Elon Musk says he's forming a new political party

On Saturday, exploding rocket aficionado Elon Musk announced that he was forming a new political party. It will be called the America Party, a truly generic name befitting of Musk's status as anti-innovator. And the announcement came as something of a surprise, because the last anyone heard from Musk he was elbows-deep in his pet project to make Grok wildly and overtly racist. But he's been making good progress on that one, as opposed to his rockets or his Cybertruck sales, so maybe he feels it's time to take on something new.

You know: Something, anything, to keep him from having to do any of the corporate jobs he gets billions of dollars to supposedly do.

Having said that, announcing you're forming a new American political party is a considerably different from actually forming a new political party, and the herculean next step—getting on ballots with actual candidates the public might consider voting for—is one that nobody has managed to do since the Connecticut for Lieberman Party. And the Connecticut for Lieberman Party, it should be noted, had a conspicuously narrow party platform.

We'll see, then, whether Elon remains interested enough in his new pet project to stick with it for a while. He certainly has the money to finance almost any number of political candidates, which is a huge problem that the next version of the United States might want to take on with more urgency than we could ever manage. But who would the candidates be? What would they stand for? Will they have, you know, actual policy proposals, or will the "America Party" instead be just another outlet for pink-slime jingoism and generic platitudes?

“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Musk said Saturday on X, the social media company he owns. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

Ah, it's going to be the jingoism then. I'm surprised he didn't tack a "Twirling, Twirling for Freedom" on the end there, but give it time. It'll appear on a bumper sticker soon enough.

For Elon, however, there is one problem that towers above all the others: The man remains an idiot. Elon Musk was given near-dictatorial powers over the federal government from January to March, assembling a team of babyfaced techbros and babybrained lawyers to rout government agencies, push policies meant to benefit himself, and spread unhinged conspiracy theories about government databases he didn't understand, and the results were so disastrous that it now counts as the largest crisis the country has faced since the second world war.

What would the "America Party" propose we do to government? We already know what it wants, because Elon Musk has never been able to keep his mouth shut about it.

• Cut all world aid to everything and everyone, erasing a century of American "soft power," killing millions, sparking new pandemic crises and throwing most of the world into the lap of sole remaining superpower China.
• Destroy anything in government that ever threatened to do anyone a lick of good, from national parks to the Veterans Administration to Social Security to Medicare/Medicaid to weather forecasting to every last bit of scientific and technological research.
• Shovel all the money towards billionaires, and most specifically shovel all the money to him as opposed to rival billionaires who might have their own space programs or government contracts or neo-Nazi chatbots.

Musk's premise for starting a third political party is that the Republican efforts to murder everything decent in the country aren't going far enough, in that they're failing to defund the supposed "waste and graft" that his drug-soaked mind came to Washington promising to find but, surprise, didn't actually exist except in his head. His takeaway lesson from "D.O.G.E." is not that he formed an incompetent, dorky, and wildly criminal group that thudded around the government breaking windows and looting databases and which he should now be ashamed of producing.

No, he thinks the ransacking was good, and he's forming a new party that, as far as anyone can tell, will be devoted to ransacking even more than that while waving little flags around. And being racist, of course. If we've learned anything from Musk's takeover of Twitter and all that's happened since, it's that the Musk version of "freedom" consists of racists screaming obscenities at you and you sitting there and taking it.

Is there a voting block that truly, desperately wants that? Are there people in the country who are willing to make the theft of government databases the new hill they're willing to die on? Who want to be hopelessly online, all the time? Who want to be harassed by more racist internet trolls, because confining them all to X is an affront to racist internet troll liberties? Who like Trump's concentration camps, but would like to see the camps put on wheels so that they can ignore stop signs and plow into groups of schoolchildren?

Certainly! But the bigger question is, do any of those people exist who aren't already on Elon Musk's payroll, and of those, are any of them willing to abandon Republicanism for an even more extreme version even if it means turning their back on their lord and savior Donald Manlyman Trump.

The Elon Musk constituency is weird techbros who believe apocalypse is imminent (might be) and that the solution somehow involves passing laws that force women to have sex with them, moving to Mars, or both. And while there would appear to be a whole lot of people like that in America, I'm going to remain skeptical that it's above even 10%. I'm also deeply skeptical of the idea that your average American norm is salivating to join forces with those freaks.

If Musk goes through with actually fielding candidates this next election cycle, it's not likely to be many. If he does shovel out cash to support more than a handful, and if he spends a good chunk of his imaginary fortune towards making them viable candidates, it's a given that those candidates will suck far more votes away from Republicans than Democrats; there's no non-Republican constituency that thinks we ought to be having more ICE violence or dismantling of government programs or killing off kids in other countries for fun.

Musk wants a fascist America, and most Americans, as recent polls and mass protests have proved, don't.

There has been no sign, since Donald Trump first glided down his gilded escalator, that Republicans feel any urge to moderate even as the chaos Trump and Musk have caused send America into darker and darker new timelines. They appear to have no interest in even pretending at supporting their constituents; they seem bizarrely confident that no matter how many babies they throw down how many wells, their Republican voters will laugh and clap and vote to reelect them when reelection time comes around.

I'm not sure how the threat of a Ross Perot-ish third party moves those calculations, given that apparent disinterest in "calculating" anything to begin with. Will Republicans scramble even further right, attempting to placate the small set of weirdos who still think Elon Musk knows anything about anything? Will this be the final straw between Trump and Elon, the thing that convinces Trump to pull the same (illegal!) triggers to destroy Musk's companies and fortune that his White House and Justice Department uses against other enemies of Republicanism like "people who investigated the Jan. 6 coup attempt" or "news organizations that were rude to Donald"?

Couldn't tell you. One of the hallmarks of fascism is its inherent irrationality; trying to guess where it will trundle off to next is absurd, because it might depend on what sort of bird Dear Leader saw out his window this morning.

But sure, Elon Musk's going to fund a third political party based on the same values he's brought to "X" and "Grok" and that one Las Vegas tunnel. Sure.

Or he might get bored and move on to designing a more racist rocket or an angular boot that bursts into flames if it gets wet. Who the hell knows. For now, however, there is no good reason to believe that the America Party will be anything more than "DOGE, but with more yelling."