The Political Malpractice of Elon Musk

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Ross Douthat

The Political Malpractice of Elon Musk

April 25, 2026

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Chip Somodevilla/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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By

Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

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This week’s action in the Senate yielded a predictable setback for the SAVE America Act, a bill that would impose identification requirements for voter registration nationwide. Conservatives had hoped to use the bill to test the filibuster, but the most recent vote confirmed what had been clear for a while: There aren’t 50 Republican votes for

passage

in the first place.

Why, then, has the bill garnered so much attention? In part because it’s a familiar priority of conservative activists, and in part because of Donald Trump’s eagerness to suggest that American elections aren’t on the level.

But the bill’s prominence also owes a great debt to Elon Musk. After the unwinding of his Department of Government Efficiency and his brief third-party flirtation, the SAVE America Act became the billionaire’s most notable political priority, at least judging by the attention he’s

devoted to it

on social media. And like DOGE’s failure to move the spending needle, the voter-identification debate is a study in squandered influence, with the world’s most successful businessman engaging in politics in a profoundly ineffective way.

At this phase of the second Trump administration, Trump himself is primarily to blame for his escalating problems. But when the history of Trump 2.0 is written, Musk’s political malpractice will loom large — because at the outset of the administration, no figure in the inner circle was so well positioned to play a shaping role.

Unlike much of the second-term cast, Musk was not a creature of Trump’s influence: He had his own fame, power base and funding. The social network formerly known as Twitter gave him a unique influence over the national conversation. His embrace of anti-wokeness gave him credibility on the grass-roots right that most rich Republicans do not enjoy.

This leverage seemed as if it could be brought to bear on the territory Musk knew best: space travel, technology policy, overregulation and its discontents. (One could even hope that his unusual personal commitment to pronatalism would yield some kind of policy interest as well.) And his

devotion to dynamism

seemed like a potential check on Trump’s zero-sum mentality around tariffs and trade wars.

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