'Scorched earth': Elon Musk scrambles to clean up mess at pro-Trump super PAC
Tech billionaire Elon Musk's efforts to boost former President Donald Trump in the 2024 election are already faltering under the organizational chaos of the super PAC he supports, a Wall Street Journal reporter told MSNBC on Monday.
This comes after Dana Mattioli's new article revealing Musk's frantic, behind-the-scenes efforts to help America PAC both turn out 800,000 swing state voters for Trump, and personally leave as little of his fingerprint on the operation as possible — all while, according to other reports, America PAC is under criminal investigation in Michigan for their voter data collection practices.
"With less than 90 days until the election, Musk has overhauled the group's leadership after a series of early stumbles," said Phil Mattingly. "First, Dana, explain why he went scorched earth on the super PAC leadership. There's still the expectations of that initial very big goal of turning out 800,000 voters."
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"Yeah, they have a very ambitious goal," agreed Mattioli. "They want to get 800,000 low-propensity voters in these swing states to show up for Donald Trump. But there was a big shakeup of PAC leadership in July. Some operatives from Gov. Ron DeSantis' failed presidential bid came in to be involved with the PAC and the vendors were changed out, and that has had some resulting chaos. They're having to start from scratch less than 90 days before the election."
"Are they gonna be able to pull this off?" asked Mattingly, bringing up that DeSantis' campaign kicked off with a live Musk interview before crashing and burning. "Do they feel comfortable they'll be able to do this today?"
"No, it's a really big haul," said Mattioli. "So they want — they have ambitions of hiring 6,000 people to go out and canvas in these battleground states, and then they fired the people doing that. So they have to hire and retrain those people. Their political ads have stopped since firing the other vendors. They've had glitches on their website, which hasn't been maintained since firing the other vendors. And they had 8,500 new voter registrations that were signed up through their website that they didn't mail out the forms because the vendor was fired. So there are definitely things they have to patch up in the interim and they have to get the new vendors up and running, and, you know, some of the Republican operatives we spoke to were a little bit worried about that because early voting starts as soon as a month from now. So there's a really big time crunch element to this."
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