President Donald Trump threatened imprisonment in a stern warning to the Tesla saboteurs that are setting the electric vehicles ablaze in defiance of CEO Elon Musk.
“People that get caught sabotaging Teslas will stand a very good chance of going to jail for up to twenty years, and that includes the funders,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial late Thursday night.
“WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!” the 47th president added.
Trump’s ominous threat came hours after Attorney General Pam Bondi brought up charges against three alleged vandals who destroyed Tesla cars and charging stations for “domestic terrorism” in Colorado, Oregon and South Carolina.
The suspects – Adam Matthew Lansky, 41, in Oregon, Colorado’s Lucy Grace Nelson, 40, and 24-year-old Daniel Clarke-Pounder in South Carolina – all face up to two decades behind bars for their actions.
Lansky is charged with unlawful possession of an unregistered firearm when he showed up at a Tesla dealership in Salem, Ore. armed with a suppressed AR-15 and throwing eight Molotov cocktails at the parked cars.
He returned and shot out a window and fired bullets at a car, Fox 12 reported.
Nelson allegedly spray-painted the phrase “Nazi cars” across several vehicles before throwing Molotov cocktails at the cars in the lot of a Loveland, Colo. dealership.
She was arrested in February but released on a $100,000 bond.
Clarke-Pounder was caught allegedly vandalizing Teslas at a Charleston, SC charging station writing anti-Trump rhetoric across the vehicles before setting them on fire.
Each faces a minimum of five years in prison if convicted, but the charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years.
Bondi called the actions “domestic terrorism” but the three incidents do not qualify as such.
In Las Vegas a firebug ignited several Teslas resulting in one turning into a large fireball after the lithium battery exploded, according to footage obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The arson allegedly scrawled “RESIST” in giant red letters across the Tesla Collision Center in Enterprise, just a few miles from the Vegas Strip.
Musk says he was shocked by the rise in the Tesla-targeted attacks calling out the “hatred and violence” from the left.
“It’s really comes as quite a shock to me that there was this level of, really, hatred and violence from the left,” Musk told Fox News host Sean Hannity.
“I always thought the left, the Democrats, were supposed to be the party of empathy, the party of caring and yet they’re burning down cars, they’re firebombing dealerships, they’re firing bullets into dealerships, they’re just, you know, smashing up Teslas.”
The 53-year-old defended his actions as “productive” before calling out the Tesla attackers as “deranged.”
Trump’s late-night warning reflected similar sentiments he shared after buying a red Tesla that was put on display outside the White House on March 11.
“I’m going to stop them,” he said. “We’re going to catch them, they’re bad guys.”
