President Donald Trump on March 11 condemned violence against Tesla dealerships and said he would consider labeling perpetrators as domestic terrorists, following multiple acts of vandalism and demonstrations at the electric vehicle company’s showrooms throughout the United States.
“I will do that, I’ll do it. I’m going to stop them,” Trump said when asked if he would consider labeling the individuals carrying out the violence as domestic terrorists.
The president told reporters his administration is already aware of who some of the people are behind the attacks, adding that law enforcement will soon apprehend them.
“Those people are going to go through a big problem when we catch them. We’ve got a lot of cameras up, we already know who some of them are. We’re going to catch them. And they’re bad guys. They’re the same guys that screw around with our schools and universities, the same garbage,” Trump said.
Trump described Tesla as “a great American company” that “supplies so many people in jobs that others are unable to do.”
Trump’s comments come as police are investigating a series of attacks on Tesla showrooms and charging stations across the country amid backlash over Musk’s role in cuts to the federal workforce and the cancellation of contracts made by the U.S. Agency for International Development to fund programs around the world.
The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has been tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in federal operations, is led, in part, by special adviser Musk.
In a separate incident on March 3, seven charging stations were set on fire at a mall outside of Boston, with the Littleton Police Department describing it as “suspicious in nature.”
A group claiming to be an organizer of the “Tesla Takedown” protests said in a statement on the social media platform Bluesky that it was peaceful and opposed violence.
“Peaceful protest on public property is not domestic terrorism. They are trying to intimidate us. We will not let them succeed,” the group stated while calling for people to join the protests.