Republicans Apparently Think Elon Musk Is a Total Flake

Elon Musk recently came out with a public endorsement of Donald Trump for president, but Republicans haven’t fully embraced him, according to a report from The New York Times.

The tech billionaire CEO of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX has been highly sought after by GOP fundraisers and Trump associates for years, who see him both as a meal ticket and a potential inspiration for the party. But Musk doesn’t have a solid record for political involvement.

For example, he has promised to spend money on “free speech” lawsuits to support conservatives who claim that they are the victims of social media censorship but hasn’t followed through. Musk has also been a no-show at public appearances, such as a 2023 event to support Kevin McCarthy, then the newly elected speaker of the House. In San Francisco, he promised to donate $100,000 to the centrist group GrowSF to defeat progressives, but again didn’t follow through.

“Some conservative activists said they wished that Mr. Musk had followed through more on promises,” the Times reported.

Musk’s public endorsement of Trump only came after a gunman tried to assassinate the former president and convicted felon on Saturday. Previously, the tech magnate, while privately urging friends not to vote for Biden, was waiting until the president had secured the Democratic nomination, according to the Times.

Musk’s confidants in the tech world, such as Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data analytics firm Palantir, reportedly discuss politics with him and have urged him to play a more active role. Lonsdale founded AmericaPAC to help Trump return to the White House, with Musk reportedly pledging a monthly donation of $45 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk denied the report, leaving those involved with the PAC to wonder how much he plans to donate, or if he will at all.

Alongside fellow tech CEOs Peter Thiel and David Sacks, Musk is a member of the “PayPal mafia,” the group of early supporters and founders of the payment service. All three have embraced conservative ideas and supported J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, with Musk and Sacks openly lobbying Trump on behalf of the Ohio senator. If Trump wins in November, the trio will have an administration friendly to their whims and those of Silicon Valley’s right wing.

Donald Trump’s campaign is still working to distance itself from the Heritage Foundation’s extremist blueprint to uproot American democracy, Project 2025.

Speaking at the CNN-Politico Grill on Thursday, senior Trump adviser and co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita suggested that any reported link between Project 2025 and Trump’s plans for a potential second administration would be “complete and utter bullshit.”

“The president has made it clear, these people do not speak for him, they do not speak for the campaign,” LaCivita told Politico’s politics bureau chief, Jonathan Martin, calling the project a “pain in the ass.”

LaCivita added that it’s “pure speculation” to suggest that the former Trump staffers currently building Project 2025 have a future in Trump’s potential next presidency.

Trump’s campaign has grown increasingly frustrated by reporting on the affiliation between the campaign and Project 2025’s agenda, despite their apparent ties, and the program’s intention to serve as a de facto policy agenda for the Trump campaign. Project 2025 includes policies ranging from the dismantling of government agencies, such as the Department of Education, to the implementation of national abortion bans and contraception restrictions.

The campaign and the project share political philosophies and key allies, including former Trump advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. Project 2025 employs more than 100 people who previously worked under Trump. And, as much as Trump wants to distance himself from the apparatus, Project 2025 has been thoroughly involved in staffing a future Trump presidency: Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has claimed the project has already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November.

But they may have more on the way—in November 2023, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a “Schedule F” executive order.

Trump only recently began to drive a wedge between himself and the plan he once called a “colossal mandate to save America.” Earlier this month, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Project 2025 had “nothing to do” with his run for president.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

The public split came two days after Roberts issued an ominous warning for leftists ahead of what he called a “second American Revolution.”

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room, celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.

But Trump’s sudden pushback didn’t rattle people involved with Project 2025—instead, they felt confident that his turn of favor wouldn’t stand in the way of their ability to implement the far-right agenda come Inauguration Day.

“The general sense is this is a P.R. gesture for him to provide himself maximum room to maneuver and avoid making any commitments at this point,” one source on Project 2025’s advisory board told NBC News. “He wants to avoid having to answer questions about anything he doesn’t want to answer questions about. Most people I know who are involved with it don’t seem overly worried that this actually constitutes a repudiation and is going to mean anything on Jan. 20.”

Team Trump seems to be growing increasingly nervous about the likelihood that they will have to face off against a different candidate in November, with a top Trump adviser calling the push to replace Joe Biden on the ballot “a coup.”

Sitting down with Politico reporter Jonathan Martin at a CNN-Politico event at the Republican National Convention on Thursday, Trump campaign senior adviser and Republican strategist Chris LaCivita was asked how he’d feel about the replacement of Joe Biden. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” LaCivita quipped.

“This is nothing more than an attempted coup by the Democratic Party,” he quickly relented.

LaCivita accused Democrats of actively “deposing the president of the United States” and argued that Biden “can’t step down as a candidate for president because you’re cognitively impaired while still being president.”

“It’s literally a coup,” said LaCivita. “For everything they accuse Republicans of, they’re actually doing it on national TV every single day.”

The adviser later said he would “love” Vice President Kamala Harris to take Biden’s place, calling her “gaslighter-in-chief.”

Also on Thursday, the disgraced Matt Schlapp of the Conservative Political Action Conference accused the Democrats of trying to switch their nominee in “a tofu-filled room,” according to Semafors Dave Weigel. Weird joke aside, it’s clear Republicans are worried about the possibility of a new Democratic candidate on the ballot.Months ago, top conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation began scheming ways to insure Biden remains on the ballot.

“We would make it extraordinarily difficult” for Democrats to change their candidate, a Heritage Foundation leader told NOTUS, “We definitely want the dementia patient.”

Senator J.D. Vance’s public Venmo account shines a light into the many corners of the Republican vice presidential nominee’s inner circle, illuminating his long-standing ties with right-wing fascists, shadowy elites, and federal employees, according to a new report from WIRED.

Vance’s public account on Venmo, a mobile payment app, was first discovered by a law enforcement and extremism researcher, who asked to remain anonymous. WIRED was able to verify that the account belonged to Vance.

It’s worth noting that when setting up a Venmo account, the app offers users the opportunity to sync their phone contacts into their friends list. So some people included on the list of Vance’s Venmo friends could have been automatically added when he made his account in 2016, and may have never made a transaction with the senator or contacted him recently.

Still, the list presents a trove of powerful right-wing voices and some surprising names, too, who could be splitting meals and trips with the Ohio Republican.

Among the more than 200 accounts listed on Vance’s Venmo friends list is that of Amelia Halikias, the government relations director at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025.

Donald Trump and Paul Dans, the project’s leader, have attempted to create the illusion that the former president is not affiliated with the fascist plan to oust civil servants and replace them with Trump sycophants. But they can’t outrun all of the evidence demonstrating that Trump had his hands all over the project.

Despite all that posturing, Vance has long-standing public links to the Heritage Foundation, and the group’s president even said he had been rooting for Vance to get the V.P. nomination. Halikias also gave a nod to Vance Monday, retweeting Elon Musk’s comment on Trump’s “excellent” pick of running mate.

Also present on Vance’s friends list is Gladden Pappin, a conservative political theorist who serves as the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. Pappin is part of the same “new right” vanguard as Vance, which has turned to Hungary’s authoritarian populist regime for inspiration on how to install Christian nationalist policies nationwide.

Pappin also co-founded an online publication called the Journal of American Greatness, which attempted to make scholarly arguments out of Trump’s talking points but shut down before the 2016 election. Alongside collaborator Julius Krein, Pappin later co-founded American Affairs, a Trumpist magazine that still exists.

A Yale alum, Vance has previously criticized elite universities as “expensive day care centers for coddled children,” but he had plenty of connections with many attorneys from expensive law schools, including (predictably) his alma mater.

Several of these lawyers are employed by the Department of Justice and would therefore be considered Trump’s so-called “deep state” enemies. One friend was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which once launched an investigation into Michael Cohen’s claims about the Trump Organization’s business dealings.

Vance also had links to outright Trump critics, such as former Arizona Governor Jeff Flake and Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen’s former lawyer. Davis denied being Vance’s friend on Venmo.

Others on Vance’s list include intellectual dark web doyenne Bari Weiss, hapless conservative news pundit Tucker Carlson, as well as lobbyists from conservative think tanks such as the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute. None of these people responded to WIRED’s requests for comment.

While Vance’s Venmo presents a window into his inner world, it also presents a security threat, by exposing his connections to those who would seek to influence a potentially powerful person.

“What you guys need to realize is that Vance is influenceable,” wrote Andrew Torba, a right-wing social media CEO who has promoted antisemitic content, in a post on X. “We have plenty of people in his orbit. Plenty of our guys can be put into positions of power because he’s there. Our focus should be on pulling him as far right as possible by 2028. Long game. Honey, not vinegar.”

It turns out that the right-wing boycott of Bud Light in 2023 was helped along by funding from a conservative with a history of dark-money spending: Leonard Leo.

The Guardian obtained 2022 tax filings showing that a group linked to Leo, the Concord Fund, donated $350,000 to Consumers Defense, part of Consumers’ Research, shortly before the latter group played a big role in the beer boycott.

The boycott started over Bud Light’s use of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in an advertising campaign, resulting in threats to Mulvaney and Anheuser-Busch, as well as a drop in profits. The company abandoned and eventually dropped Mulvaney.

Consumers’ Research, after having been dormant for decades, has surfaced in recent years as a right-wing organization dedicated to leading “the fight against ESG,” or environmental, social, and governance policies, by corporations in America. When companies put “progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers” in its view, Consumers’ Research releases “woke alerts.”

This wasn’t the first time a donor group connected to Leo helped out Consumers’ Research. In 2021 and 2022, it received $15 million from right-wing philanthropic organization Donors Trust, also linked to the billionaire Republican megadonor. Consumers’ Research is also a client of Leo’s for-profit firm CRC Advisors, according to The Guardian.

Leo is infamous for helping to engineer the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court and the right-wing influx of judges into lower federal courts. Through those efforts, he has in effect become a power broker in conservative circles, throwing his money in unexpected places, such as blocking AIDS relief, in addition to funding brand boycotts. He’s dodged Democratic attempts to hold him accountable or even to have him just answer questions about his activities.

The Bud Light boycott Leo fueled might have caused an ethics violation by one of the justices he helped get on the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. During the height of the boycott, Alito dumped between $1,000 and $15,000 of Anheuser-Busch stock, possibly showing his own support of the boycott his patron helped to fund.