Stephanie Kaloi
Mon, August 12, 2024
The Kamala Harris campaign trolled Elon Musk and Donald Trump in real time during the much-hyped and subsequently much-mocked “conversation” with Trump that Musk hosted on X.
At one point during the conversation, the Harris team pointed out that Trump was “slurring” while arguing that climate change isn’t a problem because he’ll “have more oceanfront property.”
The X account Kamala HQ first shared an older tweet from Musk in which he wrote, “Donald Trump will be 82 at end of term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.” Kamala HQ retweeted the post and simply captioned it, “Interesting.”
The team also trolled Trump from his platform of choice, Truth Social, where they reshared a 2023 post in which the former president mocked political rival Rick Desantis’ own failed interview on X.
The campaign also sent out an email to supporters with the subject line, “The two worst people you know are live this evening,” and an opening that pointedly called Musk’s website Twitter and refused to call it X.
After the discussion ended, the Harris campaign released a statement mocking it as “whatever that was,” and also poking fun at the glitchy start that delayed the interview by more than half an hour. Musk blamed the delay, without providing evidence, on a “massive DDOS attack,” though it should be noted that previous events he’s held on Spaces were beset by similar problems.
The campaign also dismissed Trump and Musk as “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
Kamala HQ weren’t the only people who took advantage of the failure to roast Musk and Trump. Antonio Arellano, vice president of communications at NextGen America, wrote on X, “The Elon <> Trump interview just crashed. Just like his campaign will in November.”
Journalist Aaron Rupar shared a photo from “The Simpsons” of Homer Simpson pouring water on a computer system and wrote on X, “twitter engineers logging on ahead of the Elon/Trump space.”
As it became apparent the planned conversation was not only going to begin late but was going to begin very, very late, others began to join the mix. MSNBC’s Tim Miller tweeted, “Elon probably shouldn’t have fired all those childless cat ladies maybe one of them could have figured out how to successfully host an interview on this platform.”
Miller later added, “Hopefully the people working on the Neuralink chip Elon wants to plant in our brains doesn’t overlap with the team in charge of the live audio blog he can’t get to work.”
xx
The post Kamala Harris Campaign Trolls ‘Slurring’ Trump and Musk Using Their Own Words During X Livestream appeared first on TheWrap.
Trump rambles, slurs his way through Elon Musk interview. It was an unmitigated disaster.
Rex Huppke, USA TODAY
Mon, August 12, 2024
For a fascism-curious billionaire who loves cuddling up to right-wing loons, Elon Musk sure is good at making right-wing politicians look stupid.
Former President Donald Trump had loudly trumpeted a planned Monday night interview with Musk that would stream on X. But much like the disastrous X-platformed launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, the Musk/Trump interview failed to launch, leaving social media users laughing at the collective incompetence.
Since Vice President Kamala Harris rose to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket last month, Trump’s reelection campaign has been flailing. His childish attacks against her aren’t working. His racist comments about her mixed-race heritage have repelled all but his most loyal supporters. His vice presidential pick, JD Vance, becomes less likable every time he speaks.
This illustration photo shows former US President Donald Trump mugshot on X (formerly Twitter), on August 24, 2023.
So his answer, weirdly, was to sit down with Musk and talk to what would undoubtedly be a very online audience that doesn’t represent the broader electorate. Had the conversation gone off without a hitch, it still would have been odd and largely useless for Trump’s effort to halt Harris’ momentum.
Trump's interview with Elon Musk was an unmitigated disaster
But the online interview went off (the rails) with a multitude of hitches. X users erupted with either frustration or laughter as the planned start time passed, and nothing could be accessed. It took more than 40 minutes before the interview could start and be heard by anyone. It was amateur hour, the last thing a campaign struggling to project competence needed.
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally held along his running mate Senator JD Vance, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., August 3, 2024.
In May 2023, when DeSantis' presidential campaign premiered with a glitch-tastic interview with Musk on what was then called Twitter, Trump mocked the debacle, writing on social media: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
On behalf of DeSantis, allow me to say this: HAH!
Forget the glitches, Trump's X interview got worse when he started talking
Of course, things didn’t get better for Trump once the interview was able to proceed.
Trump says AI did it: Trump blames Harris' crowds on AI, so let's all assume everything we don't like is fake!
He was rambling, babbling on about crowd sizes and immigration and President Joe Biden and whatever else seemed to pass through his mind. 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.
He sounded like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck.
Elon Musk is no Barbara Walters – his interview skills stink
Tesla and X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk speaks with other delegates on Day 1 of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in Bletchley, Britain on Nov. 1, 2023.
Musk, meanwhile, has the interviewing skills of a stoned introvert. He did little but cheerlead Trump and agree with every bizarro thing that fell out of his mouth, while occasionally going on the kind of odd right-wing tangents you’d expect from a man too rich to ever be told to pipe down.
I’m not going to quote anything Trump said in the interview because it was either too stupid to merit transcription or a mere repetition of the nonsense he spouts at every rally he holds.
Harris can beat Trump: I was wrong about Kamala Harris. And that's a huge problem for Donald Trump
A big part of Trump’s problem right now is he has become almost unbearably boring. Build a wall. Drill, baby, drill. Marxist, socialist something-something. Harris only recently became Black. Blah, blah, blah.
Musk gave Trump the same gift he gave Ron DeSantis. Whomp whomp.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are seen at the Firing Room Four after the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft on NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. May 30, 2020.
So for Trump, sitting down with a rich weirdo few people like and slurring his way through an interview that failed to launch was, in the words of one Donald J. Trump, “a DISASTER!”
Musk, with his social-media ineptness and unmerited sense of self-importance, made DeSantis look like a fool. And now he’s done the same to Trump.
Heck, if Musk keeps this up, I might start to like him.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk
Brittany Gibson
Mon, August 12, 2024
Elon Musk guaranteed entertainment. He delivered technical difficulties instead.
Musk planned to host GOP nominee Donald Trump for an interview “Live on X,” formerly Twitter Spaces,” at 8 p.m. But for the second time in the 2024 presidential election, the social media site was glitchy and many users apparently couldn’t listen to the interview.
Musk posted that “there appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down,” adding that he may proceed with the interview with a smaller set of listeners. DDOS stands for “distributed denial of service.”
The interview started about 45 minutes late.
The swirl of posts about technical difficulties echoed Musk’s previous X Live event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his Republican presidential primary campaign on an X live interview with Musk. As appeared to happen with Trump’s event, the site’s livestream portal, which is audio only, crashed.
“I’m assuming all the Trump supporters who ridiculed DeSantis for the crashing of his Twitter Space with Musk will do the same here. LOLOLOLOL,” wrote conservative commentator Erick Erickson, with a clown face emoji.
Musk posted ahead of the event with Trump that he was “going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance.” But these precautionary measures couldn’t save the platform from crashing.
Some X users were able to enter the livestream portal, but as Bloomberg’s Stephanie Lai posted, “We’re ten minutes in and there is still background music playing.”
Many other users couldn’t enter at all, getting either a gray-toned webpage where the portal would usually pop up or an unavailable notification on the mobile app.
Trump’s campaign spokesperson claimed that the GOP nominee and Musk were “breaking the internet.”
Musk’s interview with Trump was supposed to be the third in a series with 2024 presidential candidates who have interested the tech mogul this year. But Musk has now pledged to put his full support — and X feed real estate — behind Trump’s third campaign. The multibillionaire has the potential to boost Trump’s reelection chances with contributions from his personal fortune and mobilizing his devoted online followers.
When the interview finally started, with about 1 million people tuned into the livestream, Trump and Musk discussed the assaination attempt that the former president survived before pivoting to verbal attacks on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic nominee.
During the unstructured interview, Musk often agreed with Trump on issues like immigration, inflation and crime. Both men during the hour-plus interview rambled at times over the criminal cases Trump is facing as well as the ongoing foreign wars where the U.S. is providing aid.
“That war had zero chance of happening if I was there,” Trump said of the Russia-Ukraine war. And he said “this stupid administration” allowed inflation to happen.
Trump also chastised Harris pledging over the weekend in Nevada to end taxes on tips — a proposal Trump first floated at a rally in Las Vegas in June. He also repeated his criticism of Harris over her role as border czar in Biden’s administration.
“She was the border czar, and you people can’t allow them to get away with their disinformation campaign. Now she’s trying to say she wasn’t really involved,” Trump said of Harris.
Trump also praised Musk for his tough business practices, specifically breaking strikes at his businesses.
“You walk in and you just say, “You want to quit?” They go on strike. I won’t mention the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s ok, you’re all gone. You’re all gone,’” the former president said. “And you are the greatest.”
Musk has previously made donations to a mix of Republicans and Democrats, according to disclosures to the Federal Election Commission. His last disclosed political donation was made in November 2020, an election cycle when he wrote checks to both Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), among others. In the midterms before that, Musk wrote checks each for $33,900 for the Republican and Democratic House campaign arms.
The billionaire is now backing a new super PAC to support Trump, where he will potentially make his first political contributions of the 2024 election cycle. America PAC will file its first financial disclosures in October.
“She’ll be worse than him,” Trump said of Harris. “Because she’s a believer in the radical left and he wasn’t.”
“I think you’re right,” Musk said.
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