The Trump-Musk Snoozefest

Even Trump’s usual ghoulishness couldn’t keep a glitch-filled conversation interesting.

Donald Trump is back on Twitter—sorry, X!—and some of his advisers are wringing their hands about it:

“Look, I love Trump on Twitter,” one Trump confidant told our Marc Caputo. “But one of the advantages on Truth Social was that nobody was on there and he could say basically whatever he wanted and a lot of the problematic stuff just didn’t get seen. Now we’re back to old times.”

Happy Tuesday.

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(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos via GettyImages / Shutterstock.)

The Farce of It All

—Andrew Egger

Last night’s much-ballyhooed X “interview” of Donald Trump by Elon Musk involved two of the biggest villains and personalities of the MAGA pantheon—the felonious, megalomaniacal, deteriorating ex-president and the internet-poisoned, race-war-curious gajillionaire mogul. So why was it all so boring?

The talk started half an hour late due to widespread glitches; many of the million-odd people trying to tune in were unable to get into the space. Musk theatrically blamed the issues on scurrilous hackers, darkly suggesting that “there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.” (As the New York Times drily put it, “the attack could not immediately be verified.”)

Things finally got going, but the vibes stayed off. Trump’s audio was oddly distorted, making him sound as though he were lisping throughout. And Musk frequently seemed unable to steer a conversation, desperately interjecting with an ineffectual “yes” or “sure” in hopes of moving on to another topic. At other times, he seemed more interested in doing his own pontificating than in trying to get good answers out of Trump: “I should probably say something about my views on climate change and oil and gas, because I’m probably different from what most people would assume,” he offered at the beginning of a lengthy soliloquy about an hour in.

The pair eventually meandered through a laundry list of topics. Trump, who said last month at the Republican National Convention that he would never again retell the story of the attempt on his life “because it’s too painful to tell,” told that story with relish. He expounded at length on his usual moonbat fables about how countries around the world are emptying their prisons and mental institutions to send their convicts and lunatics to the United States. He insisted that every foreign policy problem facing the world today could be traced back to his having to leave office; nobody acted out when he was in charge.

“I said to Vladimir Putin, I said, ‘Don’t do it. You can’t do it, Vladimir. You do it, it’s gonna be a bad day. You cannot do it,’” Trump said. “And I told him things, what I’d do. And he said, ‘No way.’ And I said, ‘way.’”

Usually, a Trump interview involves some pushback from the interviewer. This is often true even in friendly settings like Fox News, where anchors frequently try to coax or trick Trump into walking back some of his more insane utterances to make their jobs of shilling for him easier. Not so much here: To Trump’s obvious pleasure, Musk just vibed with anything he had to say. “You know, we’re having a great conversation right now,” Trump said. “Kamala wouldn’t have this conversation—she can’t, ’cause she’s not smart. She’s not a smart person, by the way.” Musk just giggled along.

Occasionally, the bizarre and vindictive sides of Trump’s personality flashed through. He kvetched that the pencil sketch of Kamala Harris on the latest cover of Time was too attractive. “She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live . . . She looked very much like a great first lady, Melania,” And he accused Joe Biden of tempting Putin into invading Ukraine: “The stupid threats coming from his stupid face that he was using—I said, this guy’s gonna cause us a war.”

But those asides weren’t enough to spice up what was ultimately a snoozefest. There was no friction, no direction, no insight as the pair rambled along for two hours, each plainly unsure by the end how to end the conversation. The only thing it illuminated was how highly the two of them think of themselves.

The MAGA faithful treated the entire affair like it was some historical gathering of intellectual heavyweights—the public having been magically transported back in time to hear Thomas Edison and Teddy Roosevelt talk shop over a beer.

But it’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t already slugging the Kool-Aid coming away with their minds changed much—let alone the sense that they’d just been on a livestream with the bull moose himself. Trump is looking for a way to reset the narrative in a presidential race that he now appears to be slightly losing. After last night’s Space, he’s still looking.

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Blowing Out the Moral Lights

—Bill Kristol

I’m grateful to Andrew for listening to Donald Trump and Elon Musk last night and sparing me that unpleasantness.

But I did listen to some of the clips this morning.

Here’s my take: Trump’s awful.

This is, I acknowledge, not breaking news. Trump’s awfulness has been so obvious for so long, and we now take it so much for granted, that it seems silly or gauche to point it out.

Still at the risk of seeming overly earnest or moralistic, I am once again going to point it out: Trump. Is. Bad. Uncommonly bad, even by the standards of today’s politics. And he’s someone whose depravity makes today’s politics far worse than they would otherwise be.

The aspect of his degeneracy that most struck me once again in his appearance last night is this: Trump admires dictators.

As he said to Musk, “Elon, I know every one of them and I know them well. I know Putin, I know Xi, and Kim Jung Un. . . . They are at the top of their game. They’re tough, they’re smart, they’re vicious.”

And he went on to explain how well he got along with those vicious dictators. Vladimir Putin, who is right now conducting a brutal war of aggression that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives? “I got along with Putin very well, and he respected me.”

North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, who presides over the world’s most totalitarian hellscape: “You know, I got along with Kim Jung Un. We had dinner. We had . . . everything. He really liked me. And I got along with him really well. We had a good relationship.”

This isn’t realpolitik. It’s the public and unapologetic admiration of viciousness.

If one loves the United States of America and the principles on which it stands, one cannot but hate this.

In the 1850s, Stephen Douglas took a “don’t care” stance on the question of whether new territories or states would allow slavery. Douglas was a far superior man to Trump, and he thought an openly amoral position on slavery necessary to preserve the Union.

But Lincoln denounced Duglas’s stance unreservedly. The Founders, according to Lincoln, were willing to tolerate slavery where it existed. But they prohibited the spread of slavery into new territories, where it had not existed, and held out the prospect of slavery’s ultimate extinction. This resistance to slavery’s expansion and the prospect of its extinction were key to the moral grounding of the nation.

And so on October 7, 1858, in their debate at Galesburg, Illinois, Lincoln said of Douglas: 

He is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them; he is penetrating, so far as lies in his power, the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty, when he is in every possible way preparing the public mind, by his vast influence, for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national.

A week later, on October 15, at Alton, Illinois, Lincoln developed his argument further:

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Today it is Trump who is blowing out the moral lights around us.

This doesn’t mean that everyone who seeks to deny Trump another term as president needs to talk only about this aspect of Trumpism. Lincoln’s Republican party didn’t campaign exclusively on slavery, and it appealed to different constituencies with various policy proposals.

Kamala Harris should do the same. She and her fellow Democrats don’t have to spend every minute denouncing Trump or explaining how dangerous he is. In fact, as a tactical matter, they should probably spend much more time building up Harris and explaining her program than focusing on Trump; it’s not clear that there’s much more information to be imparted about Trump, whereas voters still have to get comfortable with the rather sudden prospect of a Harris presidency.

But still, beneath all the political maneuvering—which is important!—one can’t lose sight of the real issue: The fight for “the common right of humanity” against the old and awful doctrine that it is might that makes right.

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Quick Hits

AT LEAST HE’S ON SEMI-SOLID LEGAL GROUND: In addition to the question of why, Trump’s return to X on Monday raised the question: How? Trump has tried to keep focus on his own social media company, Truth Social. Beyond that, it was reported that one condition that facilitated the merger of Truth Social’s owner (Trump Media & Technology Group) and the shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp—a merger that could net Trump billions—was exclusivity. The language in the License Agreement specified that Trump was obligated to make his posts on Truth Social and not make the same post on another site for six hours.

So, was Trump violating the agreement? No.

Tucked further in the SEC filing was language specifying that the exclusivity provision only pertained to “non-political social media post[s].” And, for now at least, Trump’s reentry into the Twitter-verse (X-land???) has been plainly political. Asked if he thought the ex-president was in the clear legally, Michael Ohlrogge, an assistant professor of law at New York University who researches SPACs, told Morning Shots: “It looks like that to me.”

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STONE COLD: Some new developments came in yesterday regarding the reported hacking of Trump campaign documents by (it is alleged) the Iranians. According to the Washington Post, one of the phishing attempts looks to have succeeded in compromising the account of Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime friend and adviser. Stone is rather famously a practitioner of dirty tricks. And so there is some irony in him now being caught in this sordid affair. Also—we can save you the time—he was quite invested in the tranche of Hillary Clinton emails that were unearthed by Russian actors in the 2016 election. His efforts to obtain them from WikiLeaks was kind of a big thing.

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CHOO CHOO: During last night’s talk with Elon, Trump did lament the fact that there was no good high-speed rail in this country. Which, yes, it’s kind of a shame. But culpability does rest, to a degree, on his shoulders. As president, he canceled a billion dollars or so in funding from California’s much-maligned high speed rail project and then demanded billions more be repaid. That project has been a mess, though it continues on, no thanks to Trump.

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