As Elon Musk descended deeper into the ugly belly of American politics in recent months—first endorsing Trump, then throwing vast wealth at ham-handed attempt to sway voters, and finally making repeated “jokes” about the lack of assassination attempts on Kamala Harris in a transparent effort to inspire just such an attempt—Democrats have been slow to respond.

Then, about two weeks ago, while working the elliptical trainer at the gym, I saw a Harris-Walz ad featuring Musk vamping on the Met Gala red carpet. Now, with Tim Walz going viral for calling Musk a “dipshit” at a recent rally, in a well-calibrated deployment of his weapons-grade folksiness, we seem to have a shooting war on our hands. With less than two weeks left in the race, both presidential campaigns want to make Elon Musk an issue.

Having followed Musk since 2015, this is one of the many twists and turns in the story that I never could have predicted. Though Musk arrived at this point on the tail of the dynamics I identified in my 2019 book Ludicrous, specifically Tesla’s core dysfunctions as a car business and Musk’s willingness to bend any law or stated principle to paper over those dysfunctions, I never thought Musk would ride his toxic hype train into partisan politics. That blind spot says a bit about me, but it says a lot about the massive shifts in American politics and culture that have taken place since Musk embarked on the journey that brought him to this moment.

As a student of political science who ended up covering autos and mobility technology by accident, Musk’s relationship with the political system has always fascinated me. I have always had an intellectual fascination with politics, which has allowed (or perhaps cursed) me to try to see political discourse from a variety of perspectives, instinctively avoiding the team sport mindset that has dominated the topic in my lifetime. This political promiscuity meant that, even as I discovered more and more objectionable things about Musk and how he operates, I always had a grudging admiration for his ability to transcend the deepening political-cultural divide.

It’s easy to forget now, but few people bear more direct responsibility for the monstrous Elon Musk we now face than Barack Obama. Musk’s cynical promise, that free markets would drive a transition to sexy electric vehicles with nothing more than cash on the hood of a six figure luxury car, was a perfect match for Obama’s gauzy rhetoric. In the rosy dawn of an orgy of low interest rates and runaway techno-optimism that would define the 2010s, Musk’s ability to appeal to Silicon Valley’s still somewhat-principled libertarians and the environmentalist left was load bearing to Obama’s “Purple America” pitch.

And the relationship wasn’t just rhetorical. Thanks to the good offices of Rahm Emanuel (whose brothers were customers and investors), the Obama administration literally allowed Musk to pre-announce a Department of Energy loan that Tesla hadn’t even submitted a complete application for (in order to bring in Daimler as a partner, which the Obama administration required as a condition for the loan, no less). It was under a Democrat president that Tesla began to simply ignore safety and other regulations with no expectation of repercussions, kicking off a pattern of enabling and impunity that has now reached world-historical proportions.

Covering Tesla critically as a blogger at the time, the only broader media interest I could muster for a lot of my stories came from right-of-center outlets, who wanted to bash Obama’s environmental policies and political favorites. On a personal level I wasn’t against electrification policies on principle, I just didn’t think that tacitly giving one company a free pass on basic regulatory and legal compliance should be part of that policy. Given the deep challenges still facing America’s electrification effort a decade later, not to mention Musk’s impunity-fueled runaway crime spree, the price of all that high-flying rhetoric (and don’t get me wrong: it worked on me!) has turned out to be quite high.

With the election of Donald Trump, the political landscape began to shift in ways that at first challenged Musk. Still heavily dependent on environmentalism to buttress Tesla’s marketing, Musk at first cooperated with Trump’s tech councils, but ended his involvement with the administration following its move to pull out of the Paris climate accords. What followed was another pivotal lesson, leading to the current political situation: Trump didn’t like Musk’s environmentalism, but he was all for extending the Obama administration’s tacit impunity. Over the course of Trump’s administration, a pivotal time for Musk personally, he must have realized that he could have the license to bend and break rules that he needed as a practical matter, without the pretense of environmental principles. For Trump, the impunity was the point.

It’s worth noting that Trump didn’t appear to be offering Musk specific impunity during his first administration. For example: the reason Trump’s NHTSA didn’t invoke a 2016 guidance that gave the agency power to regulate Autopilot for “foreseeable misuse” defects clearly identified in three NTSB investigations of fatal crashes had nothing to do with Tesla or Musk themselves. Musk simply benefitted from a broader gutting of agency-level regulatory power centered on the EPA, regardless of whether he worked with Trump or traded barbs with him.

Though the Biden administration has obviously failed to reign in Musk’s runaway ego trip, the contrast it strikes with the Obama administration is stark. Under Biden, NHTSA not only opened investigations into Autopilot, but it began collecting crash data under a Standing General Order that is now proving the system’s ongoing danger, and for the first time is questioning Tesla’s recall fixes to the problem. Though the EPA and SEC have been notably less productive on Musk’s crime sprees in their jurisdictions (which isn’t saying much), they are making more of an effort than either under Obama or Trump. Today, Tesla is under federal investigation by Biden’s Department of Justice for securities and wire fraud, a move which would have been unimaginable under either Trump or Obama.

After three terms and two presidents worth of naked impunity, Musk clearly sees the Biden administration’s shift toward even the possibility of consequences for his lengthy crime spree as beyond the pale. The key factor in this shift is likely the resurgence of organized labor, which had been at its lowest tide under Obama, but will doubtless remain a strong presence in a Harris administration. With an historic new UAW contract raising wages across the auto industry, Tesla’s greatest enemy is not the Big Oil conspiracies Musk spent the Obama administration railing against, but the one traditional component of the Democrat coalition that had most been frozen out in Obama’s political triangulation.

It’s worth reflecting on Musk’s political history for a couple of reasons, the most important of which is that it reveals his single political priority: the ability to do whatever he finds expedient, whatever the cost to everyone else, with zero repercussions to him. His rhetoric and mode of engagement with politics have swung wildly over the years, from arguing that anyone who criticized him wants to see the planet destroyed to insisting that we mustn’t “demonize” the oil and gas industry, but as time has gone on, his actions have revealed his true motivations with increasing clarity. The NY Times recent graphic, showing his companies’ massive income from the federal government alongside their rampant regulatory conflicts, shows that his ostensible libertarianism is as hollow as his supposed environmentalism or altruism.

The other reason this history is worth examining is that it cuts through the inevitable partisan bullshit. Like Trump, Musk likes to pose as a political victim who must win this election or face persecution for his outspoken beliefs. Needless to say, like Trump this is a transparent cover for the fact that he has actually committed crimes and simply wants to evade the consequences anyone else would expect for them. But more importantly, history reveals that Musk is as much a creation of the Democrats as Trump and the Republicans. If anything, Trump’s enabling of Musk as president was more crime of omission, whereas Obama actively worked to create the legend that now casts its ominous shadow over the very future of the country.

It’s not simply that Democrats have the responsibility to destroy the monster they created. Musk is a potent symbol of what this election is about: the rule of law. It has been a long time since this has been an explicit issue in American politics, and as a result it can be a difficult one to message, and incorporate into political discourse. With time running out, the figure Musk cuts as a spoiled toddler, “skipping around like a dipshit” to revisit Walz’s delightfully fragrant Midwesternism, makes this messaging much easier. If they lean into attacking his personal weirdness as a symbol for his obscenely self-interested politics, much as they did with Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, there’s a unique opportunity to create a powerful new symbol in the home stretch of a tight election. As repulsive and attackable as Emperor Palpatine is on his own, having a Darth Vader by his side creates something more than the sum of its parts.

Harris and Walz may not have much time left with which to make Musk and his obvious desire to create a kleptocracy (at best) with Donald Trump a major campaign issue, but they have plenty of material. From the fraud and abuse and death and pollution at his companies, to his blatant attempts to buy votes and inspire the assassination of a sitting vice president, to a dizzying string of eye-popping and undercovered incidents that reveal the ugly depths of his character, it’s not hard to paint Musk as a monster. After all, this is a guy who called a rescue hero a pedophile, who lied about his own son dying in his arms, who burned $44 billion and the best social media platform in the world on a whim, and even released the most cringeworthy EDM tracks you have ever heard, titled *shudder* “RIP Harambe,” and “Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe,” just to scratch the surface.

Musk’s rise to power came from his ability to bring different sides of the widening partisan divide together around his vaguely altruistic rhetoric and too-good-to-be-true visions. Now that his dream has curdled into a rancid nightmare, bringing him down presents another opportunity to once again bring a divided nation together. If Harris and Walz don’t grab that opportunity with both hands in the limited time available, and double down on the good start of simply calling him a “dipshit,” I will have to wonder what they were fighting for anyway.