In the 2004 comedy Team America, a group of freelancing Thunderbird-style puppets romp around the world, saving mankind from a coalition of terrorists and liberal Hollywood actors. It was hard not to bring the film to mind last night when Elon Musk announced a new “America Party”.
That was my first thought. My second was: thank God Rupert Lowe doesn’t have $400 billion. It is, as my mother often says, “very easy to mock”.
Nonetheless, although such a party would be unlikely to win a future election – if it did, it would be the first time in history that a third-party candidate became president – it could unleash even more chaos upon the American political system and even more volatility upon the world.
That could be the whole point. The announcement of the America Party was the latest escalation in a war of words between the two most powerful men on Earth over Donald Trump’s signature megabill. As the legislation made its way through the Senate, Musk became furiously opposed to it.
“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their heads in shame!,” he posted on X on Monday. “And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”
Not to be outdone, Trump fired back on his own social media site, Truth Social. “No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE,” he wrote. “Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”
The bill was signed into law on July 4. Then came the announcement of the America Party.
We mock at our peril. As the richest man on Earth, Musk’s net worth is the equivalent of the GDP of mid-ranking countries like the Netherlands, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia.
To put that in context, the 2024 presidential election was the second most expensive since 1998, behind only the 2020 race, which was the most costly on record.
Donald Trump’s latest victory cost about half-a-billion dollars in candidate committee cash, and about a billion in outside money. Musk could comfortably drop three or four times that sum on the America Party without his eyes watering.
He could also fund a private army the size of Britain’s Armed Forces (annual budget: £57 billion) to go with it, should his ambitions take a more Team America turn.
With a political megaforce like this unleashed upon the United States, unpredictable numbers of votes would be hijacked both from the Democrats and Republicans. We would witness a three-way rhetorical battle, with Donald Trump’s legendary bile haemorrhaging in all directions and the whole catastrophe given rocket boosters – almost literally – by social media.
But there are big caveats. Although Musk’s post on X seemed unequivocal – “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it! Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom,” he wrote – no paperwork has been filed to the Federal Election Commission for the formation of a political entity by that name.
Given the impulsiveness that social media encourages and the volatile characters of the two big beasts, it is quite possible that by this time next week, Musk will have abandoned his political ambitions and once again be a card-carrying member of Team Trump. On the other hand, it is just as likely that the feud may have gone interstellar. All of this is terrible for America.
In the final analysis, this latest bombastic move is a gesture of spite by a man with a gold-plated god complex and a social media platform. But it is more than a fight between two Thunderbird-style caricatures competing for the attention of America.
The tragedy of the episode is that Musk’s poll on X revealed that a majority of users felt that no political party was speaking for them. That is a real problem, and it is one that Musk’s America Party would never solve.
Whether it becomes a reality or not, it is hard to avoid one conclusion. The United States deserves better than this.
