Official statements from Elon Musk's newly founded "America Party,"ranked by whether they make any damned sense at all

Spoiler: They do not!

I assure you, America Party, I am not “afraid of what comes next,” I am just wondering why you decided to put your logo in a big pile of sand.

You’ve heard the news, right? There’s a new political party in America. Not Ross Perot’s Reform Party. Not Andrew Yang’s Forward Party. Not No Labels, which was less a political party than it was four K Street consultants in a trench coat. This one is called The America Party and it was envisioned Elon Musk, a man you might remember from escapades such as “breaking the United States government” and “inventing a robot Nazi.” Don’t you worry, though. Elon assures us that this project isn’t about eliminating USAID or conceiving another child named Bloop Blorp or musing about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion just for yucks, it’s about bringing us all together. As Americans. In a party.

To say that Musk “founded” The America Party is to give too much credit both to the man and the project. Elon Musk, like Donald Trump, believes that he can change material reality through blustery decree. “There,” he says, “We’ll have a new party. It will be the most popular party in the country. It will represent 80% of Americans.” He is wrong, of course, but I get the appeal. I too wish that effective politics didn’t require organizing, community-building or any of those other tedious topics that I’m always yapping about. I too wish that I could watch a Zohran video for the millionth time and wake up to find that the new American utopian socialist government had built a whole bunch of free high speed trains. Magical thinking! It’s the only thing we all agree on, across the political divide.

The America Party is not real, but it lives amongst us. Moreover, it owes its surreal non-existence to a number of forces that, unfortunately, are real: ketamine and social media and generative AI and both the tired billionaire preoccupation with how “government should be run like a business” and the equally tired pundit preoccupation with how “America is equally under threat by extremists on both sides.” It is the fever dream of people who are not currently best friends with Donald Trump but who would also like to make life worse for immigrants and trans people and who call the Venn diagram between those two beliefs “common sense.”

I’m skeptical, is what I’m saying, but when somebody presents you with a new idea, the least you can do is let them put their best foot forward. And so, in the spirit of grace and generosity, I made the extremely questionable choice to waste a beautiful Milwaukee summer afternoon hearing the America Party out.

What I found on the official America Party account on X.com will surprise you, if for some reason you were expecting something other than a stream of memes, vacuous sloganeering, and AI-generated attempts to make Elon Musk look like the Fonz. It was a mess, somehow both hollow and tangled at the same time. It said nothing, but loudly and repeatedly.

That’s enough table setting. Let’s get rank some posts, from “makes a relative amount of sense to somebody who is not living inside Elon Musk’s mind” to “oh my God, why have you forsaken us”

Number five: The America Party (established: 2025) liberates Iwo Jima from Imperial Japan

The image: The crackerjack team behind the America Party thought “ok, what’s an iconic American image and how can we put our big dumb logo on it?”

A quick aside about that logo: Friends, I’m not trying to be nit-picky here but it really looks like that eagle is, um, in the process of relieving itself and that its droppings are somehow star-shaped. Finally: sanity, accountability and direction.

The message: An absolute Mad Libs of focus-grouped political copy. It might as well say “The America Party is for respiration, perspiration and graduation, not coronation.” My favorite part is the line about how the America Party is “backed by voices like Elon Musk,” which would be like if the Cookie Monster had a social media account about how you should feed him cookies and it posted “this message is backed by voices like the Cookie Monster.”

Are we all lucky that Elon Musk decided to co-opt this iconic World War II and not, like, the one of the sailor and the nurse kissing in Times Square: [Writing on the blackboard a million times: “I do not want to see an AI-generated image of Elon Musk kissing anybody in Times Square. I do not want to see an AI-generated image of Elon Musk….”]

Number four: Elon Musk wears a leather jacket in front of a flag.

The image: It’s clear that “voices like Elon Musk” typed “please make a picture where I look cool” into an AI prompt box. Then Elon was like “no, with a chain and a leather jacket” and the Nazi robot complied (poorly, but dutifully). And then, for some reason, he was like “make the leather jacket look as stiff as possible, like it’s made out of literal tires, and also have me sit at a folding table in a church basement” and all this went on for days and in completely unrelated news I was just thinking— who really needs drinkable water anyway?

The message: Ok, it’s a lot of pablum, but there’s enough substance here to reveal that the America Party might not have nailed “a clear message” yet. What are you mad about, America Party? Trump’s new bill (the “trillion dollar betrayal”) or how both parties are the same (“fake choices”)? Because while you could make an argument that the two parties are too similar, if you’re mad at Trump’s bill, so too are all the Democrats. That seems like a clear distinction between the two parties. Furthermore… oh jeez, am I now arguing with Elon Musk and his Goebbels robot? Am I part of the problem? Maybe politics does need a reset.

An update on whether the America Party stands for “sanity, accountability and direction:” No, it now stands for “sanity, sovereignty and strength.” Please update your notes on what three substance-less Rule of Three slogans you’ve been promised in lieu of a livable future on this planet.

Number three: Elon Musk shushes a crowd of patriots

The image: You know what I love, when I go to a rally? When I’m all fired up and waving my hands around and my one buddy is saluting the flag and there are balloons (or something? I’m not sure what those menacing shadowy shapes are supposed to be). Then, right when the energy in the building is at its peak, my party’s leader stands up (in the middle of the crowd for some reason) turns their back on us, and puts their finger on their lips as if they’re about to tell a gossipy secret. LETTT’S GOOOOO!!!!

The message: I’m going to ignore the part about how the America Party doesn’t want control, just alignment because, um, what the hell does that mean? Instead, I want to talk about “Some people want power. We just want clarity,” which sounds like the kind of thing a reality television personality says after they flip a table, call their former best friend a skank, then retreat to the confession booth to whine “I hate drama. I just want CLARITY.” In this scenario, the producer would then ask a follow-up question (“what do you mean by clarity?”) causing them to yell “C-L-A-R-I-T-Y. What about that don’t you understand?” before stumbling out of the booth, knocking over fifteen chairs and making out with a potted plant.

What secret does Elon have for us: “I’m a Nazi!” [Elon, that’s not a secret!!!].

Number two: “It’s always been the America Party.”

The image: Ok, I had to look this one up, because unlike Elon Musk I am not fluent in meme. Also unlike Elon Musk, I do not spend twelve hours a day sending conservative influencer ladies messages that read “yo, wanna have a genius baby with me, it would be epic lol 420.” But I am told that this is a famous meme. The original version featured the smaller astronaut saying “wait, it’s all Ohio?” and then the Ohio flag patch astronaut with the gun shoots him while int “always has been.” Does that make any sense at all to you? Good, because Elon Musk is an innovator, so he’s about to make it make even less sense.

The message: You all, I have been thinking about this all day, and it’s truly going to drive me insane. Is it saying that instead of the Democratic AND Republican Party, we should just have the America Party? And that this has always been the case? Setting aside the fact that this is factually inaccurate, if it were true, wouldn’t “voices like Elon Musk” be happy? According to the meme (such a cursed sentence), they’ve always had their party, in the form of the Democrats and Republicans. So wait, does that mean that the America Party likes the Democratic and Republican Party? I thought the whole point of this was that the America Party hates those two parties. Please help me out, you all. I would ask the first astronaut for clarification, but apparently they’re dead now? Because they got shot?

A thought on memes: Do you think the era of memes can survive Elon Musk? Let’s say you enjoy trading wacky inside joke memes with friends. When you see something like this from Musk, it makes you never want to meme again, right? Like, it makes you want to communicate solely through haikus, or sonnets, or dance. Elon Musk has a Midas touch, but for making previously fun things seem impossibly dorky.

By the way, as a parent whose life will be much easier if my kids continue to abstain from illegal narcotics, I have the same theory about drugs. Elon’s gotta have made doing drugs just seem like the least cool thing on the planet by now, right? If so, thank you sir, for your service.

Number one: You know, if you think about it, we’re ALL the distracted boyfriend.

The image: Ok, in this case, I actually understand the original meme. The boyfriend is supposed to be with the woman in the light blue top, but is instead distracted by the woman in red. Meanwhile, the woman in blue is mad, understandably. This meme works when the guy’s label says “me” and the light blue woman’s says “important work I need to get done that might help the world” and the red dress says “writing this essay instead.”

But this? This? Ok, let’s break it down together. In this scenario, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are dating (awwwwwwww! cruelty and impotence sitting in a tree, not g-o-v-e-r-n-i-n-g). But the Republican Party is distracted by the America Party, and so it’s gonna date, um, them instead. But then the caption infers that it is instead the American people who are going to break up with both parties and start dating The America Party, because it’s neither right nor left. According to the people who write America Party captions (“Elon Musk”) this is “the only thing that makes sense” but my friends I am now five America Party posts in and I no longer think I’m legally allowed to operate a motor vehicle. Nothing makes sense anymore.

The message: Oops! I already covered it above, in a feat of madness. What are categories anymore? What is anything? The richest man in the world has a political party now. Do they stand for anything? Do they have a cohesive platform? Are they against “extremism” on both sides? Or just really mad about deficits? And wait, how is this party against extremism, why is its founder so into Nazi stuff? Does “extremism” mean anything? Is that just a thing people say now when what they mean is “things I don’t like?” Got it. And also, the question of what constitutes an 80% opinion gets to be decided by a drug-addled racist billionaire who was radicalized because he couldn’t accept that his daughter is trans? Oh jeez I need a bath

After considering all the evidence, what is my final verdict on the America Party: Bad. It is bad.

If I were starting a political party today what would I do differently?: Man, I don’t know. Mostly I’d just propose universal healthcare and free childcare and college and a super high marginal tax rate. Plus government run grocery stores, because those sound sick, especially since Kroger bought our local grocery chain and went with an innovative new “make everything terrible now” strategy. Back to the political party, though. In addition to all the policy stuff, I’d make a “no memes” rule for our social media team. Every once in a while, they’d come to me with a picture of SpongeBob explaining the Federal Reserve and I’d be like “my friends, nobody wants that— let’s just post: ‘we’d like you to have healthcare because we don’t want you to die’” and call it a day.

Would your comms team be allowed to post an AI image of you, the party’s founder, at Mount Rushmore, inexplicably staring into Lincoln’s nostril? Wait, why do you ask? Oh God no, he didn’t. Please tell me he didn’t…

A reminder: Tonight I’ll be doing a live watch of Get Out (I’ve never seen it!) for The White Pages Summer Movie series. 8:30 PM CT in the Substack chat (though if you can’t make it live, it’s equally fun to follow along afterwards). This is a paid subscriber bonus, since the privacy helps the vibes. Please keep me company, though, because the reason I haven’t seen it yet is that I am an absolute scaredy cat and I don’t watch horror movies.

I shared all the other announcements for the week in my significantly more earnest Tuesday essay, so check that out as well!