Donald Trump has been endorsed by Elon Musk in an extraordinary online interview together that was beset with problems including a major delay because of a ‘massive’ cyber attack.
The former US president returned to Twitter/X with an interview with the Tesla billionaire that started 43 minutes late after the social media site’s servers were hammered with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Once up and running Trump spoke about becoming more religious after the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania on July 13, a shooting that Musk said showed Trump’s courage.
The 45th President of the United States also vowed to build an ‘Iron Dome’ defence system for America like the one used by Israel to intercept missiles and promised that he would oversee the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in history if he became president in November, insisting that cities like New York have been ‘overwhelmed’ and that ‘rough people’ including terrorists are entering the US from Mexico.
‘These are people that are in jail for murder and all sorts of things, and they’re releasing them into our country,’ he said.
Mr Musk then urged Americans to vote for the Republican presidential nominee over Kamala Harris, saying that the US is at a ‘crossroads’ and that choosing Trump would be a vote for hope and prosperity.
In return Trump said he had ‘no choice’ but to back electric vehicles ‘because Elon endorsed me very strongly’. Previously he said that EV supporters should ‘rot in hell’.
But the meeting of arguably the two most influential men on the planet was also dominated by listeners noticing that Trump appeared to have a lisp or even slurred his words at points, struggling with words containing ‘s’ sounds. Memes of Trump as Mike Tyson and Donald Duck immediately began trending.
Trump’s spokesman denied there was any lisp – and accused reporters of ‘hearing things’ – amid a debate over whether it was dentures or audio problems.
There was also an awkward moment that might put the politician in the doghouse at home where he told Mr Musk that his presidential rival Ms Harris bore a resemblance to his wife.
Discussing Kamala’s Time cover he said: ‘She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing, and actually, she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania’.
The interview revealed:
Listeners of Donald Trump’s Monday interview with Elon Musk on X sent the internet into overdrive after some noticed that the ex-president seemed to be speaking with a slight lisp.
It was unclear if Trump was misspeaking or if there was an audio quality issue after the conversation on X started off with several tech problems.
Many on the right and left created memes to poke fun at the former president’s voice, with one supporter photo-shopping Trump as Mike Tyson.
‘Iron Trump is giving a great interview. Lisp and all,’ said one supporter, referencing the boxing champion and ‘Hangover’ star’s nickname.
Others compared him to two of the more famous lispers in cartoon history: Daffy Duck and Sylvester the Cat.
‘Trump low-key sounds like a cartoon on this Twitter space. His mic catches a crazy lisp,’ wrote one listener.
Another wondered: ‘Trump sounded like he was slurring his words a bit. Did he get dental work done? Elon sounds like he always does.’
However, left wing streamer Hasan Piker defended Trump, claiming it was how X Spaces’ audio quality always made people sound.
‘It’s probably due to audio compression issues but trump sounds like he has a lisp’.
Michael Tracey, a journalist, also noted that he’d had similar problems with the service.
‘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’.
However, former CNN journalist Chris Cillizza wondered how Trump would react to the glut of memes posted online from the supposed lisp.
‘Trump lisp is SUPER pronounced. Probably the only thing he will care about when he reads coverage of this interview’, he wrote.
Mr Trump remarked on Kamala Harris’ Time Magazine cover, saying he thought the vice president resembled his wife and former First Lady Melania during his interview with Elon Musk.
Harris was featured on the cover of the long-running periodical despite continuing to refuse one-on-one interviews.
The magazine used an illustration of Harris with the headline ‘Her Time’ and Trump commented on how he felt she looked like a familiar face when talking to Musk during their conversation on X Spaces.
‘She looked very much like our great first lady, Melania,’ Trump told Musk, as they discussed the cover image of Monday’s issue.
Trump also appeared to mispronounce Kamala’s name, though this time, it sounded more like ‘Camilla’.
‘She didn’t look like Camilla but of course, she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that,’ Trump said of the cover.
Time’s new cover story on Harris features the phrase, ‘Her Moment,’ alongside a black-and-white illustration of the vice president.
Trump noted this, calling it a ‘free ride’ from the media and that the image presented her as if she was ‘the most beautiful actress ever to live’.
The magazine has caught some critique for putting out the story, for which Harris declined to be interviewed, amid Republican outrage that she hasn’t sat for a media interview since Biden quit the campaign, making way for her.
The interview, due to start at 1am UK time on Tuesday, was put back by more than 40 minutes by technical problems with X owner Mr Musk blaming a cyber attack on the platform.
He made no mention of his disagreement with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer over Britain’s riots and free speech, but he did raise the open letter posted by EU internal market boss Thierry Breton’s asking him not to spread disinformation when interviewing the former president.
Mr Trump responded by claiming the EU is ‘bad’ on trade with the US and criticising Nato for not spending enough on defence.
‘That’s probably why they notified you,’ Mr Trump said. ‘They don’t treat our country well.’
In a rambling conversation that spanned more than two hours, the Tesla boss and Republican presidential nominee declared their mutual admiration and rehashed shared political views on immigration and the economy.
Mr Trump took the opportunity to take aim at President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who he blamed for a rise in illegal immigration.
‘She is a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco, and then as attorney-general, she destroyed California,’ he said.
‘She’s going to be worse than him,’ he added, referencing President Joe Biden, saying the country needed to prevent anything happening under ‘stupid people like Biden’.
Mr Trump started by talking about last month’s assassination attempt at a campaign rally, pledging to return to the Pennsylvania town of Butler where a bullet hit his ear.
‘Doctors later told me that the ear is a place, that is a very bloody place if you’re going to get hit,’ he said.
‘If I had not turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now – as much as I like you.’
Mr Trump trumpeted his good relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim-Jong Un, Mr Musk questioned whether Ms Harris was tough enough to stand up to overseas leaders.
‘There’s some real tough characters out there,’ he said. ‘And if they don’t think the American president is tough, they will do what they want to do.’
He spoke about immigration, claiming the US is ‘overwhelmed’.
‘I saw it today in New York, where somebody was knifed, where they raped the girlfriend of a man that stood there watching in New York in one of the shelters and started pulling out the knives. And bad things happen today, but this is happening every day.
‘We’re already overwhelmed. Elon, we’re overwhelmed. You had to see the news tonight about New York — New York, and I love that place, and what they’re doing to it is horrible. What they’re doing to it, and all the courts do is they try and focus on Trump’.
Musk said most people who enter the country ‘are actually good hardworking people’.
Trump said there are many ‘nonproductive’ people flooding the country.
‘These are rough people,’ he said. ‘These are people we don’t want in our country.’
Towards the end of the conversation, Mr Trump asked if 60 million people had tuned in to listen to him, and the listener count showed 1.2 million tuning in live. A post to X advertising the conversation was viewed 93 million times.
Mr Trump’s X account had earlier posted a series of tweets for the first time in almost a year.
The Harris campaign responded to the interview with a statement which said: ‘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.
‘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.’
The call, described by Mr Musk as a ‘conversation’ rather than an interview, started late with people logging on to the online space initially greeted with music or silence rather than a conversation between the two men.
Mr Musk blamed an attack on X’s system for preventing access, posting: ‘There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down.’
He appeared to accuse the Democrats for attacking X.
When an X user posted ‘Is Dems fighting to ‘save’ Democracy from two massive disrupters!’, Mr Musk replied ‘Yeah’
A distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack is an attempt to disrupt the traffic of a server or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic.