It Was Elon Musk All Along
Slate · L · trust 50/100
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that, since its redesign, is looking sharper than Jon Husted’s ass.
We have only two-and-a-half more weeks until these damnable midterms are over, after which all politics will cease and this will become a newsletter about spelunking. Hooray! This week: Donald Trump is so mad about fuel prices screwing up the midterms that he might just give Europe to Russia. A White House press secretary has come and gone since we last wrote, and now she can return to being a lawyer (maybe?). Jon Ossoff said WHAT? There are competitive Senate races WHERE?
But first! It was super PAC donor disclosure week, and you’ll never guess who’s spending the most money this election cycle. (Hint: It’s the guy with the most money.)
Recall in the spring, during the Texas primary season, the big conundrum that Senate Republicans faced over money. Their concern was that if baggage-laden Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Sen. John Cornyn for the nomination, the party would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to (attempt to) rescue him in the fall, money that it could be spending in traditional battlegrounds. Then, after Paxton rode Trump’s last-minute endorsement to win the primary, there was a lengthy standoff between irritated Senate Republicans and Trump’s super PAC over who should foot the bill to rescue Paxton.
The conundrum was resolved around Labor Day. Trump’s MAGA Inc. has put $30 million into the state. But it’s Texas PAC, a spinoff of Senate Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, that’s done the bulk of the work, having poured $148 million into the state as of this writing. It both did and didn’t come as a surprise that Senate Republicans so easily let themselves be pushed around by Trump’s operation into cleaning up Trump’s mess. But with third-quarter fundraising filings now coming in, we can see the deal that was struck:
Senate Republicans’ PAC spent the rescue money, but they were just a vessel. The guy really picking up the tab was Elon Musk.
Senate Leadership Fund announced this week that it raised $273 million in the third quarter, with a full $158 million of that—58 percent—coming from Musk. In total, Musk has now given a jokelike $366 million this cycle, making him comfortably the biggest donor of either party. With that $158 million gift to the Senate Leadership Fund, he made months of Republican worries about how to (attempt to!) rescue Paxton look foolish. It was resolved with two checks, two strokes of the pen. No hard decisions over resources would have to be made after all.
For all the attention Musk got during the 2024 campaign and the early part of Trump’s second term, it’s gone relatively unnoticed the staggering degree to which he’s shaping these midterms with his checkbook. That’s not by accident. He’s learned that people want his money but not him.
From the 2024 election through the first few months of 2025, Musk was everywhere: On the campaign trail prancing about onstage with Trump, living at Mar-a-Lago, attending inauguration and inauguration rallies, shredding the federal government apart, fishing around the Treasury Department’s payment system, wielding chain saws at conservative conferences, and trying to win Wisconsin Supreme Court elections. Musk eventually crashed out and receded back to his companies (which were suffering in the stock market during his extracurricular activities) and said he would spend “a lot less” on politics going forward. “I think I’ve done enough,” he said in May 2025. (Over that summer, he and Trump would have a spectacular falling out over social media. They’ve since repaired things.)
Musk, it turns out, has not spent “a lot less” on politics—if we’re talking dollars. He has now spent more on the midterms than he spent to help elect Donald Trump in 2024. He’s just done it more quietly, without attaching the force of his weird personality as a condition. He is not skipping around onstage behind Ken Paxton in Texas. He’s just funding his candidacy. In full. He has taken the most expensive race of the cycle off of Trump, the Senate GOP’s, and the candidate’s plate.
We know it’s ho-hum to observe that there’s too much money in campaigns. But this is really something! Musk has reshaped the midterms with an amount of money that comfortably cruises past any other donor’s contributions this cycle but is effectively less than couch change to him—an amount of money he’s made in the time it’s taken us to write this (run-on, sure) sentence. Is that how our elections should work? Guess it depends on who you ask.
For a while now, the Trump administration has been blaming the spike in diesel prices on Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries. He’s not wrong that it’s a meaningful factor. But it’s an exacerbating factor atop the underlying cause of the Iran war. Trump can’t blame spiking prices on the Iran war, of course, since he was the one who done did it. Laying blame at the feet of the Ukrainians, whom MAGA has been unusually hostile to for years, serves the White House’s political interest heading into the midterms.
And man, does that political interest suck for geopolitics. To spite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump reached a diesel deal with Russia—just weeks after signing into law a bill allowing the president to tariff the top importers of Russian energy in the hopes of cutting off funding for the Russian war machine. (Trump has yet to announce any self-tariffs.) That indeed did tick off Zelensky, who then ticked off Trump, who said Ukraine needs a new president.
Things have only gotten worse from there. The Ukrainians this week reported a disruption in their access to Starshield, the military-grade satellite network that Ukraine uses for battlefield communications and drone operation—and Reuters reported that the order to do this came from the White House. Zelensky appears to be finished pretending to be nice to Trump and has resumed attacks on Russian energy…
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