If Protesting Tesla Is Domestic Terrorism, Then What Demonstration Against Musk Isn’t

During a bizarre live ad for Elon Musk’s car company on the White House lawn Tuesday, President Donald Trump said people protesting at Tesla dealerships around the country would be treated as domestic terrorists. 

A reporter asked Trump what he would do about the Tesla protests, noting that some commentators had suggested that protesters “should be labeled domestic terrorists.” 

Trump leapt at the opening. “I will do that. I’ll do it. I’m going to stop them. We catch anybody doing it because they’re harming a great American company,” he said. “We’re going to catch them. And let me tell you, you do it to Tesla and you do it to any company, we’re going to catch you and you’re going to — you’re going to go through hell.” 

The remarks came in the form of an unprecedented display of salesmanship with the White House as a backdrop, part press conference, part advertisement to improve stock performance for the president’s billionaire righthand man amid controversy and tumbling markets.

On Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, R-Ga., urged the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate Tesla protests. Forbes reported that in doing so, Taylor-Greene — who owns Tesla stock — may have violated House ethics rules.

Trump cannot summarily declare a class of people exercising their First Amendment rights as domestic terrorists. He can try to encourage domestic terror charges, which can be terror crimes or sentencing enhancements on other felonies, but the efforts would be unlikely to stand up in court.

“It’s absurd,” said organizer Alice Hu, executive director at the youth-led climate justice group Planet Over Profit. “It’s obvious, both legally and from a common sense perspective, that First Amendment-protected peaceful protest is not domestic terrorism.”

The response from Trump and Musk, Hu said, is a sign that the protests are working. Tesla’s stock prices tanked. And Musk, who is spearheading Trump’s controversial effort to gut the federal government, is using his social media platform Twitter to target individual organizers and grassroots groups, Hu said. 

“They’re trying to label this peaceful movement an illegal, violent, whatever, domestic terrorist movement,” she said “The reality is that it’s DOGE’s illegal rampage destroying the government, taking over the government. That’s the real problem here.” 

The president is immune from federal ethics regulations prohibiting the use of public office for private gain. However, it’s clear that after campaigning on being a champion of the working class, Trump is using the White House to advertise the company of his largest single donor and de facto appointee amid tanking Tesla stocks. 

“There aren’t laws that apply to Trump here, and with Musk, it’s still not 100 percent clear how he fits in with the government,” said Jordan Libowitz, vice president of communications at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “But beyond that, there’s a huge optics problem, where it looks like the president of the United States is trying to stop the stock slide of his election’s biggest individual funder.”

Police have showed up in force to barricade Tesla dealerships around the country since, amid Musk’s de facto takeover of the government, the grassroots #TeslaTakedown movement began demonstrating against the electric car maker last month. An image from Chicago showed more than 20 officers standing in a line blocking the entrance to a Tesla storefront last week. 

Chicago police department out in force protecting a Tesla dealership. pic.twitter.com/LF7X0B9qTw

— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) March 9, 2025

Some 350 people attended protests at the Tesla showroom in Manhattan on Saturday. New York Police Department officers arrested six people; one was charged with resisting arrest, and the other five were released. 

Hu said the police showed up with several massive vans from the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a counterterror unit that deals with civil unrest. In 2021, The Intercept reported that NYPD officer trainings — and manuals for the SRG in particular — included few directives about protecting demonstrators’ First Amendment rights. 

“In response to this outpouring of turnout, the police had at least five or six Strategic Response Group vans. Those are the vans that are ready to transport prisoners from some kind of location to the precinct. Each of those vans fits at least 10 people or so in there,” Hu said. “They were totally preparing for some kind of event where they might have needed to arrest dozens of people.”

An NYPD spokesperson confirmed that five people arrested on Saturday were released but did not respond to questions about how many officers were dispatched to the scene. 

At least nine people have been arrested at protests at Tesla dealerships and showrooms in New York. It’s not clear how many more arrests have been made around the country. 

Undeterred by the draconian response of the Trump administration, an organizer in California said she and her colleagues decided to start their own Tesla protests after seeing others pop up around the country. Lara Starr is part of a small group called Solidarity Sundays that writes postcards as a form of protest. “But after the election, postcards didn’t seem like enough,” Starr told The Intercept.

Organizers with the group anticipated that fewer than 10 people would show up to their first action, but after Indivisible, the protest group that sprung up during Trump’s first term, publicized the plan, 200 people showed up. 

“So many people thanked us for giving them something to do,” Starr said. The group plans to keep protesting at Tesla every Sunday.

“Tesla cannot be disentangled from Musk, and Musk cannot be disentangled from Trump and the chaos he is causing, the lives he is ruining, and the dismantling of our democracy and decent society,” she said. “Taking down Tesla’s sales, stock price, and potentially the entire brand is the people speaking up, stepping up, and not letting our voices and values be silenced and ignored.”

The strategy behind the Tesla protests is to take a moment when so many people feel helpless and turn it into an opportunity to exert the power of the masses, Hu said. 

“Ordinary people around the country knew that they needed to take matters in their own hands and start organizing,” Hu said. “We are seeing relative inaction from the Democrats and from people with that kind of platform and power.”

Trump and Musk have no grounds to speak about what’s lawful or unlawful, Hu said. 

“It’s more than clear to anybody paying attention that this is a wannabe dictator, a wannabe authoritarian administration,” she said, raising the arrest and attempt to deport Palestinian protester and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil. “They’re undermining the rule of law to try to disappear a permanent resident.”

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