SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was revealed Thursday as the person behind the RBG PAC, which invoked the name of the liberal female Supreme Court justice to salve President-elect Donald Trump’s image on abortion access.
Named after the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the RBG PAC launched in late October, just weeks before the 2024 elections. With Trump facing a barrage of claims from Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign asserting that he wanted a national ban on abortion, the PAC ran ads defending Trump from the allegations in an appeal to female voters and moderates.
The RBG PAC’s paperwork was signed by May Mailman, who worked for Trump during his first term in office. However, the group’s financial backer was unknown until Thursday evening, when the RBG PAC filed a campaign finance report with the Federal Election Commission.
The filings revealed Musk gave the group a one-time donation of $20.5 million, with the majority of the funds being directed toward digital ads.
Musk endorsed Trump in July following the first assassination attempt on the president. A former Democrat, who was once an avid fan of former President Barack Obama, emerged as one of Trump’s most important allies. He held a series of townhalls and campaigned in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania in the weeks leading up to the election, formed America PAC to support Trump, and poured a staggering $119 million of his own money into sending Trump back to the White House.
The RBG ad campaign he financed gained attention at the time for invoking Ginsburg’s name because the justice was a Trump critic and held liberal views on abortion access that do not generally align with the standard Republican position.
However, the RBG PAC’s campaign suggested there was more in common between Ginsburg and Trump on abortion policy than met the eye, arguing, “RBG believed that the federal government shouldn’t dictate our abortion laws.”
Similar to Trump’s position that abortion policy should be decided on a state-by-state basis rather than by a blanket federal law, the RBG PAC pointed to Ginsburg’s critique of Roe v. Wade to back up the claim. The sweeping 1973 decision invalidated many states’ laws on abortion and handed power over abortion policy to the federal government.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, Trump celebrated the news, saying it returned power over abortion access to the vote of the people in individual states.
“They all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote. And that’s what happened. Now, Ohio, the vote was somewhat liberal. Kansas, the vote was somewhat liberal. Much more liberal than people would have thought. But each individual state is voting. It’s the vote of the people now. It’s not tied up in the federal government,” Trump said during his presidential debate with Harris.
Citing his support for allowing individual states to decide on abortion access, Trump has said he would not support a national federal ban on abortion.
“On this issue, great minds think alike,” says the RBG PAC website, implying that Trump and Ginsburg held common ground on the matter.
While the RBG PAC’s days ended following the 2024 elections, Musk’s influence in Trumpworld has not.
The president-elect tapped Musk, alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, to run the new Department of Government Efficiency.
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DOGE is seeking to cut government spending and reduce waste.
Musk said the department “will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”
