Bulwark Takes - Tesla’s Stock Crashes; Trump Stages a Bizarre PR Stunt

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Sam Stein and Lauren Egan discuss another bizarre Trump and Elon interaction. They have an impromptu Telsa showroom on the lawn of the White House.

Hey guys, it's me Sam Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark. I'm here with Lauren Egan and we're going to be talking Tesla and really we're going to be talking about Trump trying to showcase Tesla out in front of the White House because Tesla's not doing too well because Elon's kind of screwing things up and people are mad at him. Also, the markets are really shitty. Before we do that, let's subscribe. Let's get you to subscribe to the feed. We are doing well. Our numbers are going up. I don't like Tesla's. All right. So Lauren, backstory here is it's been what? A pretty bad couple of weeks for Tesla. Their stock is down. It's up today about 3.8% or so, but it closed that Friday at 262. It's now 230 today. Ties were 480. So it's been down badly. And Elon's been targeted aggressively by Democrats and Tesla specifically. And so Trump does what?

He's like, I'm going to sell some cars. I'm going to buy a car. Like, what happened here? So this afternoon, his press secretary gets up there on the podium and it's like, Hey guys. So we didn't have this event on the schedule, but later this afternoon, Trump is going to buy a Tesla at the white house. He's going to look at some Teslas. We knew he was going to buy one. We didn't know that there was going to be like a whole event with five different Teslas. Was there five? Apparently there was five.

Oh, my God. Okay. Wow. Including a Cybertruck. They got red, white, and blue thing going on there. So, you know. Yeah. So he comes out this afternoon and does this like, you know, super long kind of Q&A with reporters as he's walking around and checking out these Teslas.

And Elon's there, too, obviously. Elon's there. Chatting it up the whole time. He affirms he's both the CEO of Tesla still and Trump's top advisor. Not that there's any conflict of interest at all here. No, none. Yeah. I mean, it's like kind of hilarious because trump obviously campaigned against evs like every rally was him like shitting on evs and now there's

this massive what would he say be like you never know when you're gonna lose a charge what if it's not you know if there's no wind you might be in the middle of the country and there's no charging station yes okay yeah so yeah so it's just like funny that he's having this big ev event now at the white house because you know musk one of his biggest donors is suffering a bit uh with some of these protests and obviously the stock market just kind of you know it's so hard to comprehend an analogy to like of what a Democratic presidency would be like in this situation. It's just – it would be like if Jeff Zients – if Biden took Jeff Zients out into the back and was like, everyone needs to go and buy Call Your Mother bagels. But like not even because he sold whatever he owned.

But Jeff Zients would have had to still own it. For people that don't know, Call Your Mother is a bagel store. Pretty good. That Biden's former chief of staff. What? Sam. I'm a bit of a snob on this stuff. But let's say Biden went out into the back of the White House, had a table of all of Call Your Mother's best spreads and was sampling them and talking about how great the bagels were and how everyone needed

to go and buy bagels. And that, you know, it was totally unfair that Call Your Mother was being targeted by Republicans and all that stuff. People would be like, this is crazy behavior. But also it's a bagel. So it's bagels. It wouldn't matter that much. Yeah, there just bagel. So it's bagels. Yeah.

There just isn't, there isn't a comparison. And also there's not the equivalent of someone who's like given him out the same amount of money as Musk has. So, you know, like Zinston, like that, that isn't there.

Zinston put $290 million. So it's, it's different. It's totally different. And you know, Trump does this stuff because everything's a culture war, right? It's like if they're against the Teslas, he's got to be for the Teslas, even though he was also against electric vehicles. And it's just like everything's divided on cultural lines these days.

Let's watch. I did have some fun watching Trump kind of explore the Tesla. It appears he's never stepped foot in one before, which makes sense. Like he's not driving. Okay. There's no way he's driven himself. Well, we saw some. No, no. There was a video of him in Melania in a car that surfaced a while ago.

But I think more or less it's fair to assume he's not driving a lot. And he's certainly like getting in a Tesla. And he shouldn't be. Yeah. No. I mean, I think he was. No,'s certainly like getting in a Tesla. And he shouldn't be. Yeah. No. I mean, I think he was – no, he was in a Cybertruck. I should take that back. During the campaign, he went inside a Cybertruck because one of the podcast personalities or streamers had him on for an hour-long show.

And one of the things that was gifted to Trump at the end of the show was a Cybertruck that was outfitted for Trump. So he's been inside a Cybertruck. I know that. But I don't think he's been inside one of these Model Xs or anything like that. So let's watch his wonderment, his amusement at seeing what a Tesla is like. Oh, that's beautiful. Wow. That's beautiful. This is a different panel than I've had. Everything's computer.

That's beautiful. Wow. Yeah, it's just a brake and an accelerator. That's beautiful. Should I? I'll start it again. You don't want me to drive it to you? I thought by... I'll tell you, it could do it. It's very easy to drive.

You're the only one that saw it. So it's like driving a golf cart, basically. It's very simple. It's very simple. So it's literally like the golf cart that goes from the car to the car. All right, so there Trump's just sort of amazed at the computers. A lot of computers. Elon, helpfully, I will say, this is very clever of Elon, tells him it's a golf cart that goes really fast.

I think that's very relatable for Trump. Very appealing. Well, appealing and also that one you can say, oh, yeah, you push a button and you go. I get it. I understand what Elon's getting. Yeah, but it's just like this giant infomercial for Tesla. Oh, yeah, totally. It's a giant Tesla. Like on the White House South Lawn.

I know. It's crazy. It's unbelievable they're doing that. And then Trump says other stuff. He's like, we're going to buy. Elon's going to ramp up operations. There's one piece that came out. Yeah.

What did it say? I think that Elon said before Trump got in the car, Elon said that he was going to double vehicle output in the US in the next two years and kind of like spiel about how it was a demonstration of his, I think he said, active faith in America. So I guess he is feeling like perhaps his stock might recover. Or maybe it's just a bluff. Yeah, I mean, it projects confidence, right. But the other thing that Trump said is he will label violence against Tesla's dealers as domestic terrorism. So that gets us to the reporting you've been doing, which is on the Tesla Take That movement. You know, obviously it's spreading. We've seen a number of different articles about it and gaining momentum, but it has occasionally turned into arson and vandalism. So can you talk about just sort of the fine line here? I know Ro Khanna was up on Twitter saying or denouncing that aspect of it.

I think this happens a lot of times, like with some of these movements, you get, you know, a few bad actors in the mix and there have been, you know, some kind of harrowing and scary stories to come out of some of these these protests. But the groups that are organizing behind it have been really sort of consistent in saying we only think nonviolent protests work. We are only trying to, you know, really like highlight, uh, that Elon Musk is not an elected official, um, and absent, you know, a sort of like congressional type office that elected officials would have.

These are kind of our next best bet to kind of get, get his attention. Right. Um, and to And to, you know, put some pressure on Musk and the Republican Party. Well, I would say based off of the event that just happened at the White House. I guess it is working. This is the surest evidence. And I don't know. I've been monitoring Elon online. He's clearly like, you know, first of all, he's chronically online

in a way that's making even more. A little concerning considering he has so many jobs. What I was talking about with Tim is like, he's online and like his spaceships are blowing up, his Tesla stock is like. It was like that Dave Portnoy tweet from last week where he was like, how far does the Tesla stock have to drop before Elon goes back to work? I know. We've talked about this a fair bit. Which I think is a fair question. It's totally a fair question.

But so to your point, though, it's bothering Elon. I think I'm not trying to be like armchair psychologist here, but it clearly is bothering him. Yeah. I mean, I think that's what that whole like active faith in America comment was like exemplary of too. Clearly, he's trying to play it cool, but he's responding to all this stuff on Twitter. Right.

You know, Trump's out there doing true, true social posts about this at night. Well, Hannity bought a car or something like that. Hannity said last night on his show that he was also going to go out there. I think Alex Jones is buying a car. It's just like,

yeah, you guys should just go to his Twitter account and see the monstrosity of that. Custom made. Yeah. You don't have one. No. Although I do have a hybrid car. So, you know, but not a Tesla, not a Tesla. Okay. So where does this leave us? Elon's in a little bit of a bind. Trump's coming to his back. And then we had this kind of funny moment where Trump is trying to explain if he thinks Elon is doing a good job and if he's even a Republican. And he says this. He's an incredible patriot. And I don't even know if he's a Republican.

I really don't. All right, so there you have it. Trump doesn't know if Elon's a Republican. I don't you have it uh trump doesn't know if elon's a republican um i don't know i think they're gonna end up this is the thing though here's my theory is that the more elon gets attacked personally i think the more trump rallies to his side and the more they're kind of bound together and that's kind of the the irony of this is that one of the things that um trump opponents were trying to do early on was to create a fissure between the two of them. And I think, you know, this will probably bind them together. It doesn't mean it's

good political or bad political, but just that's just the outcome of this because Trump takes it personally. Yeah, I think that's probably right. I think we'll have to see what sort of pressure, you know, when Republican lawmakers go home for recess and everything, like what kind of pressure they face about it. Elon's definitely more unpopular right now than Trump. Like there's empirical polling data on that. Which is why you see, you know, grassroots activists on the left, obviously choosing to target him and go after him as opposed to making this all about Trump or something. They see him as this like weak link and, you know, the Mago chain or whatever.

And he's kind of messing things up a little bit for Trump, too. Like he did the interview yesterday on Fox. And I mean, I saw the context of it. He was clearly talking about waste and fraud in Social Security. But then he said, we're going to cut 500 to 700 trillion, a billion dollars in there. And that's just, you know, a huge amount of money that has no correlation to what is why they perceive to be the amount of waste and fraud in the program. And it leads questions like what you saw today at the briefing about whether Trump is eyeing social security. That's not good for Trump.

Yeah. It's like every single time that Elon Musk is in front of a camera, there's basically just like gold he's handing over to democratic ad makers. Like we just know all this stuff is going to appear, you know, in midterms or even before then. You call it a Ponzi scheme. It's like the easiest thing to do. Right. You just see that like running over and over and over again.

And it's a huge political liability, which, you know, they have to recognize. Yeah. Well, we'll just get into tesla's instead all right lauren egan i'll give everyone who watches a little bit of a heads up she's writing about

the tesla movement uh the abandoned tesla movement um tesla take that movement uh for wednesday's newsletter uh which you should all be uh subscribing to it's great only well you've only done one but i already know it's great. Thank you for joining us. Appreciate it. Thank you guys for subscribing to the feed. We appreciate that too. Stay in touch. Keep watching. Thanks, Sam. Hey, YouTube fam, if you want to support the bulwark, the best way to do it is by becoming a YouTube bulwark plus member. The Bulwark is truly independent. We have no corporate overlords.

We're not settling any dumb lawsuits with Trump. By joining, you help support our work and you can get a bunch of perks right here on this platform. Add free content, bonus videos, live streams, and some emojis of me, which I guess some people want. So come join. Come hang out. Become a Bulwark YouTube Plus member and I'll be seeing you in the want. So come join, come hang out, become a Bulwark YouTube Plus member,

and I'll be seeing you in the comments. So behave.