Elon Musk and Bill Ackman endorsed former President Donald Trump on X following the failed assassination attempt that occurred on Saturday. The celebrity endorsements represent Trump’s ever-increasing popularity amid a long overdue cultural shift that has yielded sympathy for the former president.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X, simply wrote: “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.” Ackman, a famous hedge fund manager whose political participation has become more prominent in recent years, wrote a lengthier post saying that he “came to this decision some time ago.” The two billionaires’ public support for Trump shines a light on a broader political shift in the country.
Trump’s unreasonably controversial nature has been on full display ever since he burst onto the political scene almost a decade ago. His inarguably brash personality was paired with perpetually negative media attention to create a culture that demonized his very existence.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s entire 2016 presidential campaign was predicated upon the idea that Trump was a wretched, self-interested narcissist worthy of unforgiving condemnation. Attacking Trump wasn’t enough, however — Clinton famously said that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in what she called “the basket of deplorables.” To be a Trump supporter was to be racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic in her eyes.
Brewing underneath the surface of Trump’s shocking 2016 victory was a broader social movement in the Democratic Party that has only recently manifested itself in our culture’s conscience.
An easy way to put it would be this: While Trump was discussing the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries on the campaign trail, Clinton was ranting about transgender bathroom laws.
The social movement that has completely taken over the Democratic Party over the last decade-plus has its roots in ideology, most notably Marxism and postmodern theory. The former claims that every social conflict exists within an oppressor vs. oppressed framework, while the latter rejects objectivity and emphasizes intersectional identities. What’s different between now and 2016, and what makes it viable for trailblazers such as Musk and Ackman to endorse Trump, is that we now have nomenclatures with which to identify these philosophies and their applications in policy.
Whether it’s called “leftism,” “wokeism,” “progressivism,” or “identity politics,” we all know it when we see it. An absurd obsession with COVID-era restrictions, an open border, pro-Hamas antisemitism, the defund-the-police movement, the list goes on and on. It used to be that leftism was present but concealed, threatening yet subtle.
The Biden administration, however, decided to unmask the ideology by rooting its policy positions in these postmodern, Marxist philosophies. The aforementioned examples represent a shift so far to the left that the former designation of “liberal” can scarcely be applied to the Democratic Party at all.
The most evident application of this movement has been the Democrats’ and the liberal media’s appalling treatment of Trump and their denigration of those who support him.
They’ve compared him to Adolf Hitler. They’ve claimed that he’s an existential threat to democracy and that the country would cease to exist upon his reelection. They impeached him twice and are now trying to put him in jail. Upon their violent rhetoric leading to an assassination attempt, however, these arguments will now fall on deaf ears.
Their now absolute lack of credibility is pertinent as well. It’s hard to take a political party seriously when, for years, it tells the public that its aging candidate is “sharp,” just for him to humiliate himself on national television in a live debate. President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance immediately yielded a shift in the polls in favor of Trump, but what happened on Saturday will most likely turn the tide even more.
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It has yet to be seen how the assassination attempt will alter the course of the election, but Musk and Ackman’s endorsements make it clear that our culture is finally warming up to the 45th president of the United States.
After years of absurd “progressive” policies, the pendulum is finally swinging back in the opposite direction. Unfortunately for Democrats, their leftist party appears to be over.