Familiar vitriol, and Musk the enabler: key takeaways from Trump’s X interview
Donald Trump returned to the social media platform that turbocharged his career for a live discussion with Elon Musk. The former president unleashed familiar rambling, vitriolic talking points to a sympathetic Musk.
Here are key takeaways from the event.
A terribly slow start
The event started about 45 minutes later than scheduled, with listeners struggling to join the live stream. The issues echoed the meltdown that took place during Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch on X last year, which experts at the time attributed to infrastructure issues on the platform after Musk laid off much of its workforce and shut down multiple data centers.
On Monday, Musk attributed the delay to a cyber-attack, namely, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in which bad actors deliberately flood a website with traffic to overwhelm its servers. That claim could not independently be verified, and it can be difficult to distinguish between a deliberate DDoS attack and a routine outage caused by an influx of legitimate traffic to a site.
Trump, meanwhile, attributed the glitches to regular traffic, congratulating Musk for “[breaking] every record in the book with so many millions of people” on the live interview.
The greatest hits
Once the conversation got going, Trump rehashed the greatest hits, and biggest lies, from his rallies – absurdly claiming he oversaw the “greatest economy in the world”, lying about his own record, about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s records, and spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic, his criminal cases and election security.
His most dangerous lies were about immigration and the climate crisis. He baselessly claimed that migrants arriving at the US southern border were dangerous, calling them “murderers” as well as “non-productive” people. Trump, who built his political career on promises to “build the wall” at the southern border, has ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric lately, and promised a dystopian vision for mass deportations and migrant labor camps if he is re-elected.
He also dismissed the climate crisis as a threat, saying that rising sea levels would at best create more “oceanfront properties”. That latter point, which he has made before, is, of course, wrong – rising sea levels are more likely to destroy beachfront property, devastating coastal communities. Sea level rise is, however, an actual driver of global migration – as it creates climate refugees.
Trump derides Harris
Trump also seemed to sharpen his critiques of Kamala Harris, who he has struggled to attack as her nascent campaign gains momentum. The former president attempted to paint Harris as a “radical” leftist, falsely suggesting that she wanted to ban fracking and defund the police. He also came at her with classic sexism, insisting on calling her by her first name, rather than by her title or surname, as he does for Joe Biden. He also lingered on her looks, saying that she was a “beautiful woman” who looked like Melania Trump, his wife.
And for a measure of intersectionality, he also repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s south Asian first name.
Musk the enabler
Throughout the conversation, the two men lavished praise and admiration on each other. Trump, who has been a critic of electric vehicles, called Musk’s Teslas “incredible”. Musk, meanwhile, nodded along and agreed as Trump said that it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry. At the beginning of the event, the tech billionaire had noted his belief that “no one is themselves in an adversarial interview” and that the conversation was “aimed at kind of open-minded independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind”.
But in the end, the softball format seemed like it was aimed more at those who had already bought into Trump and Musk’s rightwing politics. At the end, Musk told Trump he was “on the right path”.