Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, 78, sat for a friendly two-hour interview on Monday with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, 53, on the latter’s social media platform X, after technical problems delayed the start of the event for more than 40 minutes.
Here are some of the key takeaways from what Trump’s campaign team had billed as “the biggest interview in history”:
DDoS ‘massive cyberattack’
About 15 minutes after the interview was scheduled to begin, thousands of people who were trying to join the conversation on X began to complain that they couldn’t hear what was happening. Others reported being confronted with an error message which read: “This Space is not available,” referring to X’s live audio streaming feature, Spaces.
Musk blamed a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) that had overwhelmed the servers.
In a DDoS attack, hackers try to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyse it when it can no longer cope with the scale of data requested.
“The attack saturated all of our data lines. We think we’ve overcome most of that. As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say, but I’m honoured to have this conversation,” Musk said.
He added that the conversation was meant to be informal, to help “open-minded independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind”.
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down.
Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
The technical issues recalled a similar event on X in May 2023, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suffered a chaotic start to his bid for the Republican presidential nomination due to glitches on the platform.
The Trump-Musk livestream eventually began at 12:42 GMT, more than 40 minutes after it was scheduled to start.
Trump sought to turn the technical issue into a positive, congratulating Musk on the number of people trying to tune in. A counter on X showed as many as 1.3 million people were listening at times during the conversation.
Meanwhile, the team of Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris was also following the conversation. On X, they reshared a 2022 post in which Musk was attacking Trump’s age.
Interesting pic.twitter.com/z8UnPRt85a
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 12, 2024
The chat with Musk gave Trump an unfiltered opportunity to air his usual mix of grievances, personal attacks and overstated or even false claims.
Musk praised Trump’s reaction to assassination attempt
“Well, maybe we can start off with the assassination attempt,” Musk said as the conversation began.
Musk added that one of the reasons he endorsed Trump’s presidential bid was Trump’s reaction to the attack, saying that Trump pumping his fists was “just incredibly inspiring”.
“What was it like for you?” he asked.
“Not pleasant, I have to be honest. I didn’t know I had that much blood … it was a hard hit … I moved down pretty quickly, and we had bullets flying right over my head after I went down,” Trump said.
“It was very, I guess you would say, surreal, but it wasn’t surreal. You know, I was telling somebody, you have instances like this where you feel it’s a surreal situation. And I never felt that way. I knew immediately that it was a bullet,” Trump said of the moment the bullet hit his ear.
“I’m a believer, now. I’m more of a believer in God, I think,” Trump added.
Trump promised ‘largest deportations in history’
Trump and Musk discussed immigration extensively.
“Would it be accurate to say that you’re supportive of legal immigration, but that we obviously need to shut down illegal immigration and especially unvetted illegal immigration,” Musk asked.
“It’s just not possible for the US to absorb, you know, everyone from Earth,” said Musk, identifying himself as a “legal immigrant”.
Trump responded: “I say it very simply, they have to come in legally, they have to be checked.”
“I believe it’s over 20 million people came into our country, many coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger version of that is insane asylums, and many are terrorists,” he added. “And I’ll tell you what, they’re coming not just from South America, from Africa… from all over the world,” he said.
The former president promised, that if elected, “we’re gonna have the largest deportation in the history of this country.”
US Customs and Border Protection reported 7.1 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico between January 2021 and June 2024. Studies also show immigrants, including those who have arrived in the US illegally, do not commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans.
Trump called Biden’s replacement with Harris ‘a coup’
Trump expressed anger that Vice President Kamala Harris had been swapped in for Biden – who he referred to as “a vegetable” – on the Democratic ticket.
“She hasn’t done an interview since this whole scam started. And say what you want. This was the coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave. And they said, we can do it the nice way. Or, we can do it the hard way,” Trump said.
Before Kamala Harris – a “radical left lunatic” and “not a smart woman”, in Trump’s words – was announced as the new Democratic presidential candidate, Trump had been ahead of Biden in polls of battleground states (including ABC News/Ipsos, CBS News, Fox News and NBC News) likely to be critical to the outcome of the November 5 election.
However, he is now trailing Harris in some of the same states according to The New York Times/Siena College poll which shows Harris with 50 percent support among voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, compared with Trump’s 46 percent support in each of those states.
“What I can tell you is this. We cannot have a Democrat. We cannot have her. She’s incompetent. She’s as bad as Biden in a different [way],” Trump said.
Musk also expressed displeasure at the thought of Harris as a presidential candidate.
“What was happening sort of overnight is they’re rewriting history and making Kamala sound like a moderate when, in fact, she is far left, like far, far left,” Musk said.
“I think we’re in massive trouble, frankly, with a Kamala administration. And that’s my honest opinion. And I think really it’s essential that you win for the good of the country of this election. And, I mean, that’s understating my opinion,” he added.
Trump slammed ‘worst inflation in 100 years’
During the interview, Trump also criticised what he called the “inflation crisis” while targeting the current administration for the current numbers.
“I think we have the worst inflation we’ve had in 100 years. They say it’s 48 years, I don’t believe it,” he told Musk.
At this point, Musk suggested creating a government efficiency commission.
“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers’ hard-earned money, is spent in a good way,” Musk told Trump.
“I’d be happy to help out on such a commission,” he added.
“I’d love it,” Trump said, noting the billionaire is a “great cutter” after he launched mass layoffs at Tesla. “You just walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone … Every one of you is gone’,” he added.
Trump expressed fondness for South America
Trump praised Argentina’s President Javier Milei and his austerity measures that have seen more than 70,000 public sector workers laid off and pensions cut by 30 percent to reverse spending that caused the country to default on its debts.
“He’s great,” Trump told Musk. “I hear he’s doing really a terrific job. He’s going to make Argentina great again.”
Annual inflation in the South American country still tops 270 percent, however, among the highest rates in the world, outpacing salaries. Unemployment in Argentina has become a bigger concern for Milei as the government freezes infrastructure projects.
Trump also joked that he might consider going to Venezuela if the upcoming election does not go his way.
“If something happens with this election, which would be a horror show, we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela, because it’ll be a far safer place to meet than our country,” Trump said to Musk. “OK, so we’ll go. You and I will go, and we’ll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela.”
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