It’s Now a Hate Crime to Vandalize Teslas in DC

Add Mayor Muriel Bowser’s D. C. government to the long list of blue-state entities cornered into genuflecting before Donald Trump. In the face of Republican threats to take over the self-governing capital, the city administration has spent 2025 trying to accommodate White House priorities on supposedly local policies ranging from graffiti abatement to street murals. This week may have brought the most Trump-pleasing move yet: The vandals accused of writing anti-Elon Musk graffiti on Tesla windshields, D. C. police said, will potentially be on the hook for hate crimes. The announcement read more like pro-Tesla White House messaging than a public-safety notice from a blue city’s police force: “The suspects wrote political hate speech onto the victims’ Tesla vehicles then fled the scene,” the police press release declared. “The Metropolitan Police Department is investigating these offenses as potentially being motivated by hate or bias. ” The document was accompanied by security-camera pictures of a man and a woman believed to be the perps. They are still at large. The department’s X post about the investigation was subsequently reposted without comment by Musk himself. Even in a month when Bowser placated Republican critics by tearing up the iconic Black Lives Matter Plaza on 16th Street, the tone seemed over the top. The incidents, after all, involved writing on car windows, not blowing up automobiles. People reading the police announcement could be forgiven for thinking that the pair were wanted for scrawling bigoted threats against an identity group rather than wisecracks about the world’s richest man. In fact, according to police reports I reviewed, the so-called hate speech actually consisted of sarcastic zingers like “Let’s do away with the administrative state! Buy a tesla!” “I like what Musk is doing,” “Go Doge I support Musk killing the dept of education,” “Ask me about my support of Nazis,” and “I love Musk and hate the Fed Gov’t. ” To be sure, these are crimes: You’re not allowed to deface someone else’s car, no matter what the slogan, and no matter how easy to clean off with windex . In addition to being illegal and destructive, it’s awfully inconsiderate. Any local government worth its name ought to be protecting cars from being defaced, no matter who the automaker supports politically. But calling it hate speech seems like a stretch — and it isn’t hard to imagine ulterior motives for making such a stretch. “For me it’s a good example of how you can have well-intentioned legislation that leads to absurd results,” said Patrice Sulton, the executive director of the D. C. Justice Lab. “You get to just weaponize something that’s not the purpose for which it was passed. ” As it happens, the District of Columbia is one of the rare jurisdictions that lists “political affiliation” alongside race, sex and religion as categories of bias. But that simply means you can’t discriminate against someone for being a Democrat or a Republican. It’s OK, though, to shun someone for a political opinion — like wanting to kill the administrative state, or for that matter wanting to save the administrative state. Even if all Tesla owners agreed with the company’s CEO on public-policy questions, they wouldn’t be a protected class. Someone convicted of tagging their cars would just be guilty of vandalism. But they wouldn’t have the harsher sentence that attaches to crimes motivated by bias. “I would have a hard time seeing how anti-Elon Musk graffiti would constitute political affiliation discrimination,” said Michael Selmi, an Arizona State University law professor and an expert on discrimination law. “The real issue is there’s very little case law interpreting political affiliation in D. C. or in the few other jurisdictions that include it” on their lists of protected categories. Political-affiliation bias claims are also vanishingly rare. While police statistics show dozens of reports each year of alleged bias crimes involving race, sexuality or ethnicity, there’s been exactly one political-affiliation complaint in the last four years. It happened in 2022 after an Uber driver allegedly refused to take someone to the Capitol Hill Club on the grounds that it was a Republican establishment. The refusal led to an altercation between the driver and the passenger, according to a police report. There were no arrests. Given the long historic odds, why make a big show now out of investigating the Tesla tagging as a possible hate crime rather than as a string of just-as-illegal acts of property destruction? A department spokesman said that “the language used in the vandalism is the reason for this classification. ” A spokesman for Bowser said she was not involved in her police department’s decision-making on this investigation. Ultimately, it’s hard to separate this incident from the political travails of the city itself. Constitutionally marooned, D. C. is a place where Congress could end local democracy with a simple vote and where the president could unilaterally assume command of the police department with the stroke of a pen. During last year’s campaign, Trump vowed to “take over” the city. Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert this week suggested that the GOP might rename the place the District of America. Against that backdrop, the city’s elected leadership has tried mightily to mollify the president. Bowser this month got rid of the Black Lives Matter street mural that enraged Trump in 2020 and was targeted by GOP legislation this spring. The “sanctuary city” page has disappeared from the municipal website. The local government has embraced presidential priorities around cleaning up homeless encampments. And last week, D. C. police controversially helped DOGE operatives get into the United States Institute of Peace. Now the White House is beating the drums about Tesla vandalism, creating another incentive for the locals to play ball. The FBI director called Tesla vandalism domestic terrorism. The president has suggested sending vandals to jail in El Salvador. If likening run-of-the-mill political graffiti to criminal bigotry is what it takes to keep the feds from padlocking city hall, the logic goes, maybe it’s worth it. Unlike local governments in Cleveland or Boston, D. C. ’s is really between a rock and a hard place. But in the process, a city that recently was demanding statehood becomes progressively less autonomous. And the citizenry, likewise, becomes a little less free. In an age of fear about civil liberties, one reassurance has always been that national-politics lunacy will always break down at the local level. Presidential partisans may call for throwing the book at political enemies, but real cops serving real communities — and worrying about catching real rapists, murderers or burglars — are too busy to play along with political bullying. That may still be true in most cases. But the Case of the Tesla Taggers shows how much Washington, even the most local parts of it, can be swayed by the Trump White House.

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