'Punk rock to be Republican': Lawmaker claims Elon Musk has made GOP cool

Tech billionaire Elon Musk made the Republican Party a "punk rock" group that is cool to join, a state lawmaker from Nevada told a Politico reporter.

Writer David Siders recalled the conversation as he detailed a tour of the country he made in an attempt to engage with Trump voters.

“The left was very successful the last four years in bringing a negative connotation to MAGA, and I think they lost that battle the day that Elon Musk came out in support [of Trump], because now all of a sudden it just became punk rock to be Republican,” said Nevada state assemblymember Danielle Gallant.

Gallant previously spoke to Siders last January, when the Nevada GOP was bitterly divided over the nominating process due to its decision to effectively hold two separate contests, one in which Trump was running and another in which former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was running.

“We need to start engaging people back in the process,” Gallant told Siders at the time.

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Trump managed to narrowly carry the state in November, the first time the GOP has done so in a presidential contest since 2004.

Musk, who once had much more centrist politics and a nonpartisan public relations image that painted him as a genius innovator behind electric cars and spacecraft, became radicalized to the far right over the last few years as he took control of the Twitter platform, now renamed X.

He initially backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the 2024 election, but later switched to Trump, building up a massive super PAC operation that essentially handled most of the Trump campaign's canvassing, though it was plagued with glitches and problems from the start.

Now, he and fellow right-wing billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy are heading up Trump's "Department of Government Efficiency" task force, where they have a much more straightforward and traditionally Republican-associated goal: cut government bureaucracy and balance the budget, which they aim to achieve by eliminating lots of federal programs.