WATCH DODDERING OLD GRANDPA TRUMP TURN INTO A THUG

We're all having a good laugh watching President Trump's conversation with CNBC's Joe Kernen in Davos:

Trump on Tesla’s @elonmusk to CNBC:
“I was worried about him, because he’s one of our great geniuses, and we have to protect our genius. We have to protect Thomas Edison and we have to protect all of these people that came up with originally the light bulb and the wheel and all.”

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) January 22, 2020

Trump seems to believe the wheel was invented in the United States: "We have to protect all of these people that came up with, originally, the light bulb and the wheel and all of these things." pic.twitter.com/re6CyRi6HY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 22, 2020

But at the very end of that clip, watch Trump turn from a doddering old man into a Mafia don. Trump is talking about Elon Musk:

He’s going to be building a very big plant in the United States. He has to, because we help him, so he has to help us.

This is a threat. Maybe it's an empty threat, but it's meant as intimidation.

At Electrek.co, Fred Lambert notes that Musk appears to have no such plans:

Today, Donald Trump commented on Elon Musk and Tesla’s recent success on the stock market, and the US president ended his comments by saying that Tesla is going to “build a very big plant in the US.”

What is he talking about?

... Tesla recently started production at Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai, Tesla’s first vehicle factory outside the US, and also recently announced Gigafactory 4 in Germany.

... As far as his comment about a Tesla factory, I don’t think he knows anything we don’t, but he might be right.

Elon has talked about Tesla building another factory in the US on a few occasions before. He even specifically mentioned a tri-state area at one point.

But that was in 2017:

Something on a tristate border might work. Gigafactory plus nearby supporting supply chain needs a very large workforce.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 24, 2017

As for the "we help him" part, Lambert is puzzled:

... I don’t know what Trump means by helping them. I assume he means subsidies that Tesla received over the years, but as we previously reported, this was only a fraction of the subsidies that fossil-fuel companies have received from the US government over the years.

Also, Trump apparently recently intervened to stop the EV tax credit reform, which would have made it a lot fairer to early proponents of electrification like Tesla.

Therefore, he hasn’t been helping Tesla much lately.

Trump's just trying to strong-arm Musk, the way he tries to strong-arm trading partners or NATO allies or Amazon or AT&T. He may be your embarrassing old granddad who doesn't seem to know what century it is, but he's still a thug at heart.