What’s behind the vicious attacks on Elon Musk?

Why are Democrats mounting such a ferocious assault on Elon Musk? Why are mainstream media outlets so eager to go along?

The simplest answers are the best. Musk is the most prominent member of the new administration aside from the president himself. He is Donald Trump’s point man for exposing malfeasance in federal bureaucracies, determining where the money is going and cutting the engorged payroll.

The more Musk and Trump succeed, the worse for Democrats. They created those agencies; their supporters staff them; and those supporters funnel lots of public money to specially favored institutions and projects. When Musk attacks this partisan nexus, he is attacking a major source of Democratic power and influence.

That is what’s really at stake here, beyond cutting the budget. The pickings are easy, and they’re popular. The latest poll shows 60 percent think DoGE is helping and 76 percent support eliminating fraud and waste. (Who, for heaven’s sake, are the 24 percent who don’t support eliminating fraud and waste?)

Why does the mainstream media oppose these popular efforts, marching in lockstep with the Democrats? Because they are Democrats. That’s why 60 Minutes deceptively edited their interview of candidate Kamala Harris to make her appear coherent and intelligent. She was neither, a point she continues to prove whenever she speaks. That’s why CBS refused to release the transcript before the election. Hey, what are friends for?

Of course, attacking Musk has its own attractions. He is the richest man in America and the best-known, aside from the president. Pillaring Musk for his wealth allows Democrats to pose as populists, hoping to regain voters they lost to Trump’s MAGA coalition.

Democrats can only hope this populist theme — this return their party’s roots — will work. Those roots have withered over the years. Trump’s appeal to working-class voters has a lot more traction than the Democrats’ and has reshaped the Republican coalition. Meanwhile, Democrats have reshaped their own coalition by winning higher-income, more educated voters, who were once Republican. The result is a dramatic shift in the electoral composition of both parties.

The Democrats’ basic pitch — and their attack on Musk — is nicely captured in the latest fundraising email from California senator Adam Schiff:

I don’t answer to Elon Musk. I answer to you.

While I stand up to the richest man in the world, will you have my back and chip in $5, $10 or any amount to my campaign? Any amount goes a long way in our work to respond to Musk’s lies and hold him accountable.

Since Musk is doing the president’s bidding, why not attack Trump directly? Mostly because Trump is so popular, at least for now. He not only won the election and all the swing states, he won the popular vote. Polls show his favorable ratings are well above his unfavorable. So, it makes sense to gradually wear down Trump’s popularity before focusing attacks on him. Better to attack others who stand-in for him.

Meanwhile, Democrats and the media are happy to goad the president. That’s why TIME magazine — yes, it’s still being published — depicted Musk sitting behind the president’s desk in the Oval Office. They know Trump has thin skin — and they’d love to get under it. The idea that Trump is not in charge of his own administration is ludicrous. But it’s the thought that counts.

Whatever the target, Democrats have gone all-negative, all-the-time. There’s a good reason. They don’t have a positive agenda and may not settle on one before they choose a presidential candidate in 2028. For now, they are simply angry, confused and divided between coastal progressives and midwestern centrists.

Without a positive agenda, Democrats are coalescing around their shared hatreds. Borrowing from Saul Alinsky’s cynical but shrewd playbook, they have personalized their opposition. And that person is Elon Musk.

Having picked their target, they are throwing everything they can at him and his small workforce at DoGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. They hope the onslaught will mask the essential fact that Musk is acting for Trump. The president appointed him, and the president can fire him on a moment’s notice.

The richest accusation is hearing Democrats cry that Musk is “unelected.” That objection is coming from the party that 1) built all the entire administrative state, with hundreds of agencies; 2) filled them with unelected policymakers, whose preferences are closely aligned with Democrats; and 3) creates as many barriers as possible to insulate those bureaucrats from presidential control. None of those attributes apply to Musk. He is a direct appointee of the president, who can remove him at will. He has no “civil service protections.”

Trump — and Musk — aren’t sitting ducks. Trump has made clear that his opponents can’t drive a wedge between them to eviscerate their agenda. Musk is his guy. Together, they are moving fast and helping their cause by starting with extremely popular positions.

Call them “80-20” issues, where 80 percent of voters side with the president. Those include cutting foreign aid, identifying “waste, fraud and abuse,” and removing biological males from female sports. (The same is true for Tom Homan’s effort to remove illegal aliens. He is starting with violent criminals and others already ordered out of the country by the courts.)

Even better for Trump and Musk, Democrats are reflexively siding with the 20 percent. Dumb. Really dumb. That’s the best description of anti-Trump partisans screaming at press conferences and yelling at his nominees in Congressional hearings. None of it is working. Neither is objecting to line-by-line investigations of federal spending. Do they really think most voters are opposed to seeing where their money going?

For Republicans, the cherry on top is having an unpopular, polarizing figures like Representative Maxine Waters show up at a federal building to hurl invectives at ordinary folks, like the beleaguered security guard, who (on orders) refused to let her in. Republicans couldn’t ask for better publicity. The mainstream media would like to help, but the best they can do is kill the story.

Lousy as that story is, Democrats keep repeating it. They did it again last week, when a few senators stood in front of the FBI building saying Kash Patel would end our democracy. No one showed up at this wake, aside from the media. Perhaps they should serve alcohol.

While the Democrats’ scream in vain, Elon Musk’s team is busy creating detailed maps of where our tax dollars are going. It’s an ugly picture, smudged with the fingerprints of both Democrats and establishment Republicans. The DoGE findings are easy pickings for the Trump White House.

With these attacks on Musk and Trump failing, the Democrats have turned to their old, reliable stratagem: find friendly federal judges, ready to overturn presidential policies. The plaintiffs are public-sector unions, progressive NGOs and Democratic office holders.

The Democrats will win some of these cases, lose some, and delay still others. They are on solid ground when the president acted beyond his unilateral authority, bypassed required authorization from Congress, or, worse, violated the Constitution, as he may well have done when he barred future “birthright citizenship.” All these disputes will be settled in federal courts, with the most contentious reaching the Supreme Court.

This fight, which combines law and politics, is about much bigger issues than one or two agencies, ill-conceived programs, sweetheart deals or outright fraud. It is about vast, reckless spending by mid-level bureaucrats across all federal agencies, without transparency or effective oversight by elected officials. This mess demands a thorough audit, and the public knows it.

Musk is leading the charge, but he is hardly alone. Trump is fully behind him and has tasked all cabinet nominees with cutting wasteful programs and ensuring their departments’ spending and regulations meet the president’s priorities.

These swift, dramatic moves are a dagger pointed at the carotid arteries of the administrative state. That’s bad news for Democrats, who constructed those agencies, spent a century growing them into behemoths, and staffed them with like-minded officials. They were often helped by an older, establishmentarian Republican Party, the one Donald Trump killed.

Caging this behemoth is an enormous task. Washington politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and NGOs will fight hard to preserve it. To win, they need public support. They figure targeting Elon Musk is one way to secure it. They will target Trump more directly when his popularity ebbs.

Important as Musk is, his role in this larger drama is also what linguists call a “synecdoche,” where one part stands for the whole. For example, when we say “nice wheels,” we obviously the whole car, not just the tires.

The attacks on Elon Musk follow the same trope. When they say “Musk,” as Adam Schiff did in his email, they are really going after the entire Trump administration. The stakes are huge, and both sides know it. Elon Musk’s name may be front and center, but the stakes go far beyond him and far beyond Trump personally. The real issue is the future of the ever-expanding, every-more-costly administrative state.