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“Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sat Monday for a friendly two-hour interview with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Musk's social media platform X, after technical problems delayed the start of the event for more than 40 minutes.” Reuters
The left criticizes Trump’s remarks, arguing that he offered few new ideas.
“If only there’d been some warning that you could trust X to cock up these live events. Do recall that Musk was previously backing the former Republican nominee candidate Ron DeSantis, and managed to persuade the Florida governor to launch his campaign on X last year. The tech-fail that followed was ‘a DISASTER!’ Not my take, fanfolk, but that of a certain Donald Trump.”
Marina Hyde, The Guardian
“The conversation itself didn’t amount to much: Trump told the story of the assassination attempt from various angles for the first 30 minutes; the two of them talked past each other about immigration for while, in full agreement but somehow unable to link one statement to the next; they almost managed to engage about energy, an area in which they might see things differently…
“Trump praised Musk for (allegedly!) firing workers who criticize him or threaten to unionize at his companies, handing the Harris campaign a useful clip and earning a formal complaint from the UAW. As an interview, it wasn’t especially illuminating.”
John Herrman, New York Magazine
“[Trump] recounted last month’s Pennsylvania rally shooting and promised the ‘largest deportation’ in history if reelected, but otherwise said nothing newsworthy… In one strange tangent, he described Harris as looking like the ‘most beautiful actress ever to live’ in a Time magazine cover rendering. ‘It was a drawing, and actually, she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania,’ Trump told Musk…
“[Trump] had hoped to regain his footing Monday night… Instead, he underscored the personal ‘weirdness’ Harris’s campaign has sought to highlight—and the extremism of his agenda, as seen in his praise of Musk firing striking workers, his vow to shutter the Department of Education, and his comments in support of climate change because, he said, global warming will mean ‘more oceanfront property.’”
Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair
“Trump falsely claimed that 60 million people were listening to the conversation (1.1 million people were listening at that moment, according to X’s own analytics). Rather than make headlines with the content of their conversation, the men suggested that the real news was simply the size of the summit itself. Yet the X Space was far smaller than other recent Trump appearances, such as the CNN debate against President Joe Biden, which was seen by more than 51 million people…
“Trump’s earnest return [to X] ought to have been a triumphant moment—not just for him, but for Musk and his platform. Instead, it had the opposite effect, making both men seem small, siloed in their own safe space, and performing for a home-field audience.”
Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic
The right generally approves of Trump’s remarks but urges a change in campaign strategy.
The right generally approves of Trump’s remarks but urges a change in campaign strategy.
“Trump could help himself with sharper, more direct, more focused, and more specific criticisms of Kamala Harris… It is indeed absurd that the Harris team and their media allies are playing the semantic game that she never had the official title ‘border czar.’ Trump could help himself if he just pointed to the number of times that news institutions like the Associated Press, Axios, Politico, and CNN referred to her as the ‘border czar,’ or cited Biden’s description of her duties…
“Point out the specific policies that were repealed upon Biden’s taking office. At one point, Trump said, ‘But it’s not that, it’s everywhere. They’re coming in from everywhere. And I had to stay in Mexico.’ It’s a small slip of the tongue, but Trump presumably meant that during his administration, he had remain-in-Mexico policies in place. You and I know that, but some listener might think that Trump was talking about having to stay in Mexico himself for some reason.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“The opportunity to hear from an unscripted presidential candidate for one of the two major political parties on pretty much every major issue facing our country is a gift to journalists… [But] Journalists repeatedly lobbied social media companies to remove Trump from their platforms — with many of them finally acquiescing post-January 6…
“Earlier this week, a Washington Post reporter took it to the next level… During a White House press briefing, the Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson asked if the government has a ‘role’ in tackling ‘misinformation’ and if President Joe Biden planned to ‘intervene’ in Trump’s X Space…
“That the question was asked with little pushback from Wootson’s mainstream colleagues suggests to me that the American media has been emboldened in its illiberal ways.”
Amber Duke, Spectator World
Some argue, “Trump held 27 rallies in August 2016, according to CNBC, yet this time he has only [held] a handful… If Donald Trump wants to return to the White House, he has to get serious about winning the ‘ground war.’ Social-media memes didn’t elect him in 2016 — his relentless schedule of campaign rallies did…
“Whether or not Wisconsinites, Pennsylvanians and Michiganders got to attend a Trump rally in person, the candidate’s personal presence in some of the less fashionable zip codes in their states made an impression — in a way slick television commercials didn’t. Trump couldn’t run a ground war the same way in 2020, of course, amid COVID fears and lockdowns. Without the advantage his rallies gave him, he lost…
“Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, Trump can’t afford to be any less vigorous than he was when he took on Clinton.”
Daniel McCarthy, New York Post
