Elon Musk is spreading the lies thick, given his latest Tweet to pump Trump.

Look at what they did to President @realDonaldTrump. He was loved by democrats until he ran for president. Now they call him Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc and try to kill him.

5:40PM March 14, 2025

Ok, that’s just so obviously false as to be dangerous proof Musk has lost touch with reality.

Donald Trump was very widely disliked by many Americans, especially in Democratic and progressive circles, long before his presidential campaign.

Trump was heavily involved in promoting the “birther” conspiracy theory well before he ran for president. He became one of the most prominent voices pushing this false narrative around 2011, about four years before he announced his presidential campaign in June 2015.

In early 2011, Trump began appearing on television programs like Fox News, where he repeatedly questioned President Obama’s birthplace and citizenship despite abundant evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii. Trump claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii and suggested they had found concerning information (though he never provided any evidence of this).

This racist conspiracy theory was a significant part of why many people, especially Democrats and progressives, strongly disliked Trump years before he entered the presidential race. The birther movement was widely viewed as an attempt to delegitimize America’s first Black president by casting him as a foreigner and was condemned as racist by many political commentators.

Trump only publicly acknowledged that Obama was born in the United States in September 2016, during his presidential campaign because he knew how disliked he was, and even then he falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton had started the rumor.

His public image in New York City, where he was most visible, and therefore most detested, was particularly negative among long term residents who had to hear his disgusting racism for decades and watch all his ideas fail (steak, planes, vodka, casinos…).

The idea that this guy on the run from everyone trying to collect his debts suddenly became controversial only after running for president ignores his long disgraced history.

Are we done here yet?

I’ll continue. Beyond the birther fraud and being deeply unpopular anywhere he was really known, there were many other reasons he faced strong criticism:

• His business reputation included allegations of fraud at Trump University
• His environmental record and battles with local communities over development projects
• His tabloid persona and controversial statements about women
• His personal attacks against critics and celebrities
• His tendency toward exaggeration and self-promotion that many found off-putting

He was a deeply polarizing figure, hated by Democrats, well before entering politics at the national level.

The historical record clearly shows that Trump wasn’t suddenly disliked only after announcing his presidential run, because he cultivated significant friction through his many immoral actions and statements for many years prior.

Elon Musk suggesting that Democrats only began criticizing him after he ran for president is false, revisionist and evidence of what’s really wrong with the both of them.

Musk also mischaracterizes the normal political process as if he doesn’t understand that candidates face heightened scrutiny because… duh, inviting attention is what a campaign is and does. Trump’s pre-existing controversies naturally received more attention once he sought the presidency, as none of it needed to be newly invented.

Let me put it another way. The only voters, Democrat or Republican, who really liked Trump before or after he ran for president, are people who aligned with his overt racism. It was unmistakable ever since the 1970s, so there’s nothing new about who really likes or hates him. And in that sense, when some particular people call him Hitler, they probably mean it as a compliment.