Musk tries to help Trump halt the Harris surge
The world’s richest man and its once-and-possibly future most powerful man agreed on almost everything.
Tech titan Elon Musk threw open his X platform on Monday night, offering Donald Trump a pipeline free of fact checks for his falsehoods, conspiracy theories and extremism as he tries to slow the rise of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
The chat represented yet another extraordinary chapter in a presidential campaign that has defied logic with its stunning twists in recent weeks, including an assassination attempt against Trump and President Joe Biden’s ending of his reelection bid.
cnn.com
Full Trump-Musk Interview: Assassination Bid, Iran-Israel, Russia-Ukraine, Kamala-Biden, US Election
Former President Donald Trump recalled how illegal immigration “saved” his life during an interview with billionaire Elon Musk on Monday.
Trump replied jokingly, “Illegal immigration saved my life, you’re right.”
mediaite.com
Trump’s interview with Musk devolves into yet another X catastrophe
Musk posted that “there appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down,” adding that he may proceed with the interview with a smaller set of listeners.
The interview started about 45 minutes late.
The swirl of posts about technical difficulties echoed Musk’s previous X Live event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his Republican presidential primary campaign on an X live interview with Musk. As appeared to happen with Trump’s event, the site’s livestream portal, which is audio only, crashed.
politico.com
5 takeaways from the Trump-Musk conversation on X
Trump returns to X
Monday essentially marked Trump’s return to the social media platform where he largely built his political brand and rewrote the rules around presidential communication.
Trump not only spoke with Musk on Spaces, but he posted several times on X in the hours ahead of the interview, a sign he may be dipping back into X as a means of communication at a tumultuous time for his reelection bid.
Trump avoids major missteps
The former president’s chat with Musk frequently resembled one of his rallies, as Trump rambled often, attacked Harris and Biden as “incompetent,” and repeated many of the same anecdotes he tells at campaign events.
But he also managed to focus on issues, inflation in particular, and avoided making the type of inflammatory, controversial comments that have plagued his recent public appearances.
But still gives Democrats fodder
Despite his focus on policy when going after Harris, Trump’s often rambling responses to Musk’s prompts still gave Democrats some soundbites they are likely to use against the former president.
Trump reiterated his stance that he would try to shutter the Department of Education and allow states to handle the issue on their own, echoing a proposal from Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation document Democrats have aggressively promoted as a blueprint for Trump should he win.
Musk seeks to nudge Trump on policy
Musk, who has made clear his support for Trump, frequently offered his own prescriptions for certain policy issues or tried to coax the former president into agreeing with his own point of view.
Musk said his views on climate change were that the country should not “vilify” the oil and gas industry but that “we should lean in the direction of sustainability.” Trump has previously said he’s for “clean air” and “clean water” but has cast doubt on the legitimacy of climate change.
Another event on X plagued by tech issues
For many tuning in to Monday night’s conversation, it was deja vu as the start was delayed by close to an hour because of technical issues.
The event was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m., and Trump posted a link to the Spaces where the conversation would take place about 10 minutes before. But it was at 8:42 p.m. that the event finally got underway.
thehill.com
Musk hosts friendly chat with Trump on X after tech delays
Elon Musk’s much-anticipated discussion with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on the billionaire’s platform X was marred by technical issues.
The event was billed as an interview but Trump made a series of unsubstantiated claims that went without challenge.
Mr Musk repeated his endorsement of Trump, who faces a resurgent new Democratic candidate, Vice-President Kamala Harris, in November’s election.
However the Musk-Trump conversation got off to a less than auspicious start.
As many users struggled to access the livestream, Mr Musk blamed “a massive DDoS attack on X” for the problems in a post.
Distributed denial of services attacks – or DDoS attacks – are attempts to overload a website to make it hard to use or inaccessible.
“A DDoS attack sends a very large number of signals to an online target to disrupt it,” Anthony Lim, Director of the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace and International Studies in Singapore, told the BBC.
“It is unlikely it would affect only one single service or feature on a website.”
Mr Lim added that it is possible that a large number of people trying to listen could have temporarily crashed the service.
bbc.com
Trump revisits most divisive talking points in rambling interview with Musk
Ex-president attacks migrants and denounces Kamala Harris in discussion delayed by technical glitch
Musk also reinstated Trump’s X account in 2022, two years after the former president was banned from the platform following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Trump has not made much use of his account since his reinstatement, as he has instead chosen to post on his own social media platform, Truth Social. But he shared a series of posts hours before the interview on Monday to promote his campaign and paint Harris as a “San Francisco Radical”.
“Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Trump wrote in one post. “We’re a nation in decline.”
With less than three months left until election day, Trump indicated he would start posting to X more often. Given Trump’s record of upending news cycles with his tweets, his return to the platform could inject even more uncertainty into what has already been a historically tumultuous presidential race.
Before the conversation between Musk and Trump, a senior EU figure warned Musk against possible “amplification of harmful content”. In a letter posted on X, Thierry Breton, commissioner for internal market of the European Union, urged Musk to “ensure X’s compliance” with EU law, including the Digital Services Act, adopted in 2022 to address a number of issues including disinformation.
theguardian.com
Donald Trump lashes out at ‘inside’ enemies in 2-hour Elon Musk interview
Trump also accused Harris of shifting towards the middle on issues such as immigration, saying she was a “radical left, San Francisco liberal . . . and now she wants to be more Trump than Trump”.
The former president has been struggling to find a coherent line of attack on Harris in recent weeks — including questioning her race — as she has gained ground in the polls. His criticism remained scattered on Monday, and he rarely mentioned Harris by name.
He also raged against his political opponents, declaring that he had “enemies on the outside and enemies on the inside” and that “bad people in our government” were “more dangerous” than foreign adversaries.
The former president praised the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea as “at the top of their game”.
“They are tough, they are smart and they are vicious,” he said.
ft.com