share it had before its founder’s anti-Semitic venture. It will likewise be extremely difficult for Musk to win back his lost customers. If the boycott bites, Tesla could be overtaken by cheaper electric-car firms, such as China’s massive BYD—already the third-biggest car firm in the world—which sells cars for less than half the price of a Tesla. (A future Democratic administration may also seek revenge by reducing the 100 percent tariffs on Chinese-made E.V.’s.)
Alternatively, if Trump is successful in getting his followers to buy Teslas, we might end up in a bizarro world where the party of “Drill, baby, drill!” becomes the party of environmentally conscious, fuel-efficient electric cars.
George Pendle is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL. His book Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons became a television series for CBS All Access. He is also the author of Death: A Life and Happy Failure, among other books