Trump will have to choose: populism or Elon Musk

In his interview on X, the Republican candidate revealed anti-worker sentiments.

You can fawn over Elon Musk or you can run a populist political campaign. But you can’t do both. On 12 August, Donald Trump joined the Tesla boss for a live-streamed conversation on the latter’s social media platform, X. In what was meant to be a campaign event, Trump proceeded to hand over ammunition to progressives who accuse him of pushing an oligarchic agenda under the guise of populism.

The whole affair was awfully reminiscent of Ron DeSantis’s misbegotten GOP primary bid in 2023. The Florida governor, you will recall, elected to have Musk host his launch event on the “Spaces” discussion platform – used by a fraction of X users, who, in turn, form a minuscule share of American voters. The event was marred by technical difficulties, with many users complaining that they couldn’t join. Musk dominated much of the airtime, and afterward, the campaign hastily put together a video showing the richest man in the world dancing in a tux, while DeSantis could be heard lamenting the American opioid crisis.

Sure enough, the Trump-Musk event likewise glitched, with several ultra-Maga personalities struggling to log on – not that it punctured Musk’s aura of technological mastery among the online right.

The media have described the substance of the conversation – not unfairly – as “rambling”. But amid his usual jumble of words, Trump managed enough lucidity to praise Musk for… firing workers en masse for trying to mount collective action. “I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump told Musk. “You walk in, you say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’ So you’re great.”

The company under discussion was likely Twitter, now X, which saw a mild employee uprising, swiftly crushed, in the wake of Musk’s takeover in 2022. For some on the right, the fact that it was tech workers in Silicon Valley was seemingly reason enough to excuse Trump’s hideous anti-worker sentiments – his backslapping praise for a tycoon who has lauded the Chinese labour regime. According to a certain pseudo-populist narrative on the right, those X employees didn’t count as workers, because they belonged to a “woke” managerial class that wasn’t doing much of anything (besides censorship, that is).

But it turned out that many of those workers were doing useful and important things under Twitter’s ancien régime, which was much more effective at filtering out violent threats. I can attest to this from personal experience. Earlier this year, in response to my denouncing the racist right in the New Statesman, an X account published my home address along with footage of a gun assassination. It took days and numerous complaints from me and my allies to have the post removed, with X initially and repeatedly insisting that there was nothing untoward about it.

Whatever the relative merits of Musk’s ownership of X, the pseudo-populist right is recapitulating a tired, racialised, and “culturalist” account of labour in defending his actions. A worker, in this telling, is a burly electrician or carpenter who wears flannel shirts and drives a pickup. In reality, the American workforce – people with no means of sustaining and reproducing themselves but for selling their labour power for wages – also includes the likes of university adjuncts, a slew of downwardly mobile professionals, and, yes, tech administrators.

Musk’s anti-worker stance isn’t limited to his employees at X. As I’ve previously detailed, Musk is at war with the entire labour architecture inherited from the New Deal era. Earlier this year, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint against Musk’s SpaceX, charging the firm with unlawful retaliation in firing a group of employees who had dared to criticise the magnate’s online behaviour. In response, SpaceX filed suit against the NLRB in federal court, claiming that the board itself is unconstitutional, since it both enforces labour law and adjudicates disputes. Citing James Madison, the firm claimed this is “the very definition of tyranny”.

Amazon and Trader Joe’s – supposedly “woke” firms routinely denounced by the pseudo-populist right – have joined Musk’s challenge to the NLRB’s constitutionality. They’d prefer to remove all labour disputes to the justice system, with its high costs and cumbersome processes, so that by the time striking workers get their day in court, they will be too exhausted and bankrupt to press on. Already, thanks to decades of rulings from GOP-dominated courts and labour boards, the New Deal order has been hollowed out, with every advantage accruing to bosses. If Musk has his way, that order will be effectively demolished.

This agenda is neither populist nor pro-labour. By cheering Musk’s brutal treatment of his workers, the Trump campaign has sadly vindicated those who saw its pro-worker rhetoric as a mere facade. There is still a chance for Team Trump to prove these critics wrong, for example, by proposing a labour-law reform that levels the lopsided playing field between employers and employees. But time is running out.