Donald Trump interviewed by Elon Musk on X
Elon Musk’s talk on X with Donald Trump lasted more than two hours — but everyone said the same thing about the former President’s voice.
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Elon Musk’s talk on X with Donald Trump has wrapped up after more than two hours — but the content of the discussion was largely overshadowed by a bizarre issue with the former President’s voice.
A number of listeners commented that Mr Trump appeared to be speaking with a “lisp” throughout the highly anticipated live-streamed conversation with the billionaire.
“Why does [Donald Trump] have a terrible ‘lisp’ in the [Elon Musk] X interview?” wrote one user. “Someone needs to adjust that microphone ASAP.”
Podcast host Tim Pool claimed the strange lisping sound “seems like audio compression issues”. “It’s not a lisp,” he wrote. “It’s called a ‘slush’. But I wonder if Trump had dental work.”
Blogger Michael Tracey agreed, “Trump isn’t slurring his words, I’ve also had that weird thing happen on Spaces where it sounds like I have a comically outrageous lisp.”
BREAKING THE INTERNET! @realDonaldTrump 🤠@elonmuskpic.twitter.com/26YgA5vwJO
— Steven Cheung (@TheStevenCheung) August 13, 2024
Assassination attempt
During the interview, Mr Trump opened up about last month’s assassination attempt, quipping that the experience was “not pleasant, to be honest”.
He also revealed the first question he asked after the shooting that nearly killed Mr Trump and left one rallygoer dead and two others seriously injured.
“My first question was how many people were killed, because we had a massive crowd there,” he said. “They said we don’t know yet, but some people have been badly hurt.”
Mr Musk said Mr Trump’s reaction to the shooting was “inspiring”.
“Instead of shying away from things, ducking down, you were pumping your fist saying ‘fight, fight, fight’,” he said. “The President of the United States represents America and I think that is America, that is strength under fire, and so that’s a part of the reason why I was excited to endorse you for another term.”
Asked about the glaring security failures by the Secret Service and other law enforcement, Mr Trump agreed “there should have been nobody on that roof”.
“There were people that were seeing him,” he said. “There was a lack of co-ordination, everybody understands that building should be covered.”
Opening the talk, Mr Musk said he wanted to “get a feel for what Donald Trump is like in a conversation”. “It’s hard to catch a vibe about someone if you just don’t hear them talk in a normal way,” he said.
“When there’s an adversarial interview no one’s themselves. This is really aimed at open-minded, independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind.”
‘Zombie apocalypse’
They pair then delved into the topic of illegal immigration, with Mr Musk saying he was supportive of legal immigration but describing the southern border as like a “World War Z zombie apocalypse”.
“I say it very simply, they have to come in legally,” Mr Trump agreed.
He said he believed “it’s over 20 million people who came into our country”, claiming countries around the world were emptying “jails or mental institutions, many are terrorists, they’re coming not just from South America, they’re coming from Africa, Asia, the Middle East”.
He pushed back on Mr Musk’s suggestion that “most people who are illegal immigrants are good” but some were not.
“I have to tell you, Elon, it’s such a downer to say, I think it’s a much bigger number than you think,” he said.
“Venezuela, their crime is down 72 per cent because they’re taking their criminals, murderers, rapists and delivering them here. This is being done worldwide. Crime all over the world is down. These are rough people, they’re releasing them into our country. These are criminals that make our criminals look like nice people.”
He added, “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of this country, and we have no choice.”
Biden ‘low IQ’
Mr Trump also lobbed insults at President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing the latter of a “coup of a US President”.
“Say what you want, this is a coup,” he said, referring to Mr Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race.
“I’m not a fan of his, he was a horrible President, the worst President in the history of this country.”
Mr Musk added, “They took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him.”
Mr Trump later resumed insulting Mr Biden, suggesting he has a “very low IQ”.
“He had a low IQ 30 years ago, by the way, but now he might not even have an IQ at all,” he said. “There’s nothing on the board that goes this low.”
And I said, ‘Way’
Mr Musk also praised Mr Trump for his approach to international relations, suggesting the US President needed to be someone foreign adversaries like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un “respect or fear”.
That led to an amusing quote from Mr Trump, recounting a conversation with the Russian leader about invading Ukraine.
“I said to Vladimir Putin, ‘Don’t do it. You can’t do it, Vladimir. You do it, it’s going to be a bad day,” he said.
“And I told him things that I would do. And he said, ‘No way.’ And I said, ‘Way.’”
Mr Trump also claimed he would “prevent World War III”.
“People talk about global warming but they never talk about nuclear warming,” he said, warning China would “catch us sooner than people think” in its nuclear arsenal.
“That’s where you need a strong American president. To me the biggest problem is not climate change, the big problem is the power of nuclear. This is a level of destruction nobody’s ever seen before.”
The reintroduction of Kamala Harris https://t.co/noW5TOgawPpic.twitter.com/iLmQIhxOeF
— TIME (@TIME) August 12, 2024
Kamala ‘looked like Melania’
Commenting on the latest Time magazine cover featuring an illustration of Ms Harris, Mr Trump said the Vice President looked “beautiful”.
“Actually she looked very much like our great First Lady, Melania,” he said.
“She didn’t look like Camilla [sic], that’s right. But of course she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that.”
The Time cover story, ‘The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris’, raised eyebrows among some in the media as it did not even feature an interview with the Vice President.
Republicans including Mr Trump have attacked Ms Harris for her lack of media interviews since taking the Democratic nomination.
Her most recent TV interviews were in June.
Trump’s job offer
Mr Musk expressed interest in serving on a commission that would monitor “government overspending”.
“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that ensures that the taxpayer money is spent in a good way,” Mr Musk told Mr Trump.
“And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.”
Mr Trump responded that he would “love it” if Mr Musk were to serve on such a panel.
“You’re the greatest cutter,” the former President told the business tycoon.
Mr Musk later compared the US to Venezuela when talking about government spending and inflation.
New York attacks
Mr Musk told Mr Trump that three of his mother’s friends were attacked in New York while walking down the street — but said they did not go to the police because the criminals would walk free anyway.
“My mum lives in New York,” he said. “And I was like, mum, you know, have any of your friends been attacked or assaulted? And she said, yeah, three of her friends in three separate instances were assaulted just in recent months, just walking around the streets of New York.”
He said the friends did not report the instances because they knew the police would not prosecute the offenders.
‘Critical juncture’
The end of the conversation turned again towards crime, with Mr Musk saying he felt the country was at a “critical juncture” and would go “even further left” with a Harris administration.
“America is at a fork in the road — you are the path to prosperity and I think Kamala is the opposite,” he said.
Mr Trump claimed that 15 years ago San Francisco was beautiful but “now it’s almost unliveable”.
“California likewise,” he said. “She was involved in the destruction of San Francisco and California and she will be involved in the destruction of our country if people are so unwise as to elect her. I hope that doesn’t happen and I hope the elections are going to be run honestly. We’re going to turn this country around, we can do it fairly quickly. We have to get rid of the criminals that have been given to us. [The other countries] are laughing at us. We have to take them out.”
Mr Musk said be believed “these are issues that I think most people in America would agree with”.
“We want safe and clean cities, secure borders, sensible government spending, restoring the judicial system, stop the lawfare,” he said. “How are these even right-wing positions? I think that’s just common sense.”
Our statement on... whatever that was pic.twitter.com/bOZfUu8rbk
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 13, 2024
‘Whatever that was’
The Harris-Walz campaign issued a statement after the call.
“Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com,” the statement said.
“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 livestream in the year 2024.”
‘Massive’ attack
The talk started more than half an hour late, after Mr Musk said a “massive” cyber-attack had overloaded the social media platform’s servers.
The Spaces broadcast appeared to be overloaded nearly 30 minutes after the scheduled start time of 8pm (10am AEST), displaying an error message reading “details not available”.
“This has already broken the internet,” one X user commented.
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on ð•. Working on shutting it down.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
Mr Musk blamed the outage on a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, which is when an attacker floods an internet service with traffic in order to shut it down.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X,” he posted. “Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
Mr Musk added that the system had been tested with eight million concurrent listeners earlier in the day. “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8.30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter,” he said.
As of 8.30pm (10.30am AEST), the Spaces broadcast was accessible again and playing waiting music, with more than 700,000 users viewing the stream.
Crude insult
The drama came after Mr Musk delivered a crude insult to a top European Union official ahead of the interview.
The Republican former President and 2024 nominee has rejoined the social media platform following a lengthy absence and was scheduled to speak live to Mr Musk, one of his most influential supporters, on Monday night.
The EU, which is investigating X under laws requiring digital firms to properly police online content, wrote to Mr Musk on Monday to remind him of his legal duty to stop “harmful” material from spreading on the platform.
“With great audience comes greater responsibility,” the bloc’s top digital official Thierry Breton posted on the platform, along with the letter laying out Mr Musk’s obligations to combat illegal content and disinformation under EU law.
In response, Mr Musk mocked Breton, saying the official reminded him of a French character from 1975 British comedy movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He then responded again, this time with a meme based on the 2008 US comedy movie Tropic Thunder that carried an obscene message.
“Take a big step back and literally f**k your own face!” read the text on the image, a quote from Tom Cruise’s character in the film.
“To be honest, I really wanted to respond with this Tropic Thunder meme, but I would NEVER do something so rude and irresponsible!” Mr Musk wrote.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung accused the EU of election interference and told it to “mind their own business”.
“Let us be very clear: the European Union is an enemy of free speech and has no authority of any kind to dictate how we campaign,” he said.
Mr Trump used the site, previously called Twitter, during his political rise and presidency, but was banned from most social media platforms after the US Capitol riots on January 6, 2021.
Mr Musk reinstated Mr Trump’s account after purchasing the platform in 2022, but the ex-President only returned to post once — to share his mugshot after being arrested and charged in an election-related case in Georgia — preferring instead to share his unfettered thoughts on his Truth Social platform.
However, Mr Trump on Monday has posted several times in the lead-up to his 8pm talk with Mr Musk, almost all campaign ads and links to his website.
Mr Musk, the world’s richest person according to Forbes, has emerged as a major voice in US politics, but is accused of turning X into a megaphone for right-wing conspiracy theories.
“This is unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!” the 53-year-old, who is also chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, posted in a preview of the interview on Sunday.
Mr Trump is struggling to pivot in the face of surging enthusiasm and strong polls for Ms Harris since she took over from Mr Biden as the Democratic candidate.
Mr Musk is one of the Democrats’ fiercest critics, leveraging his 194 million-strong following on X to assail liberal efforts to boost diversity and inclusion — what he calls the “woke mind virus” — and the White House’s handling of the southern border.
The conversation is expected to be convivial as the previously rocky relationship between the tech tycoon and the Republican nominee has been transformed, tracking Mr Musk’s rise to hero status among those aligned with Mr Trump’s views.
It is this audience, which does not watch rallies or tune in to conservative cable news, that Mr Trump hopes to woo.
Mr Trump, 78, also took part in an interview last week with internet influencer Adin Ross — who has been repeatedly banned from streaming site Twitch for policy violations.
Mr Musk endorsed Mr Trump last month, just minutes after the Republican narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The pair have not, however, always seen eye to eye.
The tech billionaire has been a US citizen for more than 20 years and has disclosed that he used to vote Democrat before turning against Mr Biden, who is pro-union and did not invite the Tesla owner to a 2021 electric vehicle summit.
The company is juggling multiple federal investigations, giving Mr Musk common cause with Mr Trump, who faces more than a dozen felony charges over his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election.
When Mr Musk bought Twitter in 2022 he lifted the ban on the former President’s account. But he also endorsed Mr Trump’s Republican rival for the presidential nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, hosting a glitch-ridden campaign launch on the platform.
He has since become increasingly focused on priorities shared with the Republican hard-right, voicing anger over illegal immigration and supposed censorship of conservatives.
Commenting on the recent riots in Britain, Mr Musk claimed that “civil war is inevitable” and shared a false post about “detainment camps”.
New analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate claimed Mr Musk’s false or misleading claims about the US elections have been viewed nearly 1.2 billion times on X.
— with AFP and NY Post
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