By now, there’s a decent chance that you’ve seen a Cybertruck out in the wild — perhaps blocking the visibility at an intersection or surrounded by gawkers in the Whole Foods parking lot. And upon seeing it, I’ll bet you had precisely one question:
How does a Cybertruck function in rural Maine?
Tucker Carlson is on the case. On Monday, the Tucker on X host posted an hour-long video to determine whether a “man with a real job” could replace his F-350 with a Cybertruck. I’ll be honest: Out of respect for my time and sanity, I did not actually watch the entire thing. But within the first three minutes, Carlson’s interview subject — a guy who’d been loaned a Cybertruck for all of five days — confirmed that he could swap out his Ford for a Tesla with a resounding “so far, yes.”
It was not the only unexpected Cybertruck endorsement of Monday, however. On the other end of the Eastern Seaboard, at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump appeared in his own (also quite long) video with a far-right personality, the gamer Adin Ross. Over an hour into the livestream, Ross presented the former president with a custom Cybertruck featuring a red, white, and blue “Make America Great Again” wrap and the picture of Trump lifting his fist in the air after the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania emblazoned on its side. (In addition to possibly committing a campaign finance violation, the pair also inadvertently proved that the only thing more outré than owning a Cybertruck is owning a Cybertruck with your own face on it.)
For anyone who has followed the Republican Party’s stance on EVs, the fact that an all-electric truck is now apparently being used to own the libs might cause your head to explode. But on the other hand: Of course it is. While the far right has for years pushed the idea that EVs are somehow emasculating, Tesla designed the Cybertruck to be just the opposite. It’s such a conspicuously masculine status symbol that it provoked an anthropologist to wonder to The New York Times whether “I’ll ever see a nice lady driving this kind of car.” The right’s change of heart on EVs (or at least one EV) has also coincided neatly with Elon Musk’s announcement of a new conservative super PAC. (Musk is credited as the supplier of the loaner vehicle in Carlson’s video.)
But is it possible the right’s embrace of the Cybertruck could have benefits beyond giving us amusing, if extremely long videos? The upside, of course, is that the planet would be much better off if every person who’d ever bought a gas-guzzling truck to project an image of “rural culture and manhood” had decided to get an EV instead. Removing political and cultural barriers to EVs as a whole is certainly something to celebrate, even while the exact motivations remain suspect.
And hey, I won’t turn my nose up at more fast chargers in rural Maine.
