Donald Trump sat down with billionaire Elon Musk on Monday for a rambling and vitriolic interview that revisited many of the former president’s most divisive talking points.
The interview on X, which is owned by Mr Musk, got off to an inauspicious start, with technical issues that initially prevented many users from watching the conversation. Mr Musk blamed the delay on a “massive” cyberattack, but the cause of the glitch was not entirely clear.
After the interview started more than 40 minutes late, Mr Trump began the conversation by recounting the failed assassination attempt against him last month at his host’s request. Although the Republican candidate previously said he would only share the story once, at the Republican convention last month, he again discussed in detail his brush with death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which he said he would visit again in October.
“It was a miracle. If I hadn’t turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now, as much as I like you,” he said.
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Mr Trump then pivoted to discussing his anti-immigration views, warning about the “rough people” attempting to enter through the US-Mexico border.
“These are people that are in jail for murder and all sorts of things, and they’re releasing them into our country,” he said. Extensive research has uncovered no link between immigration and higher levels of crime.
Mr Trump proceeded to attack his opponent Kamala Harris as the “border tsar” of the Biden administration, even though Democratic officials and immigrant rights experts have contested that characterisation of her policy portfolio.
He repeatedly mocked Ms Harris as a “radical” Democrat who had “destroyed” California when she served as the state’s attorney general and later its senator. He bizarrely complimented Harris for looking “beautiful” on the cover of Time magazine, comparing her to his wife, Melania, while noting that the image was a sketch.
The Harris campaign condemned the interview as an example of Mr Trump’s “extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda”.
“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself – self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a live-stream in the year 2024,” said Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesman.
The interview came as Ms Harris has pulled ahead in polls following the launch of her campaign last month. The Decision Desk HQ and the Hill’s national polling average now shows the Democrat with a 0.3 per cent lead over Mr Trump, who had a 3.3 per cent advantage over Joe Biden before the president withdrew from the race.
Ms Harris appears to be in an even stronger position in the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which will likely determine the outcome of the election in November.
Democrat momentum appears to have rattled Mr Trump, and his campaign has struggled to define Ms Harris as her favorability has climbed in the past month. On Monday, he seemed to be longing for a return to his contest against Mr Biden, as he continued to ridicule the incumbent as “the worst president in history”.
He also went on extended tangents about topics such as the climate crisis and the war in Ukraine. “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years,” he said. “The biggest threat is nuclear warming.”
Mr Trump said of the war in Ukraine: “Russia defeated Germany with us, and they defeated Napoleon. You know, they’ve been around a long time. They’re a big fighting force, and it’s very unfair ... We’re in a very bad position. And I’m not going to blame, exclusively, but I can tell you, I could have stopped that.”
Mr Musk remained unbothered and generally flattering toward Mr Trump throughout the interview, suggesting he could help in the 2016 election winner’s future administration as a member of a “government efficiency commission”.
“I’d love it for you. You’re the greatest cutter,” Mr Trump said, referring to Mr Musk’s penchant for executing mass lay-offs.
The pair have somewhat of a checkered history. Although Mr Musk has said he voted for Biden in 2020, he endorsed Mr Trump last month after the failed assassination attempt, and he has now launched a political action committee to assist Republican electoral efforts. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr Musk has set a goal of turning out 800,000 Trump voters in battleground states.
Mr Musk also reinstated Mr Trump’s X account in 2022, two years after the former president was banned from the platform following the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. However, he 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.
With less than three months left until election day, Mr Trump indicated he would start posting to X more often. Given his 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. – Guardian