Donald Trump made a much-ballyhooed return last night to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, spending a couple of hours in a wide-ranging, often rambling and glitch-plagued livestreamed conversation with the service’s owner, Elon Musk, who is backing the former president’s bid for another term.
The discussion, delayed for some 40 minutes by technical difficulties reminiscent of those during Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ troubled Twitter launch of his presidential campaign last year, started with Trump recounting the assassination attempt he survived last month before turning to immigration, inflation, and Trump’s relationships with world leaders including Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, among other topics.
Trump had been banned from Twitter after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but Musk reinstated the former president after he bought the company in 2022. The two men spoke at length on Monday but made little news as Musk mostly lobbed softball questions and praise toward Trump. The Republican presidential nominee sounded very much like he does at his rallies. He attacked President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, promised the largest mass deportation in the country’s history, and discussed energy policy and nuclear threats. CNN reports that he made at least 20 false claims.
A ‘government efficiency commission’? On fiscal matters, Musk blamed inflation on government overspending and repeatedly raised the idea of a special commission to study the issue. “So really, we need to reduce our government spending, and we need to re-examine,” Musk said. “I think we need, like, a government efficiency commission to say, like, hey, where are we spending money that's sensible, where is it not sensible?”
When Musk raised the issue again, asking if Trump would agree to the idea, the former president responded by essentially talking past him: “The waste is incredible, and nobody negotiates prices,” Trump said. “You used to have a lot of people making jets, and you end up with two companies, and they'll probably try and merge at some point. I mean, I went through it.” Trump went on to boast that he had saved $1.6 billion on a deal to have Boeing develop two new Air Force One planes, though the final cost of the program is projected to be significantly higher than the figures that the Trump White House had initially touted in 2018.
Musk returned yet again to the idea of a government efficiency commission and volunteered to help on such a commission.
“I'd love it,” Trump responded before going on to praise Musk’s willingness to fire workers: “Well, you, you're the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that's okay. You're all gone. You're all gone.”
Trump then praised chainsaw-wielding, cost-cutting Argentinian President Javier Milei as “a big MAGA fan,” promised to eliminate the Department of Education and criticized high-tax states, while Musk added a call for deregulation to his push to “solve government overspending.”
Musk closed out the conversation by making explicit his endorsement of Trump. “I think we're at a fork in the road of destiny of civilization,” he said. “And I think we need to take the right path. And I think you're the right path.”
The Harris campaign hits back: The Harris campaign said the interview put Trump’s agenda on full display: “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.”
Harris’ team followed up by posting audio clips of Trump praising Musk for firing workers when they went on strike, saying he’d close the Department of Education and downplaying the threat from climate change and rising sea levels, which he said would just produce “more oceanfront property.”
Why it matters: Trump has often talked about cutting waste, fraud and abuse across federal programs, including Social Security and Medicare, but experts say that wouldn’t go very far to fix the finances of those programs. Still, the conversation makes clear that Musk and Trump would focus on the spending side of the federal budget, not on revenues.
Beyond that, the interview is an indication of how the two men could use Musk’s social media platform to boost Trump’s candidacy (and Musk’s politics). Trump has not been on X regularly for years, relying instead on his own social media site, Truth Social. But he posted on X more than 10 times over the past day.
“We don't have a precedent for the owner of a social media platform aggressively advocating on behalf of one candidate, especially when that person is himself widely spreading misinformation and extremism,” Brendan Nyhan, a political science professor at Dartmouth College, told NPR.
