Donald Trump was quite literally handed a scripted sales pitch by Elon Musk during his Tesla-buying stunt Tuesday, part of a desperate attempt to boost the flagging electric car manufacturer as angry customers revolt against the CEO’s involvement in a chaotic restructuring of the federal government.
Photographers captured Trump holding note cards that listed the price and specs of each car in bullet points as he inspected a series of Teslas that had been brought to the White House.
But the president admitted they weren’t his own words.
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“They gave me notes,” he said, fumbling with the papers as he prepared to get into one of the cars.
Photos of the document show phrases like “SAFEST car,” “state of the art,” and “affordable”—lines Musk apparently wanted Trump to use in his pitch.
The bizarre PR stunt, which many critics likened to an unpaid “Tesla ad,” came after the company’s stock plunged 15% on Monday—the steepest drop in five years.
Tesla’s nosedive has been widely attributed to brand erosion due to the billionaire’s involvement with Trump and the highly controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Trump hoped his Tesla purchase would serve as a vote of confidence in his billionaire buddy, calling him a “truly great American.”
The president had no apparent qualms about using his office to promote the company of his friend.
“Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post overnight. “But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for.”
Musk’s other companies are not doing much better, with X experiencing outages this week and two explosions rocking SpaceX’s Starship rocket during recent test flights.
Although Trump ultimately didn’t use the script verbatim, he nonetheless slipped into his role as car salesman as he got into the driver’s seat of a Tesla.
Playing with the car’s dashboard, he exclaimed, “Everything’s computer—that’s beautiful!”
