Elon Musk may not have fallen out with Donald Trump just yet, but he is definitely on the nose with the American public.
The Washington Post (28/1) recently brought together a wide variety of opinion polls on how Musk is seen. It says Musk doesn’t seem to have lost appeal among the Republican base, but the rest of the US population has different views. “Musk is hardly a pariah, but he is viewed increasingly sceptically,” the newspaper said.
The AP-NORC poll showed that 36% of the sample had a favourable opinion of him and 52% had an unfavourable one. When they asked the question last month, 41% had an unfavourable opinion and 51% were favourable. Getting to know him better doesn’t seem to endear him to many.
The Wall Street Journal poll last week showed that 40% saw him favourably and 51% unfavourably compared with a 45%-45% split back in October.
The Reuters-Ipsos poll file showed Musk’s popularity was 18 points underwater (34-45). Quinnipiac University poll in September had a 39-44 split while the NBC news poll had a 34-46 split. A Marist College poll for NPR had a 37-46 split.
The most recent Economist YouGov poll got a 46-46 split. But it also showed he was in double digit negative territory with independents and moderates.
Of course, favourability ratings are not Musk’s biggest problem; rather it is opposition to his role in government. The Quinnipiac poll (which rated him negatively (by 5%) had a bigger margin — 12% — when respondents were asked if they opposed the president giving him “a prominent role in the Trump administration”.
The Wall Street Journal research found that twice as many respondents (43%) thought it was a “very bad idea” than the 23% who thought it was a “very good idea”.
It is becoming increasingly common to see the Trump administration as an oligarchy. Trump himself is not as rich as he claims although he seems to be devoting much time to adding to his and his family’s wealth through extortionate legal ploys and grifter ideas such as cyber currency and Trump Bibles. Whether he could find a nominated piece of Scripture in that book, if asked, is another question altogether.
The other problem is that the tech bros seem to be sowing chaos wherever they go. They sack public service staff as energetically as they do the staff in their own companies. And, clearly there is much more to come from people who have no sense at all of public service.
Tariff wars, culture wars and threats to Greenland and Panama are combined with a toxic mix of attacks on other groups.
The impact so far – a stock market which is tanking; the tech bros dream run interrupted by a Chinese AI system; retaliatory tariffs by former friends; potential disruption of the sophisticated integrated industrial systems between Canada, the US and Mexico; and crippling the nation’s agricultural output by rounding up and deporting the labour the industry relies on.
It’s probably not a good idea to have a bet on when Musk will get the chop. But the odds on yet more chaos — even when he goes — are very slim.
Noel Turnbull has had a 50-year-plus career in public relations, politics, journalism and academia. He blogs at http://noelturnbull.com/blog/