Former President Donald Trump’s interview Monday night with billionaire supporter Elon Musk was a wreck. Then it actually began.
Slated to start at 8 p.m. Eastern on X, the conversation was subject to a more than 40-minute delay thanks to technical difficulties that Musk attributed, without evidence, to a denial-of-service attack from Democratic partisans (the same who presumably derailed last year’s livestream with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis). When it finally got underway, it was, as the Arizona Republic’s Bill Goodykoontz commented, “every bit as unhinged and worthless as you would expect.”
There was, predictably, nothing new. After nine years of this, the Republican candidate has nothing new to say — just variations of how he launched his first run for the White House in 2015: lies about immigrants all being murderers and rapists, despite their committing crimes at a significantly lower rate than U.S.-born citizens.
The only thing new here was Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, who the 78-year-old termed a “phony” and falsely claimed was the Biden administration’s “border czar” and thus responsible for an influx of law-abiding migrants from the Americas.
Ultimately, more than two hours passed without a single tough question or interesting response. Musk was slavish in his devotion — at one point, he asked for a job in a future Trump administration, the Pentagon contractor offering his help on cutting government spending — while Trump rambled through his usual talking points, with an apparent lisp that his campaign blamed on listeners’ faulty hearing.
The New York Times summed it up thusly: Trump “repeated a number of false claims, including that the 2020 election was rigged, the criminal cases against him were a conspiracy by the Biden administration to undermine his candidacy and the leaders of other nations were deliberately sending criminals and ‘their nonproductive people’ to America.” Musk, in return, “largely voiced his agreement, offering frequent praise as he proved a sympathetic partner,” having turned one of the world’s leading social media platforms into another Gab or Truth Social, but with even more far-right extremists.
It was, per CNN, the “usual bombardment" of things that are not true, Trump lying at least 20 times about everything from crime (he said it’s going up; it’s gone down dramatically since he left office) to supposedly record-high inflation (it was 2.5% from June 2023 to June 2024).
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If the conversation revealed anything it was that Musk was right — at least back in 2022, when in response to the former president calling him a “bulls**t artist,” the tech billionaire, then a DeSantis supporter, wrote that “Trump would be 82 at end of term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.”
As USA Today’s Rex Huppke observed, the Trump on display Tuesday night was audibly diminished. “He was rambling, babbling on about crowd sizes and immigration and President Joe Biden and whatever else seemed to pass through his mind,” he wrote. “He was also badly slurring his words, raising questions about his health, and doing nothing to knock down rising concerns about his age and well-being.”
It was the same Trump who ranted incoherently at a press conference last week, fabricating a story about a near-death experience on a helicopter, where Kamala Harris’ ex-boyfriend was supposed to have spent his presumed final moments on Earth conveniently bashing the future vice president of the United States.
The Harris campaign was quick to capitalize on the performance, highlighting Musk’s previous doubts about Trump’s fitness (“Interesting,” the campaign posted on social media, highlight his 2022 comments) before going on to bash them both.
“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself,” the Harris campaign said in a statement: “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
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