Bulwark Takes - Wow! Trump Threatens to Send Tesla Vandals to El Salvador!

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Andrew Egger breaks down the disturbing video linking Tesla vandals to terrorists and praising brutal El Salvador prisons. What starts as trolling reveals a deeper threat to civil liberties. Watch as we connect the dots on authoritarian rhetoric and the erosion of due process.

Hi, this is Andrew Egger with The Bulwark. There's so much stuff to talk about, so many crazy things the Trump administration is doing right now. Every once in a while, they make it easy on us. They combine two of their outrages into an outrage that is greater than the sum of their parts. So today, just a little while ago, actually, the Trump War Room account on Twitter put up a video titled, To the Tesla Terrorists, Take a Look at What Prison in El Salvador Looks Like. Get you one way or another. I'm going to see you. I'm going to meet you, meet you, meet you, meet you one day. Maybe next week. I'm going to meet you. I'm going to meet you.

I'll meet you. I will drive past your house and in the light. Okay, so this is a couple different stories that the administration has been going with recently. Right. The one is the extra legal deportations of Venezuelan migrants to what is essentially a prison camp in El Salvador. These are people who the administration has said are our gang members and has said that essentially because they're gang members, they're terrorists. They've invoked an 18th century law, the Alien Enemies Act, to basically say they can be deported with no due process. A lot of times they're being deported without any notification to their families, any notification to their lawyers, without the say-so of any judge, without being charged with any crime. They're just, as long as federal law enforcement says

that they're gang members and therefore terrorists, that's all it takes. They're just as long as federal law enforcement says that they're gang members and therefore terrorists, that's all it takes. They get they get scooped up. They get sent down to this militarized prison camp, their heads shaved, you know, frog marched in the way you've seen. And and that's that. And that's been a huge controversy in recent days. Another controversy that has been a little sillier in recent days because it has not been, you know, quite so alarmingly, uh, life or death rule of law type stuff, uh, is, is this, uh, this, all the news that's been going on with Tesla, Tesla's share price has been dropping. Um, you know, Elon Musk has been in a big snit about it because, uh, he sold a bunch of electric cars to a bunch of well-meaning liberals over the last,

uh, decade. And now they all, uh hate him and his brand, you know, quality among his former target audience is totally in the toilet. So this has been a bad thing. But what the White House has been messaging on is not that people are just sort of boycotting Tesla and no longer buying their cars and that their market share is shrinking and, you know, people can't offload them. And that's why the share price is going down. They have been focusing on the handful of situations where people have, say, vandalized

Tesla dealerships and things like this. You may have seen footage on Fox News or that's just bouncing around the Internet of cars on fire in a handful of places. This is not an incredibly widespread phenomenon, but the Trump administration has been leaning into this because they want to portray this narrative of kind of like mass left-wing violence against poor, innocent Elon Musk and his dealerships. So what's kind of amazing about this video, you know, you see the tweet, the bleat there from Donald Trump up on the screen. I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20- year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which had become so recently famous for such lovely conditions. So first of

all, obviously just glorifying and kind of like the horrific standard of living of this place that he has now, again, unilaterally sent a bunch of Venezuelan migrants to people, again, who have not been accused of crimes, who are ISIS essentially saying are gang members based on things like the tattoos that they have and pictures from social media and things like that. But what's just astonishing about this, I mean, it's kind of trolling in one respect, but the substance of the troll is, ha ha, what if we were also to do that to anybody who was found to have vandalized a vehicle produced by my buddy Elon Musk, by the richest man in the world, this guy I have running Doge and all of this stuff. It's just this astonishing thing, right? I mean, he's literally getting up there. He's literally saying, you know, we are going to

treat these people like terrorists. We're going to treat vandalizing these vehicles as acts of domestic terrorism. And we're going to say that that unlocks a lot of powers for us to to, you know, treat these people with less rights, with less due process than than U.S. law affords to criminal defendants. And yes, it's a joke, right? I mean, it's a ha ha he he. Look how funny it is to like, think about doing state violence against our enemies in that in this way. Everybody's, you know, all his people are having a good time clowning on an online and everything. So in a sense, it's a joke. But this is the thing we see with Trump over and over and over again, is that it's a joke until it's not right. It's funny, until we decide it's serious. And they get to they get to kind of dance around

it for a long time, they get to say, Oh, you know, like, look, we're triggering the libs. Look how triggered they are. Ha ha. But it used to be the case that that was that was kind of a performance, right? That that like, look, we're triggering the libs by kind of putting on this show of being extra cruel and being extra bigoted and all of these things. That's not really the way it is now. Now it's look, ha ha, we're triggering the libs by threatening to wield state power against them in exactly the ways that they are already wielding state power against different groups, groups that are a little easier to pick off. So it's a really alarming thing. I mean, like, yes, yes, it's a joke until it isn't. And so, you know, I'm not I'm not sitting here saying Donald Trump is going to be trying to ship U.S. citizens to El Salvador, you know, tomorrow. I'm not saying he's necessarily ever going to do that at all. But this is essentially the the the naked meaning of the words that he is saying that that that this is a thing that that, you know, if if a U.S.

citizen vandalizes a Tesla, which you shouldn't do, don't commit crimes, don't, you know, don't do property damage to some poor dealership. The dealer probably didn't didn't sign up for this necessarily any more than any of the people who own Teslas 10 years ago did. But but the basic fact of it is that that he's saying, look, you know, maybe we will do this. Maybe we won't do this. But but we do think we would have the power to do this. And that's what's that's what's most alarming about the whole thing is, is that there's there's zero and there's no there's no reason at this point to believe that if that if Trump decided he was going to set his shoulder to that particular boulder and start to roll it, that that that he would have anything really stopping him from doing that other

than the courts, which he is is currently in the process of sort of shoving aside on all manner of other things. So it's really kind of dire. It's kind of dark. It's grisly. It's gross. We don't like it. But that's kind of where we are right now with Trump and Tesla and El Salvador. So thanks for watching. Come back here. I'm sure we'll have a lot more to talk about real soon.