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On Saturday, October 5, former president Donald Trump returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, for a rally less than three months after the assassination attempt on his life at the same location. This time, Trump appeared onstage with billionaire and X owner Elon Musk.
Trump’s supporters loved it.
A day before the campaign event, Musk posted on X that he would be in attendance. The excitement about his presence was palpable: On the road leading to the rally location, an electronic billboard flashed an image of Musk’s face and a rocket ship with text reading “In Musk we trust!” On a side road, where hundreds of attendees parked their cars, a Tesla cybertruck sported two Trump flags on the back.
As Musk took the stage, he was greeted with cheers. Thousands of people took out their phones to film him. Musk called on Trump’s supporters to register to vote, saying, “Get everyone you know, and everyone you don’t know. Drag them to register to vote.”
“If they don’t, this will be the last election,” he added ominously. “That’s my prediction.”
And Trump supporters in Butler who spoke to WIRED said that, although they’d been planning to attend the rally regardless of Musk’s presence, they were excited to have him in the MAGA fold. Some had even come from out of town to attend the event.
“That definitely did sweeten the deal,” says Sherry O’Donnell, a Trump supporter who attended the Butler rally.
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“I was excited because I really like Elon Musk, and we love what he’s doing with the space program,” Brian Yanoviak, who drove from eastern Pennsylvania to attend the rally, told WIRED. Yanoviak was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. “He’s very intelligent, very innovative. He understands what’s happening to the United States. And he truly cares about the future of our country. Very similar to Trump, very similar to Tucker Carlson, very similar to RFK Jr. … It’s truly a movement, and it’s a movement to make America great again, because if we don’t, we’re going to lose our republic.”
Musk’s appearance at the rally was part of a larger get-out-the-vote effort from the billionaire and X owner. Over the past few months, Musk has gone all in for the Trump campaign and Republican candidates all over the country, spending millions of dollars. Musk has also used his personal X account to get out the vote, posting voter registration links in swing states to his 200 million followers.
Many of the rally attendees WIRED spoke to saw Musk’s ownership of X as a boon.
Rob Gray, who also attended the Butler rally, says that he mostly posts on Facebook but does keep up with news on X. “They say, ‘Oh, Trump’s a threat to democracy.’ What’s a bigger threat to democracy than the censorship that is just so rampant in all social media?” says Gray. “I’m just totally grateful he bought Twitter, turned it into X, and people can actually have the freedom to talk to each other now.”
