Elon Musk’s super PAC is funding Trump’s 2024 ground game

Plus, the contradictions and faults of Trump’s taxless overtime law.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign appears to be outsourcing much of its ground game to the American Political Action Committee (American PAC), a super PAC founded by Elon Musk in service of reelecting Trump. 

The American PAC appears to have become the main means by which the Trump campaign will operate in crucial swing states. The group has committed to doing multiple knocks on houses where low-turnout Trump voters reside, and they have poured millions of dollars into staffing canvassing positions in battlegrounds like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. 

Musk’s efforts are proving to be disproportionate, with America PAC appearing to have now become the backbone of Trump’s efforts to retake the White House. Campaign officials have rejected this observation, however, citing attempts to rally grassroots volunteers to the cause

“Team Trump has hundreds of staff and offices mobilizing hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country. That’s why everyone wants to take credit for our groundbreaking, data-enhanced, people-powered operation,” a Trump spokesperson said in a statement to The Guardian. 

Even then, this strategy may prove ineffective. For one, only America PAC has actually employed hundreds of paid staffers dedicated to organizing door-knocking and local campaign events. At the same time, much of the focus of volunteers has been on rural areas — which, from a numerical standpoint, won’t make up for the kind of turnout seen in urban and suburban areas, where most independents and moderates live. 

The question at hand is whether or not America PAC can make up for the lack of a broader network of Trump surrogate organizations. For example, more recognizable Republican “brands” like the student-led Turning Point USA — a product of the conservative pundit Charlie Kirk — have limited their scope to Arizona and Wisconsin, plus key districts in Michigan and Nevada. 

Meanwhile, on the trail, Trump’s attempts to win over the working class with promises of forgoing taxes on overtime hours may backfire. On Sunday at a campaign event in Erie, Penn., Trump was bragging about a “gigantic tax cuts” for workers wherein tips, overtime and Social Security benefits would be exempt from taxation when he revealed that he often avoided paying overtime to his workers. 

“I know a lot about overtime,” Trump told the crowd. “I hated to give overtime. I hated it. I’d get other people, I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay.”

Outside the obvious contradictions of Trump’s admission, the policy proposal runs aground of a few realities. For starters, overtime pay reform from Trump actually backfired during his presidency. In 2019, the Trump administration sought to expand overtime pay obligations by creating a new ruling that required workers making $35,568 a year to receive overtime compensation. However, this proved to be lackluster at best. 

“While the administration may be trumpeting this rule as a good thing for workers, that is a ruse,” the Economic Policy Institute explained. “In reality, the rule leaves behind millions of workers who would have received overtime protections under the much stronger rule, published in 2016, that [the] Trump administration abandoned.”

Additionally, the conservative policy wish list Project 2025, which Trump has sought to distance himself from despite being authored by a multitude of former Trump officials, calls for overtime rules that are beneficial to employers.

“DOL [Department of Labor] should maintain an overtime threshold that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States),” a section of Project 2025 reads. 

Lastly, it’s unclear how a hypothetical Trump administration would make up for the lost revenue. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Trump’s proposal would cost close to “$1.7 trillion from Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 through 2035, and the revenue loss would grow to roughly $6 trillion in the extreme case that all salaried workers switched to hourly and were able to work overtime (at 150 percent pay) tax-free.”