The Billionaire and the Hatemonger

Election Preview Part 2 - Elon Musk / Stephen Miller, Anti-Trans Ads, and Public Polling

Reporting from the Wall Street Journal from early October revealed that the immigrant billionaire Elon Musk and the leading hatemonger Stephen Miller had been working closely together much earlier than was previously known. Their collaboration in 2022 pushed the outer limits of xenophobic and transphobic political rhetoric onto the national stage, with Musk funneling tens of millions of dollars to boost the grossly offensive brand of Miller’s politics. Their strategy of aggressive low-pitch dog-whistle politics that placed xenophobia and transphobia as twin election appeals in 2022 became the template for much of the GOP in 2024. Their partnership helped to create the conditions for Trump to cross over to fascist campaigning. With different roles this cycle, they have dedicated themselves to see that Trump takes power either through a ballot box with a message of thinly veiled bigotry or by overturning the results by popularizing white nationalist conspiracies about a stolen election. 

Musk’s public radicalization over the last couple of years has shaped this election in dramatic ways. He has weaponized his vast fortune to provide critical ground game and aircover lacking from the official GOP operation and turned the major social media company he bought into a white nationalist conspiracy theory distribution and amplification machine in service of the Trump campaign. 

But Musk’s radicalization, including the full-on adoption of the white nationalist and antisemitic replacement theory as the animating core of his politics, also reflects that of the Republican Party at large. Similarly evidenced in the public radicalization of Senators Lindsey Graham (SC) and Marco Rubio (FL), who went from the leaders on the right calling for immigration reform to adopting the white nationalist replacement theory and calling for a “spectacle” of indiscriminate mass deportations. Musk’s role both as an avatar and megadonor makes him a pivotal character in understanding this cycle.

Meanwhile, despite his strategy of going to the extremes on nativism failing to deliver in the last several cycles, Miller’s strategy has become more widely adopted. He has pushed replacement theory ideas for over a decade and now they are the core organizing principle for the GOP in 2024. The politics of this once-fringe ideologue are now that of the Republican Party. 

While the ballad of the billionaire and the hatemonger hasn’t yet concluded, it has already caused significant damage and harm. But, at the same time, it has done little to move the majority to their neonationalist politics. Public opinion research suggests that their efforts have seen the radicalization of the MAGA base, but thankfully it appears that most of the American people are not ready to sign up for the violence and bigotry they offer. 

The key storylines detailed below:

• Elon Musk is an avatar for the GOP in ‘24: $75 million buys quite a large megaphone, but Musk’s role in the election isn’t just as the megadonor filling in the gaps of the GOP operation. His promotion of the replacement theory, both as a justification for draconian immigration restrictions and the conspiracy theory to undermine American democracy is central to the GOP’s campaign this cycle. 

• It’s the white nationalist Stephen Miller’s strategy: Miller’s white nationalist politics of gaining attention by slowly turning up the volume on public bigotry has been widely adopted by the Republican Party. Ideologically committed to the massive purge of non-white immigrants and their children, Miller’s worldview is now completely aligned with the Republican Party’s. 

• The same forces spending loot on strategic xenophobia are pushing the transphobic attacks: The dehumanization of a marginalized group, depicting them as an existential threat that must be purged as the central solution to the nation's problems, is a hallmark of fascist campaigning. And that of the Trump campaign. Non-white migrants and trans people are the dual marginalized “villains” Republicans are hoping to ride off of to bring a fascist campaign to power, on top of their perennial attacks on Black people, including Haitian and African immigrants.   

• The details of mass deportation are deeply unpopular: Below the headlines, public opinion polling tells a story of Republican base voters radicalizing on the issue, with the vast majority of Americans still preferring pathways to citizenship over the devastation of mass deportation.  

Read part 1: “The GOP Doubled-Down Hard on Nativism”, HERE. Part three, out Monday, will focus on the consequences of a billion-dollar-plus, multi-year campaign to spread dehumanizing lies and conspiracies about immigrants as an election strategy. 

Musk and Miller in 2022

During the 2022 midterms, a brand new super PAC showed up out of nowhere, running some of the ugliest ad campaigns of the cycle. The “dark money” super PAC, Citizens for Sanity (CoS) had the sort of massive war chest that could afford to run political ads during the MLB playoffs.   Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik described the ad as “unbelievably racist,” “depicting a torrent of obviously Latino immigrants pouring over the border,” that, the ad claimed, was “threatening your family … Mixed among the masses are drug dealers, sex traffickers and violent predators.” And CoS was running similarly aggressive xenophobic and transphobic ads all over the country targeting key battleground Senate races. 

Reporting at the time identified key allies of Stephen Miller as behind the project. The main people who ran CoS were also running Miller’s post-Trump administration organization, America First Legal. It’s a relatively unsurprising revelation given the clear alignment of the ad campaign with the grotesque nativism of Miller’s brand of politics. 

We didn’t know who provided the massive funding for these vile ads – until just recently. In an exclusive report, the Wall Street Journal exposed that the operation was funded by Musk, who donated more than $50 million to the Miller-aligned organization for the strategicly racist ads. Musk’s massive influx of cash allowed CoS to jump to the overall eighth-largest spender in the 2022 midterm elections. CoS spent tens of millions of dollars of Musk’s money across battleground states targeting the Senate candidates with TV, digital, and print ads with messages that falsely demagogued immigrants about crime and taking benefits from US-born citizens, and peddled ugly transphobic bigotry (more on this later).

This collaboration set the stage for 2024 in three important ways:

• The massive amount of money (to use the overused concept) moved the “Overton Window” on the American right. It normalized Miller’s brand of politics on a much larger scale, shifting the window on shockingly thin-coded bigoted messages. The aggressive low-pitch dog-whistle politics that placed xenophobia and transphobia at the center of the political advertising was turbocharged by the Musk-funded CoS campaign and led straight into the strategic messaging decisions by the GOP in 2024 despite the lack of success the strategy saw in 2022. 

• The effort allowed Musk to get in a few practice swings as a megadonor behind the dark wall of American political financing at the exact same moment he was publicly acquiring Twitter, which is not the largest social media platform, but the most influential in shaping American political discourse. 

• The collaboration between the billionaire and one of the nation’s leading white nationalists foreshadowed the mass radicalization of the Republican Party over the next two years as they slowly but persistently adopted the replacement theory as their own.      

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022 is a key part of the story for setting up the right’s 2024 political strategy. After Twitter banned Trump’s account following his effort on the platform to help foment the events that led to the insurrection on Jan. 6, there was a lot of hand wringing on the right. Then Musk’s billions stepped in, with the long and fraught acquisition that saw him take over the company in late October 2022. On taking over, Musk has turned the platform to an online version of a Nazi bar that reinstated bigots allowing racism and antisemitism to flourish. Musk has also provided a platform for Tucker Carlson after he was kicked off Fox News. 

Additionally, Musk quickly announced the reversal to allow political ad spending back on the platform, which has Republicans and Musk’s own pro-Republican super PAC dominate the spending on this cycle. CoS has, in turn, spent about $12.9 million just on ads on Musk’s platform this year, according to the platform's rudimentary political ad disclosures. And it has become a hub for boosting replacement theory political ads.  

Musk and Miller in 2024 

In addition to inspiring Republicans to double-down on the failed strategy of 2022, the 2024 cycle has seen Musk much more personally involved. Musk has put at least $75 million over the last three months of his own money to help elect Trump, with the candidate’s campaign now also essentially contracting its ground game in key battleground states to America PAC, a group backed by the billionaire and that has been mired in controversies. The group spent $8 million of its funding towards Twitter/X political ads. The second highest X spend from America PAC, about $13.1k, happens to be about how “‘border czar’ Kamala Harris opened the border to millions” and “turned Georgia into a border state, hurting our economy and Georgia jobs, and now crime is on the rise.” Earlier this week, the district attorney of Philadelphia announced that he would be filing a lawsuit over America Pac’s legally dubious $1 million handouts to prospective voters in Pennsylvania. Musk was a no-show at a required hearing on Thursday. This week then saw reports that America PAC shared “violent and vulgar” videos about Vice President Kamala Harris, and that the organization allegedly “tricked and threatened” canvassers in Michigan, including at least one worker who didn’t know he was working to help elect Trump. Others said they were told their lodging bills would go unpaid “unless they met unrealistic quotas.” 

In a telling exchange with Tucker Carlson in early October Musk said he’s “fucked” if Trump doesn’t win. Regardless of the reality, Musk’s belief that his future and fortune are tied up in the success of Trump’s campaign is a disturbing prospect. As Musk has pushed the lie that if Trump doesn’t win “this will be the last election” based on replacement theory Big Lie 2.0. 

Disturbingly, Musk argued that the threat wasn’t just from fraudulent votes but that non-white immigrants would eventually become citizens, asserting that their naturalized status would be a permanent marker against their ability to cast a legitimate vote, which isrich irony coming from the naturalized immigrant spending so much to shape the outcomes of this election.   

Musk has also been a top promoter of anti-immigrant rhetoric despite being an immigrant himself and having possibly worked illegally in the U.S., according to recent reporting. But as a white, super-wealthy immigrant, Musk’s immigration history’s “gray area” appears to be of little concern to Miller, who has been frighteningly clear about details of the mass deportation plan.  

In his piece, “Inside Team Trump’s Plans For Mass Deportation Camps,” Huff Post’s Matt Shuham writes Miller has “gleefully” described deportation flights, along with mass camps where immigrants, and likely U.S. citizens if recent history is a guide, will be jailed before they’re deported, as “greater than any national infrastructure project” our nation has ever seen. And, Miller is hell-bent on carrying out these promises. Ahead of Trump taking to the stage to spew fascistic rhetoric at a rally in Aurora, Miller went on a wildly racist tirade in front of blown-up photos of Latino men purported to be gang members. “Stephen Miller is pointing at photos of Hispanics and getting Trump fans in Aurora to boo and yell at them,” Aaron Rupar observed. 

“Are these the kids you grew up with?” Miller asked. “Are these the neighbors you were raised with? Are these the neighbors that you want in your city?” Miller was not subtle in his underlying message: brown people are a foreign enemy, brown people are to be feared, and brown people do not belong here. And during Trump’s now infamous campaign event at Madison Square Garden, Miller made the parallels to the site’s 1939 Nazi rally all the more apt by invoking an ultranationalist slogan stating, “America is for Americans and Americans only!” as part of a rabidly xenophobic speech (see more on the parallels here).  

This is the vicious and vile closing argument of a white nationalist who has been bullying people of color since his youth, as Univision reported in 2017. 

Strategic Transphobic Bigotry, the Other “Villain” to Sell Fascism: 

Miller and Musk have also made trans people the other “Other.” Demonizing the existence of trans individuals as an urgent active threat has been the other key villain in the conspiratorial bigotry they have tried to use to sell fascism and win at the ballot box. The dual dehumanization of migrants and of the trans community isn’t part of a simplistic list of the different communities that are targeted by the right but an indication of their coherent strategy. One that seeks to use conspiratorial fearmongering about a marginalized minority to win political power with the predictable pattern of downstream political violence and draconian legislation.    

As noted above, this dual strategy is nothing new. The “message that was tried, mostly unsuccessfully, in the 2022 midterms,” The New York Times reported. Erin Reed of the “Erin in the Morning” newsletter reported this month that combined spending from GOP PACs and Trump, who has been stating the ridiculous lie “that children are undergoing sex change surgeries in schools,” has totaled nearly $100 million in the past eight weeks alone. More than 100 Republicans, she said, have been running explicitly transphobic campaigns. According to AdImpact, Republican-aligned campaigns spent $130M on 131 unique anti-trans messaging TV ads. They spent $40.5M on 59 of those TV ads that also featured anti-immigration attacks.

These reprehensible ads continue to amplify Republicans’ weird and unsettling obsessions with children’s genitalia and which bathroom folks use to relieve themselves, with a number of these hateful and disturbing messages featuring the photos of transgender individuals despite the fact that they were never asked for permission, nor gave their permission for their likenesses to be used. 

“Crazy liberal Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” reads the script for one ad that aired in battleground states, The Hill reported. “‘No men in girls’ sports,’ reads another, paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC with ties to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.” Gabrielle Ludwig, a trans woman demonized in the advertising, did play basketball while in college but has not stepped on the court for a decade and has been tormented by the unwanted exposure, she told The Hill. “I haven’t been able to sleep,” she said. “I don’t want my family affected. I have granddaughters, daughters who are in college. I only did this because I love to play basketball. That’s all it ever was.” 

The Hill reports that Republicans have used Ludwig’s image in at least nine ads targeting Democrats in critical U.S. Senate races that could help determine control of the chamber, including in Ohio and Montana. More from The New York Times:

In Ohio since the start of September, every ad about Senator Sherrod Brown from the leading Senate Republican super PAC has touched on transgender topics, such as accusing him of “allowing transgender biological males in girls’ sports.” Mr. Brown is one of the nation’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbents.

In Montana, five ads have deployed similar lines about transgender women in sports and bathrooms as Republicans press the case that Senator Jon Tester, another endangered Democrat up for re-election, is too liberal for the heavily Republican state.

Reed reports that Democratic Senators Jacky Rosen (NV) and Tammy Baldwin (WI) are also being targeted, with Republican Senate candidates like Michigan’s Mike Rogers avoiding discussing their restrictive stances on reproductive rights by instead pivoting to transphobia. 

But will the transphobic fearmongering work this time? Republicans looking to buck their anti-trans losing streak from 2022 may wake up on Nov. 6 to sour news and millions of dollars again wasted, with polling showing that likely voters “are more inclined to support a candidate who stands for transgender rights” and “would prefer politicians to focus on other pressing issues,” Reed wrote.

Citizens for Sanity’s ads, again funded by Musk, also included attacks on trans Americans. It should be noted how Musk’s multi-million dollar efforts appear to stem from a personal grudge against his own daughter, who is trans, has criticized his absenteeism as a father, and from whom he’s estranged. 

The Investment Into Nativism Isn’t the Silver Bullet Miller Thinks It Is: 

As we’ve previously documented, the GOP’s significant investment in a nativist strategy failed at the ballot box during the 2022 midterms. Republicans have doubled down with a billion-dollar investment. Trump, Miller, and the Speaker of the House are again claiming “that this time really is different.” But a look at the public opinion research suggests they might be in for yet another round of failed predictions of their success. 

We have examined the available public opinion research in detail throughout the year, but here are the three key relevant storylines for the polling this cycle: 

• Radicalization, not persuasion: After nearly a decade of Trump at the helm of the Republican Party and a multi-year billion-dollar message industry pushing his signature issue, it is not surprising that more of the Republican base has bought into the false and dystopian vision that immigrants are an existential threat that must be purged from neighborhoods and workplaces. It is Republican voters who are overwhelmingly driving “immigration” as a top issue as measured by pollsters in the cycle. Republicans are also overwhelmingly driving the support for mass deportation in the polls. This indicates this is likely more of a story about the radicalization of the Republican Party than an effective agenda for persuasion.

• Mass deportation is unpopular: Trump and GOP allies are refusing to engage on the specific details and dodging debate questions, because they know the specifics are politically toxic and unpopular among key voters. In polling conducted by Professor Tom K. Wong of the US Immigration Policy Center at UC San Diego, support for mass deportation drops from a net positive for Trump to a net negative when basic context is added to the issue. Providing context about the impact of mass deportation on long-term residents, on family separation and the economy moved voters against mass deportation. And see Ron Brownstein’s CNN column here, featuring AV’s Vanessa Cárdenas, which includes the following: “Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who focuses on Latino voters, says surveys show that support for mass deportation plummets among not only Latinos but also other voters when ‘people learn that Trump’s plans are to deport [undocumented] people who have been living and working here for decades.’” In fact, knowledge of the details of the Republican’s mass deportation plan ahead of the election is likely to be one of the best persuasion messages to turn skeptical voters away from Trump. 

• Don’t fall for simplistic interpretations of Democratic sentiment: Yes, voters have concerns about the issue, and they want to hear about solutions, but for the vast majority of voters outside the MAGA base, the GOP fearmongering isn’t driving voters' concerns. When given a choice between mass deportation and pathways to citizenship, voters overwhelmingly chose the latter. Nor should we forget the massive outcry and reaction to Trump’s rhetoric turned into policy in the form of family separation. If Trump wins and begins to enact the radical mass deportation agenda he campaigned on we should fully expect to see a massive similar swing in sentiment back toward immigrants.