Welcome to The Maga Millions: a thrilling new contest in which you can win a million bucks if you help a billionaire buy an election. As 5 November draws closer, Elon Musk has decided to try out some interesting – and possibly illegal – tactics to get his pal Donald Trump back into the White House.
First up: cash payments. On Saturday, Musk announced that “America Pac”, his pro-Trump political action committee, will give away $1m every day until the election to a randomly selected signatory to his petition supporting free speech and gun rights. He had previously offered to pay registered voters in swing states – and only registered voters in swing states – $47 (£36) to sign the petition, upping the offer on Friday for registered voters in Pennsylvania to $100.
While Musk isn’t directly paying people to vote, this arrangement is dodgy enough to have raised a lot of eyebrows. Rick Hasen, a political science professor at UCLA school of law, has said it “veers into clearly illegal vote-buying”. It certainly doesn’t seem a million miles away from the recent case of an oligarch in Russia accused of funnelling money to elderly residents in Moldova on the proviso they voted no in a referendum on pursuing EU membership (the yes campaign won a tiny majority).
Dangling cash in people’s faces isn’t subtle, but some other reported persuasion tactics are rather more devious. Another Musk-funded group, Future Coalition Pac, has been targeting voters in important swing states with conflicting messages about Kamala Harris’s Middle East policies. In areas with large numbers of Arab and Muslim voters, the Pac has been running digital ads emphasising how much Harris supports Israel. At the same time, it is targeting Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with ads claiming Harris is “pandering” to Palestinians.
Money has always talked in American politics but, increasingly, it doesn’t just talk – it screams. In 2010, the US supreme court’s controversial Citizens United ruling paved the way for corporations and special interest groups to pay unlimited amounts of money into elections via Super Pac funding vehicles. Since then, a staggering amount of money (much of it dark) has flooded into politics. The 50 biggest donors have pumped $2.1bn into the election, according to a Washington Post analysis.
A lot of big money, I should note, is going towards Harris. But the 50 megadonors skew Republican – to the value of $1.4bn. Essentially, Trump’s campaign is being bankrolled by a handful of influential individuals who seem confident they will get a substantial return on their investment from the shamelessly transactional Trump.
History suggests they probably will. Musk has spent at least $75m trying to get Trump elected, but not as much as Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has donated $100m. That figure seems to be based on satisfaction with past results. Her husband gave $82m to aid Trump and other Republican campaigns in the 2016 elections and pushed for Trump to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Trump delivered. Now, it has been reported that Adelson wants Trump to publicly support Israel annexing the West Bank, which her spokesperson has denied.
Adelson clearly wants to influence Trump’s foreign policy. What does Musk want? The usual: money and power. Trump has suggested that Musk would be “secretary of cost-cutting” in his administration; even if not in an official capacity, the billionaire has said he intends to “do a lot of work to improve government efficiency”. Presumably, he means he would direct even more government money to his companies than the billions they are already getting.
Seeing as this is Musk we are talking about, we can also expect him to spend government money trolling taxpayers with stupid stunts. There is a non-zero chance, for example, that he would defund libraries and use the proceeds to shoot Taylor Swift (whom he has publicly offered to impregnate) into space as revenge for her endorsement of Harris.
Also a possibility: the enacting of the Protection of Elon’s Ego Act, whereby anyone who doesn’t laugh at Musk’s infantile jokes is sentenced to a year’s hard labour in one of his Tesla factories. Then there is the fact that the billionaire hates the Guardian, which he has described as “the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth”. If Trump wins a second term and the Elonification of the US gets started, I may well be writing my future columns from a prison on Mars.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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