Musk prepares to buy another election and smear more trans kids

It may turn out to be the biggest political story of 2025. And it slipped by.

Last week, Axios gave us this “Scoop:”

Elon Musk has begun funding the GOP’s House and Senate campaigns for the 2026 midterms — an indication his relationship with President Trump has thawed since their messy breakup earlier this year.

Why it matters: Musk — who threatened to launch a third party and support challengers to Republican incumbents during his dispute with Trump — is now firmly back in the GOP’s camp.The tech billionaire recently cut big checks to help Republicans win congressional races next year and indicated he’d give more throughout the 2026 cycle, two sources with knowledge of the situation tell Axios.

Coincidentally, just days later, Bobby Kennedy Jr. presented a trans hate show at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy announced that he was overruling, without even a pretense of a deliberative process, decades of scientific consensus to ban gender affirming care for trans youth. Then his deputy Jim O’Neill took to the stage to plaintively rant that trans people do not exist and express a “hatred for nature as God designed it.”

It’s like Musk had his AI son Grok generate it. And it’s precisely what Elon’s paying for. And I’m sure he loved Marjorie Taylor Greene’s anti-trans bill that passed the House just as much.

For what?

I don’t have to tell you how bigoted and nonsensical this overwhelming fixation on a tiny group of Americans—less than 0.1% of American adolescents, according to the best study available— is. These kids impinge on no one’s rights and routinely struggle to find any care because it’s so cautiously delivered.

The obsession with trans kids is obviously a purposeful distraction. And one of the purposes is to please the man who has proven he’ll spend almost anything to elect Republicans.

The GOP needs Musk… badly

To review, the Republican Party under Trump suffered historic losses in the 2025 elections.

These losses portend disaster for the GOP in 2026 if elections are conducted even close to fairly. Notably, those disastrous losses began before Musk and Trump had their spat, and Elon went all in on trying to buy a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin.

Though Musk wasn’t investing in the GOP’s fall races, the GOP nominee for governor in Virginia carbon copied Musk’s trans hate campaign from 2024, when he led the GOP in spending over $200 million on transphobia, typified by the “Kamala is for they/them” ad, and lost by nearly 15%.

That could indicate that the trans issue is now a far less potent issue, given all the actual crises we face under this regime. That would make sense because before Musk dumped a fortune on the flames of transphobia, it was almost impossible to find an example of where targeting gender-affirming care helped Republicans win anything.

But we must note Winsome Earle-Sears was a horrible candidate; the Virginia GOP almost couldn’t have done worse. And she also lacked the full backing of what Musk put into his 2024 hate effort, including the undeniable sway of his celebrity, the $40+ billion he spent buying X, shifting online incentives toward attacking the existence of trans people, and the filthy machinery of Musk Inc.’s propaganda machine.

The actual history of the 2024 election

When the true history, if it still exists, of 2024 is written, scholars will have to note that this was the first time a single human bought himself a presidency and that he did it in the most despicable ways possible.

Yes, trans hate dominated the Musk Super PAC’s ads, just as it tortures his mind, but Musk's machine operated more like a phishing attack than a campaign.

Take a minute and digest this reminder of the “false flag” tactics, as the Washington Post described them, Musk’s guys employed:

Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.

What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.

This isn’t a campaign. This is a scam. It’s amoral propaganda.

Propaganda works, even on ‘thought leaders’

In the latest episode of Next Comes What by Andrea Pitzer, which I produced, Andrea spoke again about the power of propaganda, which is the lifeforce of authoritarians and wannabe dictators everywhere.

She dissects the transphobia in the UK over the last decade, comparing and contrasting it with a related phenomenon in the US, and offers this warning:

If you think such a campaign could never affect you, you might be right about this particular campaign. But after years of looking at how authoritarianism rose and how various groups were targeted around the world in the last 130 years, I can say that given enough funding and enough time, propaganda can remake society and draw support from groups and people who would have previously been completely opposed to the ideas it was presenting.

Propaganda is so effective, and Musk and Trump are such masters of applying it with a firehose, that even our press gets taken by it.

Musk’s investment in transphobia isn’t performative in any way. He’s not just lashing out. He demands that the government turn on trans people and punish them for existing. And even the conventional wisdom about the 2024 election that attacking trans people helped Trump win is part of that propaganda campaign.

How Musk twisted Democrats’ brains

The consensus that one comment from the last about trans people being treated like humans in prisons cost Kamala Harris pervades establishment Democratic thinking.

This mind virus is behind the attack on “the groups.” And it’s why big donors and some centrists keep demanding that Democrats sign up to become the second biggest haters of trans people. That’s why a handful of House Democrats voted for Greene’s trans bashing bill, saving it after a few Republicans refused to back this fascist interference between doctors and families.

And this is what Musk bought himself: an unfalsifiable narrative that turns trans people’s natural allies against them.

And there’s absolutely no proof or sense to it. Harris actually moved to the right on several issues, trying to build a cross-party front against fascism with Liz Cheney, and offered no defense for the tsunami of trans-bashing ads that flooded the public.

Yes, Musk’s money mattered, and his trans attacks were part of a propaganda onslaught designed to trigger misogyny and rage in young male voters. But those voters, in general, were responding as voters had all over the world. They were mad about inflation, angry at incumbents, and radicalized against progress by the massive onslaught of propaganda financed by right-wing billionaires.

And the myth of transphobia being decisive for Republicans completely falls apart when you consider that Trump did worse in places where voters were bombarded with the transmuted hate of his own daughter.

So here we go again

After completing the Next Comes What episode above, it hit me that there are a few coincidences in politics.

Did the GOP’s decision to spend the week before Christmas bashing trans people happen to follow Musk’s return to the GOP fold? Possibly. Elected Republicans love transphobia almost as much as Musk does, but this is the kind of alignment of evils that drew the richest man alive back to the party he personally financed in 2024.

Axios, again:

The intrigue: Musk’s latest donations came after he had dinner last month with Vice President Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Taylor Budowich, a former White House deputy chief of staff who’s still wired into the administration.Vance, who’s close to Musk, helped organize the dinner at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory.Jared Birchall, a low-profile Musk lieutenant who plays a key role in managing Musk’s political giving, was also present.

This confirms my assertion that JD Vance is now the leader of the Republican Party (and reignites my fear that if he’s the nominee in 2028, he’ll have four or five billionaires financing him the way Trump had Musk in 2024).

And that this has been in the works since the aftermath of the November elections indicates that a strategic attack on trans people could have been developing for a while. We know Greene has been working on her hateful bill for a while, and made it a contingency of her vote to pass the must-pass Defense Authorization bill.

But if you want to make the case that Musk is pulling strings and using the transphobia at the HHS for his comfort hate crimes, you have a good case, too! Just look at something that may have triggered Elon earlier this month, coming from the most ironic dude possible.

Trolls troll trolls

If anyone bought into Musk’s psyop asserting that trans rights cost Democrats the 2024 election, it would be Gavin Newsom. He’s made shifting right on trans issues a key aspect of his preparations to run for president in 2028.

Because he can be a human weather vane, Gavin may have sensed after the November elections, and after a year of Musk’s onslaught of transphobic ads, that the transphobia in America was waning as an issue, and he should try to repair some of the damage he’s done to his image on the left.

On Ezra Klein’s podcast, California’s governor defended his record on trans rights, which is imperfect but better than most any living politician, while also shitting on trans kids who want to play sports, splitting the baby in a way that only makes sense if you still buy the anti-trans narrative of 2024 that Musk engineered.

Elon Musk’s Super PAC pulled out a clip of that conversation, obviously trying to bring trans hate back to the center of our politics. It was a troll that only makes sense if you start with Elon’s premise that trans kids are bad.

Newsom’s team trolled back:

Elon’s response registered a 100 out of a possible 100 hurt butts:

And because she’s so awesome as to make me question both traditional notions of nature and nurture, Musk’s daughter Vivian responded by updating her Instagram bio:

It’s up to us to make 2026 different

All of this is to explain that for Elon, it will be 2024 forever.

The disaster of 2025 matters in no significant ways; the 600,000 beneficiaries of USAID aid, 400,000 of them kids, who have died due to his actions, mean nothing. Hey, he saved them from ever getting gender-affirming care!

Our laws still allow the abomination of one individual being able to buy a national election. And Elon’s hatred is still driving him to make sure that animosity toward his own child and his ex-wife for supporting his child is reflected in the way governmental power is used to oppress some of the most vulnerable people alive.

Now, I have my own theory about how the dynamics of a failing Trump presidency turn the right-wing capture of the media against the GOP, which would also make Musk’s efforts less effective than I’ll be publishing soon. But we should never underestimate the effects of the kind of massive investment in politics that Musk has made and appears ready to make again.

I have to quote something I wrote after he bought Twitter:

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter would rank among the worst business decisions in human history, if the goal were … business. But since the Tesla CEO has become increasingly fixated on the objective of empowering rightwingers and weakening democracy everywhere – especially in the United States – you’d have to say the acquisition makes some sense.

And it could help Republicans win in 2024.

We have to expect what we know is coming. Republicans want to rerun the 2024 playbook, especially with young men, and Musk will do it in innovative ways, applying resources beyond the comprehension of most Americans.

We must refuse to make the mistake of not answering these ads. We can and must frame the debate in our favor. The hatred of a man for his own child is repellent. Intruding on a family’s most intimate medical decisions is horrific. Using targeted scapegoating of a tiny, powerless group so you can suck up even more wealth and power as you contaminate the planet with data centers that do nothing but pillage our communities is a crime against humanity.

We can stand up to this kind of hate, even if the odds are against us. We have to accept that propaganda works and make the decision to use it for good.

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