A protest in Manhattan became the latest in the US to target a Tesla site earlier today amid Elon Musk’s continued DOGE role in President Donald Trump’s administration
Tesla dealership has been mobbed by protesters in Manhattan
A Tesla dealership was mobbed by protesters in Manhattan following a number of demonstrations against Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump.
It follows demonstrators gathering outside Tesla stores across the US earlier this month, inlcuding Tesla in New York, in protest against Musk and his push to slash government spending on behalf of Trump. Critics of Trump and Musk hope to discourage and stigmatise purchases of Tesla, the electric car company that is the world’s most valuable automaker and have taken issue with Musk’s disruptive role in Washington.
Videos on social media appeared to show people outside the Tesla showroom in Manhattan. The Mirror has contacted the New York Police Department (NYPD) and Tesla for comment.
“We can get back at Elon,” said Nathan Phillips, a 58-year-old ecologist from Newton, Massachusetts, who was protesting in Boston on March 1. “We can impose direct economic damage on Tesla by showing up at showrooms everywhere and boycotting Tesla and telling everyone else to get out, sell your stocks, sell your Teslas.”
Also in March, a number of superchargers at a shopping cntre in Massachusetts were set on fire. “No Musk” was painted onto a building next to a symbol that resembled a swastika and a man fired a gun at a Tesla store in Oregon in February. Musk is head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with slashing federal spending. The role has been controversial and DOGE’s work during the early stages of the Trump administration has drawn nearly two dozen lawsuits.
Musk, Trump and allies argue that victory in the presidential election gave Trump a mandate to restructure the US government. But DOGE officials have swiftly gained access to sensitive databases, directed thousands of federal job cuts, cancelled contracts and shut down sections of the government, including the US Agency for International Development.
Judges have raised questions in several cases about DOGE’s sweeping cost-cutting efforts, conducted with little public information about its staffing and operations. But judges have not always agreed that the risks are imminent enough to block DOGE from government systems.
“Protests will not deter President Trump and Elon Musk from delivering on the promise to establish Doge and make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers across the country,” said White House spokesperson Harrison Fields previously.
Among Musk and Trump’s targets has been USAID. The Trump administration’s cuts to USAID have frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in contractual payments to aid groups, leaving them paying out of pocket to preserve a fragile ceasefire, according to officials from the US humanitarian agency.
The cutbacks threaten to halt the small gains aid workers have made combatting Gaza’s humanitarian crisis during the Israel-Hamas ceasefire. They also could endanger the tenuous truce, which the Trump administration helped cement.
USAID was supposed to fund much of the aid to Gaza as the ceasefire progressed, and the Trump administration approved over 383 million dollars on January 31 to that end, according to three USAID officials. But since then, there have been no confirmed payments to any partners in the Middle East, they said.