Marylander Carla Harne, 41, has watched the tide turn against Tesla and Musk from the front seat of her sleek, fiery red Model 3. Harne’s interactions with others over her car had mostly been positive — until last year, when, hours after Trump was elected president of the United States, someone threw “probably a dozen” eggs at her car as she drove home from work.
“My windshield was just covered,” Harne said.
Andrew Loewinger of Northwest D.C. sold his Model S in November to protest Musk and his “abhorrent politics and actions.”
“After I sold the car, I got a customer satisfaction survey from them, and what I wrote, which I still believe, is that Musk has irretrievably damaged the brand, and I would not associate with that brand again, period,” Loewinger, 71, said.
Across the decidedly Blue Washington region, some Tesla owners — once seen as part of a pioneering sustainability movement — are grappling with the CEO’s
emergence as one of the most powerful right-wing political figures in the country. Musk, the world’s richest person,
spent at least $288 million to help elect Trump and other Republican candidates, making him the 2024 presidential election’s biggest donor.
Now, as head of the newly created DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has raced to execute his vision of a dramatically smaller government, wiping out swaths of the federal workforce, slashing diversity and inclusion efforts and ripping up deals with government contractors. The broad-brush bludgeoning of federal agencies and programs has been cheered by MAGA’s base, but it has also run in to a flurry of lawsuits and legal challenges seeking to halt what critics view as an unconstitutional process. Even some of Trump’s senior advisers have been surprised and frustrated by DOGE’s seeming freedom to do anything it wants, according to
Washington Post reporting last week.
Musk’s actions are distinctly felt here in the Washington metropolitan region, where about 20 percent of the federal workforce call the area home. Protests against DOGE have taken place almost weekly and
Tesla showrooms have also been picketed, including ones in Georgetown, Arlington and Owings Mills, Maryland. At one of the
demonstrations in Georgetown earlier this month, protesters carried signs that read, “No one voted for the Muskrat” and “Musk Robbing America.” A message scrawled in colorful chalk on the sidewalk surrounding the dealership read: “You want a swasticar?”
For some Washington residents, the political baggage associated with owning a Tesla has become too great.
“It just irritates me very deeply that the man who started the Tesla and has done other good things has, in my opinion, completely gone off the rails,” Blackburn said. “I would never buy another Tesla. I have a brother who bought a Tesla at my urging and a really good friend who bought a Tesla at my urging. Neither of them will ever buy a Tesla again.”
