The Brooklyn Rail

The massive Trump rally on Saturday commemorating the July 13 assassination attempt on the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania was mostly a stately and somber affair, with remembrances of the dead and wounded that day and a moment of silence marking the time of the attack, 6:11, followed by an operatic rendition of “Ave Maria.” The event had a religious feel to it, with Trump saying he’d returned “by the hand of providence and the grace of God,” to “this hallowed place.”

Even so, Trump couldn’t resist getting in some poisonous attacks on his less providential opponents. In his opening remarks, Trump said, “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and, who knows, maybe even tried to kill me.”

At some point, Elon Musk bounded onto the stage, jumping up and down with his arms flailing around like a pent-up Black Lab puppy. He was dressed all in black, wearing an “Occupy Mars” t-shirt and a black-on-black MAGA cap. “As you can see,” announced the over-amped Elon, “I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark MAGA!”

“Dark MAGA” actually began showing up as a meme on Twitter pre-X in 2022, near the time “Dark Brandon” appeared. As the Daily Beast reported, “The movement calls for the return of Trump to the White House at all cost, asserting that Trump should be authoritarian and ruthless in his pursuit of power.”¹ Newsweek described Dark MAGA back in 2022 as “a post-alt-right aesthetic that promotes an authoritarian version of Trump in dystopian, Terminator-like images.”² Dark MAGA is an attempt to unite the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militias, misogynists, conspiracy theorists, etc. under one banner. As Newsweek put it, “Dark MAGA was born from the alt-right’s feeling of having lost power, and seeking to regain that power, at any cost.” After Musk’s appearance on Saturday, #DarkMAGA started trending on X, with tens of thousands of posts under the hashtag, and the valuation of the Dark MAGA memecoin briefly soared. As Hampton Stall and Daniel Grober of the Global Network on Extremism & Technology said in 2022: “While Dark MAGA has not taken an enduring foothold yet, there is a distinct possibility it might, and from there it is likely to grow to influence the 2024 election.”³

Musk has become the latest in a long line of Trump acolytes who adopt Trump’s tactic (learned from his mentor Roy Cohn) of accusing one’s opponent of doing a version of what you will do or have actually done. Addressing the rally crowd from the stage, with Trump standing next to him, Musk warned that Democrats wanted to strip Americans of their rights, taking “your freedom of speech, your right to bear arms, [and] your right to vote, effectively.” He proclaimed that “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America. If they don’t, this will be the last election. That’s my prediction.” What does that mean? Does it mean he thinks Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are secretly autocrats who will dismantle democracy if they win the election? Or does it mean if they win, MAGA will take over and suspend subsequent elections? After he left the stage, Musk signed on to X to spread some lower-level election conspiracies and to reiterate his call to “Make sure everyone you know & everyone you meet has registered to vote. The fate of our civilization is at stake.”

It’s unclear how much effect Musk’s appearance will have on the election nationally and especially in the crucial precincts of Western Pennsylvania, where the rally was held. One thing that will have an effect is Musk’s America PAC, a super PAC focusing a lot of time and money on super-charging the ground game for Trump’s campaign in battleground states. Musk’s super PAC is now paying people $47 for each voter they refer to sign a petition pledging their support for the First and Second Amendments to the US Constitution. These signers will then be targeted by America PAC to turn out to vote for Donald Trump. It’s a way around federal laws against paying people to vote. Musk has also enlisted his 200 million followers on X as Trump supporters. Outside the rally, a billboard in Butler read “In Musk We Trust.”

But the larger question for me is how many unstable and impressionable people will take the vile lies and nonsense spewed out by this 247-billion-dollar boy-man and act on it offline during and after the election on November 5th? How many will bring assault weapons to polling places? How many will attack poll workers and interfere with vote counts and work up “alternative elector slates”?

And how many media-addled voters will ultimately mark their ballots for an assassination-surviving dictator-in-waiting, thinking him their savior?

Will it all end here, 228 years after George Washington published his farewell address, marking the first peaceful transfer of presidential power, and the firm establishment of America as a stable democracy? Will it all end with a narcissistic thug and a reckless billionaire prattling in the dark?