Trump first said it was illegal not to buy a Tesla, then he said he was buying a Tesla, now he has slapped a 25% tax on anyone buying a car that isn’t a Tesla.

To be clear, the Trump Tesla Tax was designed to penalize all car companies other than Tesla. And not surprisingly Tesla put out propaganda saying it would be hurt by the thing designed to help it, because that’s how gaslighting works.

• Trump says he’s helping the people he actually hurts.
• People actually being helped by him say they will be hurt.

And up is down, down is up.

The disinformation doctrine is that nobody can stop a dictator when there is no truth left but whatever the dictator says in the moment.

All that anti-vaccine propaganda? It was strategic, meant to destroy faith in experts and scientific/critical thinking. It reconfigured society to be far more vulnerable to simple attacks, easily exploited by the biggest con artists unafraid to lie. That’s how we end up with the damage of a Trump Tesla Tax, expected to be as effective as Trump’s instant cure for COVID that killed millions instead.

For those watching the world reject the Tesla since January, and rightly so in places still able to think clearly, the defective and dated sub-par vehicle (the state-sponsored Trabant of America) has seen sales drop 90% while other EV sales are up, way up. Yet, there’s been one place notably still buying the Swasticar.

The UK.

Experts attribute this holdout, a bizarre remaining market for a Swasticar, to extremist right wing groups in the UK (white supremacist cells) who see a Nazi-saluting Tesla CEO as symbolic of their mission and beliefs.

In the rest of the world there simply aren’t as many extreme right wing activists as normalized in England. And to be fair, the English are not hesitant to call out their own Nazis.

Kudos to the Brits who studied history.

Now, in an ironic twist, the new Trump Tesla Tax meant to artificially juice American Swasticar sales, is instead immediately winding up resentment from the UK.

We are looking at the zero emission vehicle mandate which is why some of… that money goes to Tesla, and looking at how we can better support the car manufacturing industry in the UK.

UK finance minister Rachel Reeves is saying Tesla should be banned from any more government handouts. Makes sense, of course. The bogus “green” marketing loophole was allowed to dominate the Swasticar sales discussions before. Yet now the ugly Nazi reality of an aggressive foreign interventionist, imperialist tin-pot dictatorship, throwing dumb taxes around, is simply too hard to ignore anymore.

Oh, and the UK just banned Tesla marketing fraud.

…it is not even close to offering full self driving capability, a fact that has convinced the Department for Transport (DfT) in the UK to disallow most Tesla driver-assist features… If you told those people they had to stand over their toasters and monitor them constantly to prevent the toast from burning, they would think you were a perfect jackass.

The Tesla Trump Tax is backfiring, and is likely to make Tesla about as popular as when the East Germans (DDR) under the KGB (e.g. Putin) built a wall and mandated that everyone had to buy a Trabant.

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Axios Harris Poll 100:

Tesla’s reputation ranking in the Axios Harris Poll 100 has fallen significantly, from 8th place in 2021 to 63rd in 2024.

Consumer Perception:

Overall, Americans’ impression of Tesla has dropped, with YouGov finding a score of minus 12.7 in March 2025, the lowest since 2016.

Caliber’s “Consideration Score”:

Caliber’s “consideration score” for Tesla fell to 31% in February, less than half its high of 70% in November 2021.

Buzz Score:

Tesla recorded a negative buzz score (-18.2) compared to Volkswagen (9.3), indicating more negative than positive buzz in the past two weeks.

Purchase Intent:

Consumer purchase intent for Tesla is also low, with a 1.6% score compared to Ford at 10.8%.”

In a recent national security group discussion I was asked what Americans can expect of a regime that sees itself in an existential war. It reminded me how too few people study history, and that most (if not all) security professionals entering the workforce these days look at the Cold War as prehistoric, like when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

With that in mind, some members of Congress have just this week launched 1960s-sounding baseless attacks claiming “communism” in children’s programming commonly known as Sesame Street.

Committee chair Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republican members accused the networks of brainwashing viewers and children with a “communist” agenda…

Was a brontosaurus elected into office? Do not underestimate the return of a Nixon, or a McCarthy, given how clear it is that their false “agenda” saws never really entirely went away.

So, what can we expect a bunch of old salted nuts in government to do next, the return of ghosts long past? What happens when an unstable genius decries communism around every corner or under every rock? What happens to the violently superstitious when a Black man crosses their path?

Cultural battles are always going to be a messy target, of course. Our expectations must look towards the even more dramatic and dangerous resource competition fights related to technological superiority.

I say people should plan for the future based on what’s happened in the past, to paraphrase Churchill warning early that Hitler was a threat. If members of Congress act like it’s 1960 again then let’s look at what American hawks were up to back then, a decade before they had to face the music (thanks to Senator Church and President Carter).

To be fair, I’m talking about looking back at the shadows of the Cold War. A disturbing pattern aligns from certain “accidents” across the global chessboard of 1960-1961, not saying we have evidence sufficient to claim proof. These are shadows by design, because we’re talking about the worst days of the CIA, after all.

First: February 1960, Adriano Olivetti dies suddenly from a heart attack on a train to Switzerland. The visionary Italian industrialist had just purchased Underwood in America and was developing the world’s first transistorized computer, with plans to potentially share technology with Communist nations.

Here’s a typical insight to be found in Meryle Secrest’s book “The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti“.

The move to contact Russia and China has to be seen as a political miscalculation of major proportions on Adriano’s part. If he still thought that Allen Dulles and the CIA were kindly disposed toward him and his ideas, he was deluding himself. After the abysmal showing of Comunità in the 1958 elections, Adriano Olivetti went from being a possible ally to a Socialist whose party had allied itself with the Communists. That loss of influence could well have led to a series of well-coordinated and highly sophisticated efforts to stop him and his company in its tracks. Whatever the cost.

Second: January 1961, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, is assassinated. Declassified documents have revealed CIA “involvement” in Belgians ruthlessly killing him, motivated to block Soviet influence in resource-rich Congo, home to uranium and other strategic minerals.

Third: September 1961, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane “mysteriously” crashes (shot down) in Northern Rhodesia while on a Congo peace mission. Evidence suggests it was not an accident, as the U.S. continues to block investigations.

Fourth: November 1961, Mario Tchou, head of Olivetti’s groundbreaking electronics lab, dies in a suspicious car crash. He had been planning meetings with Chinese officials about computer technology. Secrest again:

The accident is reminiscent of a similar, so-called accident involving a truck that took the life of a famous American general. This was, for many years, also judged to have been the fault of his driver. The case is the death of General George Patton at the end of World War II in December 1945. Like Adriano Olivetti and Mario Tchou, General Patton had formidable enemies.

Resource Control as a Parallel

These targeted killings reflected the same facets of American war planning applied in two different battlefields.

Physical resources in Africa were demanded by Western powers. America was determined to maintain control of Congo’s vast reserves of uranium, copper, and cobalt by any means necessary. Mining was seen as critical for weapons and industrial dominance. Lumumba was perceived to threaten this access; Hammarskjöld threatened the narrative. The French even deposed the Congo’s next leader when he dared to suggest European military control over the country wasn’t wanted by them.

Technological resources arguably, and far less controversially, faced a similar fate. Olivetti’s breakthrough computing technology represented a different kind of strategic resource. Its potential transfer to Communist nations would have undermined American technological superiority at a pivotal moment in the computer revolution. Secrest concludes:

The problem is as valid today as it was during the height of the Cold War, and for the same reason. Of China’s theft of intellectual property, The Economist recently observed that what is at issue are ‘the core information technologies. They are the basis for the manufacture, networking and destructive power of advanced weapons systems.’ A country with the most sophisticated solutions establishes ‘an unassailable advantage.’

By 1964, Olivetti’s electronics division had been dismantled through an engineered and artificial financial crisis. It had hallmarks of the Western-aligned leadership installed in mineral-rich African nations.

Different continents, different resources, same playbook of asserting violent control through civilian assassinations to destroy targets of America’s most extreme politicians.