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In President Donald Trump’s first term, Oregon earned a national reputation for street brawls and property destruction. The early weeks of his second term, by contrast, have been entirely placid. With one exception: attacks on electric car dealerships owned by Trump’s cost-cutting billionaire adviser Elon Musk.
The FBI says a Salem man twice damaged a Tesla dealership in Oregon’s capital city: first by throwing a Molotov cocktail through its window, then one month later by spraying it with gunfire. Adam Lansky, 41, was arraigned March 5 on a federal firearms charge.
The next morning, March 6, employees arrived at a Tesla dealership in Tigard to find it riddled with at least seven bullets. Some of the gunshots hit a Cybertruck. The Tigard police are investigating with the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“While the motivation for this has not been confirmed,” a Tigard police spokeswoman wrote in a statement, “we are aware that other Tesla dealerships have been targeted across Oregon and the nation for political reasons.”
Indeed, the two Oregon incidents are part of a national wave of attacks on Musk’s car lots as the car-and-rocket billionaire sets about dismantling much of the federal bureaucracy at Trump’s behest, taunting liberals and flirting with hardline nationalists along the way. This weekend, The Washington Post tallied “more than a dozen violent or destructive acts… directed at Tesla facilities” since Trump’s inauguration. The vandalism has ranged from charging stations set on fire in Massachusetts to more Molotov cocktails in Colorado.
Observers who spoke to the Post were divided on what lasting effects the property destruction and larger backlash could have on Tesla. The company’s stock has plunged in recent months, but at least one analyst suggested in an investors note that the political turbulence was nothing more than a speed bump. “The best thing that ever happened to Musk and Tesla was Trump in the White House,” wrote Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, “as this will create a deregulatory environment with a federal autonomous road map central to the Tesla golden strategic vision.”
Read the Post story here.
In Portland proper, the locus of political violence in Trump’s first term, protest of Tesla is regular but peaceful. A group of advocates gathers at the South Portland car dealership each Monday to picket, waving cardboard signs. No one has brought a Molotov cocktail.