RBG's granddaughter wants to ask Musk why he needed lies to help Trump | Opinion
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's daughter and granddaughter had just settled into their seats Thursday evening for a revival performance of "Gypsy," the still popular 65-year-old musical about a strong matriarch and her daughters, when they heard the news.
Elon Musk, as part of his quarter-billion dollar acquisition of Donald Trump's presidency, had carved out $20.5 million to fund a last-minute super PAC's advertising campaign with a message so farcical it landed like a sick joke.
RBG PAC, using the iconic initials of the late U.S. Supreme Court justice who died in 2020, spent Musk's money on digital ads, mailers and text messages telling voters that Ginsburg would have agreed with Trump about abortion.
Trump, the former and future president, appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who in 2022 helped abolish the constitutional protectionsfor that medical procedure.
Ginsburg, who derided Trump as "a faker" during his first campaign for president in 2016, remains a beloved figure of jurisprudence but is not here to dispute Musk's shady attempt to misuse her legacy. That's her granddaughter's job now.
Get the The Right Tracknewsletter in your inbox.
Columnist Nicole Russell on conservative values, family and religion.
Delivery: Tue, Thu
Your Email
If Musk is so proud of Trump, why hide behind a PAC?
RBG PAC launched, collected and spent Musk's money on a timeline that assured that his role as the only donor would not be disclosed until Thursday's deadline for a federal campaign finance report, 30 days after last month's election.
Nothing screams courage and integrity like camouflaging how $20.5 million will be spent in a presidential election until a month after it's over.
Clara Spera, Ginsburg's granddaughter, said she and her mother had the same reaction – "Oh, that makes sense." – when they heard Musk had covertly bankrolled the dishonest political ads. They both also wondered if it would have made any difference if Musk's role had been disclosed from the start.
I asked Spera what she would say to Musk about all this. This is what she told me:
"If you believe so strongly in Donald Trump, why do you have to mislead and lie to people to get them to vote for him?" she said.
May Mailman, RBG PAC's treasurer and a former Trump White House staffer, wouldn't talk to me about the ad campaign in late October when it launched and did not respond to my requests for comment Friday.
When you play shady, you stay in the dark.
Musk's PAC funding shows GOP's fear of abortion rights popularity
Musk's motivation here is clear. Trump bragged about appointing the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. But his thinking shifted as abortion became a volatile issue in the election. Trump being Trump, he rewrote his warped version of reality to claim that sending the issue of abortion back to state legislatures to decide on was widely popular.
But RBG PAC's efforts were all about muddying the message, obscuring the truth. The PAC played on Ginsburg's long-known position that Roe would have been better decided in 1973 using the Constitution's 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause rather than that amendment's implied right to privacy.
That didn't change Ginsburg's long and vocal support for abortion access as a constitutionally protected right. Spera said Musk "deceiving people" about her grandmother's position on abortion showed how seriously he and the Trump campaign took the issue.
"He's not particularly outspoken about abortion or reproductive rights, generally," said Spera, a Harvard Law School lecturer who also helps lead the Abortion Access Legal Defense Fund. "So it's interesting that this was where he chose to put so much money, demonstrating that he recognized how important reproductive rights were to this election."
Musk's shady campaign finance stunts show he can't be trusted – on anything
RBG PAC is not the only shady service Musk provided for Trump in this election. His political action committee, America PAC, ran what appeared to be a voter registration lottery (with winners who were not chosen at random). He used his purchase of the social media website formerly known as Twitter to convert it into a fever swamp of election misinformation.
Another PAC he funded painted Vice President Kamala Harris in social media ads in Michigan as being too close with Israel, but in other ads in Pennsylvania cast her as too sympathetic to Palestinians.
Of course, that's all done now. If you're a voter who got conned by Musk and his shady proxies, there's nothing you can do about it. But you can keep that in mind every single time you hear Musk say anything about any subject anywhere at any time.
Trump last month named Musk as co-head of the new "Department of Government Efficiency." So when you hear Musk rant and brag about how much government waste he plans to cut, remember how enthusiastically he spent millions of dollars to mislead you about Ginsburg and Trump.
Thinking about buying a Tesla? Why would you believe anything Musk says about his electric car company? He's striving for a driverless car. You'd be wise to keep your hands on the wheel.
You might have heard Musk pontificating about populating Mars with his company SpaceX, which has been far more successful at landing fat federal contracts than boldly going where no one has gone before.
You can count on Musk misleading you, and using proxies to hide his actions until he can feel free of any consequences. Only a fool would trust anything he says now.
Comments