How the Cybertruck became a symbol of MAGA dysfunction

Elon Musk’s expensive lemon featured prominently at Hands Off protests last weekend

After days of tariff-fueled stock market chaos, millions of people took to the streets across the country—and the world—last weekend to protest Donald Trump and his wrecking-ball administration.

At Hands Off events in locations from Los Angeles to London, marchers wielded signs mocking Trump with renderings of his ludicrous hair and distressingly tawny complexion. But along with those familiar images were countless depictions of our unelected co-president, Elon Musk, and his most notorious creation, the Cybertruck, which has become a symbol of the MAGA movement as potent as (though much less affordable than) a red baseball hat.

There were Cybertruck piñatas, 3-D cardboard Cybertrucks crashing through the Constitution, tableaus of birds pooping on Cybertrucks.

Only a few short years ago, Teslas were considered an environmentally-conscious status symbol. Now, in the public consciousness, they’re synonymous with a chief executive who is essentially the world’s richest internet troll.

The stainless steel-shrouded electric pick-up has come to represent everything that is so objectionable about the Trump-Musk agenda: it’s designed for rich people, it’s not just aggressively ugly it’s also dangerous, it feels like the misbegotten realization of an adolescent geek’s fantasies, and it fails to deliver on many of its key promises. The choice to buy one feels like less of an informed decision based on rational criteria than a very expensive provocation, a way to own the libs for a mere $100,000.

Last summer, the New York Times ran a story about the Cybertruck and how it had become a polarizing new front in the culture wars. “More than any other Tesla, the Cybertruck seems to represent Mr. Musk himself—an extremely online attention seeker loved by some and loathed by others,” wrote Joseph Bernstein in the piece, in which he likened the Cybertruck to the Hummer of the early aughts.

And that was before Trump won re-election with considerable support from Musk. That was before Trump handed him the keys to his administration and allowed the SpaceX billionaire and his cronies, many of them too young to even rent a car, to fire vast swathes of the federal workforce. That was before Tesla recalled nearly every single Cybertruck in the United States—some 46,000 of them—and its stock value declined by 36% in a single quarter. That was before the president turned the White House lawn into a “Tesler” showroom and equated attacks on Tesla with domestic terrorism. That was also before Musk tried to buy a Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, only to lose by 10 points in a state Trump won in November. (A defeat captured in a meme showing—what else?—a Cybtertruck smashed by a wedge of cheese.)

Because of Musk’s outsized and legally dubious role in the administration and Trump’s flagrant, unethical attempts to boost Musk’s flagging electric car business while slashing thousands of middle-class jobs and tanking the stock market, Teslas—and the Cybertruck in particular—have become rich targets for public outrage and scorn. The cars have become metonyms not just for Musk, but for the tech oligarchs who are the robber barons of a new Gilded Age. Before April 5, the Tesla takedown movement organized protests at hundreds of Tesla dealerships.

Regretful Tesla owners have decorated their vehicles in anti-Musk bumper stickers or even rebranded with decoy logos for other carmakers. Celebrities including Sheryl Crow, Elvira, Bette Midler, and Jason Bateman have gotten rid of their Teslas in public displays of resistance. When Kim Kardashian posed on top of a Cybertruck for a fashion editorial, she was dragged on social media for massively misreading the mood of the country. Mexican artist Charvis Mármol dropped a nine-ton replica of an Olmec head on a blue Tesla because he wanted to “crush an object that represents a sinister figure like Elon Mollusk.” (The mispronunciation was intentional.)

In a viral TikTok trend, owners trade in their Teslas for other electric vehicles to the sounds of the Taylor Swift hit “Look What You Made Me Do.” In a thriving Reddit forum called r/Cyberstruck, which boasts nearly 300,000 members, users delight in sharing pictures of stalled Cybertrucks (a.k.a. “Incel Caminos”).

It’s little wonder that, when a writer for The Atlantic rented a Cybertruck and drove it around Washington D.C. for a day as a social experiment, he was flipped off 17 times, including by a woman sitting outside a Le Pain Quotidien who gave him the middle finger “for a solid 20 seconds, all without interrupting her conversation.” (Side note: Who is this remarkable woman and how do we get her to run for office?)

The Trump-Musk alliance has already lasted longer than many predicted it would, given the colossal egos and mercurial personalities both men possess. But the honeymoon may soon be over: Musk has been openly critical of Trump’s tariffs, and Trump reportedly views his DOGE chief as a growing political liability. Whatever becomes of their partnership, the Cybertruck taint is here to stay.