Trump revisits most divisive talking points in rambling interview with Musk

Donald Trump sat down with the billionaire Elon Musk on Monday for a rambling and vitriolic interview that revisited many of the former president’s most divisive talking points.

The interview on X, which is owned by Musk, got off to an inauspicious start, with technical issues that initially prevented many users from watching the conversation. Musk blamed the delay on a “massive” cyber-attack, but the cause of the glitch was not entirely clear.

Related: Elon Musk’s X suffers tech failures at start of Donald Trump interview

After the interview started more than 40 minutes late, Trump – who at times appeared to have a lisp – began the conversation by recounting at Musk’s request the failed assassination attempt against him last month. Although Trump previously said he would only share the story once at the Republican convention last month, he again discussed in detail his brush with death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which he said he would visit again in October.

“It was a miracle. If I hadn’t turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now, as much as I like you,” Trump told Musk.

Trump then pivoted to discussing his usual anti-immigration views, warning about the “rough people” attempting to enter the country through the US-Mexico border.

“These are people that are in jail for murder and all sorts of things, and they’re releasing them into our country,” Trump said. Extensive research has uncovered no link between immigration and higher levels of crime.

Trump proceeded to attack his opponent Kamala Harris as the “border tsar” of the Biden administration, even though Democratic officials and immigrant rights experts have contested that characterization of her policy portfolio. He repeatedly mocked Harris as a “radical” Democrat who had “destroyed” California when she served as the state’s attorney general and later its senator.

And he bizarrely complimented Harris for looking “beautiful” on the cover of Time magazine, comparing her to his wife, Melania, while noting that the image was a sketch.

“She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live,” Trump said. “It was a drawing, and actually, she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania.”

The Harris campaign condemned the interview as an example of Trump’s “extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda”.

“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 live stream in the year 2024,” said Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesperson.

The interview came as Harris has pulled ahead in polls following the launch of her campaign last month. The Decision Desk HQ and the Hill’s national polling average now shows Harris with a 0.3% lead over Trump, who had a 3.3% advantage over Biden before the president withdrew from the race.

Harris appears to be in an even stronger position in the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which will probably determine the outcome of the election in November.

According to a recent set of surveys conducted last week by the New York Times and Siena College, Harris now leads by four points in those three states, while prior polls showed a virtual tie or a slight Trump advantage in those states.

Democrats’ momentum appears to have rattled Trump, and his campaign has struggled to define Harris as her favorability has climbed in the past month. On Monday, Trump seemed to be longing for a return to his contest against Biden, as he continued to ridicule the Democratic incumbent as “the worst president in history”.

Trump peppered his comments with insults directed at other Democrats as well, including the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker (“a real loser”), and the California congressman he referred to as Adam “Shifty” Schiff. He also went on extended and often baffling tangents about topics such as the climate crisis and the war in Ukraine.

“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years,” Trump said. “The biggest threat is nuclear warming.”

Trump said of the war in Ukraine: “Russia defeated Germany with us, and they defeated Napoleon. You know, they’ve been around a long time. They’re a big fighting force, and it’s very unfair … We’re in a very bad position. And I’m not going to blame, exclusively, but I can tell you, I could have stopped that.”

Musk remained unbothered and generally flattering toward Trump throughout the interview. Musk even suggested he could help in Trump’s future administration as a member of a “government efficiency commission”.

“I’d love it for you. You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said, referring to Musk’s penchant for executing mass layoffs.

Trump and Musk have somewhat of a checkered history. Although Musk has said he voted for Biden in 2020, he endorsed Trump last month after the failed assassination attempt, and he has now launched a political action committee to assist Republicans’ electoral efforts. According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk has set a goal of turning out 800,000 Trump voters in battleground states.

Musk also reinstated Trump’s X account in 2022, two years after the former president was banned from the platform after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Trump has not made much use of his account since his reinstatement, as he has instead chosen to post on his own social media platform, Truth Social. But he shared a series of posts hours before the interview on Monday to promote his campaign and paint Harris as a “San Francisco Radical”.

“Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Trump wrote in one post. “We’re a nation in decline.”

With less than three months left until election day, Trump indicated he would start posting to X more often. Given Trump’s record of upending news cycles with his tweets, his return to the platform could inject even more uncertainty into what has already been a historically tumultuous presidential race.

Before the conversation between Musk and Trump, a senior EU figure warned Musk against possible “amplification of harmful content”. In a letter posted on X, Thierry Breton, commissioner for internal market of the European Union, urged Musk to “ensure X’s compliance” with EU law, including the Digital Services Act, adopted in 2022 to address a number of issues including disinformation.

Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, urged the EU to “mind their own business instead of trying to meddle in the US presidential election”.

Musk responded with a meme that said “fuck your own face”.

The Press Association contributed to this report