Donald Trump’s much anticipated conversation on the social media platform X with owner Elon Musk was marred by technical errors Monday evening, starting more than 40 minutes late as more than a million users tuned in to the event. It was the latest mishap for the Republican nominee as he has sought to regain his footing amid a surge in Democratic enthusiasm for his new rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
The joint appearance was also a high-profile embarrassment for Musk’s X, which has faced numerous outages since the entrepreneur’s takeover and suffered from a server meltdown during a presidential campaign launch last year.
Musk billed the conversation with Trump as “unscripted with no limits on subject matter.” But during much of the discussion, he focused on comfortable topics for Trump, such as undocumented immigration. He also allowed the former president to deliver his preferred talking points and a stream of false statements, giving the chat some of the hallmarks of Trump’s signature campaign rallies.
The friendly conversation came after Trump reacted combatively to challenging questions at the National Association of Black Journalists convention – and as the GOP nominee is also attacking Harris for not doing interviews since she announced her campaign for president. Trump reiterated that criticism of Harris on the X Space and repeated his frequent claim that Harris’s rise to the top of the Democratic ticket amounted to a “coup.”
Musk opened the Spaces apologizing for the delay, saying that “we unfortunately had a massive distributed denial of service” attack on the site that “saturated all our data lines.” He did not immediately provide evidence for his claim. “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” he said.
Some engineers said it didn’t make sense that the rest of X was functioning well while users struggled to access the stream. Distributed denial of service attacks often look like an excess of regular traffic. With millions of people expected to listen in, ordinary traffic would have been high, and one way to prepare, adding bandwidth capacity, would also absorb most DDoS attacks.
An X adviser in a position to know said he saw no evidence of an attack, but cautioned that he could not immediately rule out a stealthier offensive and noted that Musk would be privy to additional information on any attack. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters.
At the start of their discussion, Musk said he was honored to speak with Trump, who congratulated Musk on “breaking every record in the book tonight,” seeking to spin the technical glitches positively.
Much of Trump’s interview with Musk echoed his previous speeches, including attacking Harris on immigration and touting his relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He added that “the people from within” the United States often pose a bigger threat than those countries.
When Musk criticized undocumented immigration but said he believes most unauthorized migrants are not “bad,” Trump responded in agreement: “Hundred percent.” Yet the Republican nominee has vilified undocumented immigrants throughout his campaign, saying without evidence that countries around the world are emptying their jails and mental institutions to send people into the United States en masse. Trump repeated those unsubstantiated claims on Monday night.
At one point, Trump reiterated his assertion that a chart on immigration numbers had saved his life – because Trump was looking toward it when a gunman tried to assassinate him. Trump was grazed but not seriously injured. “Illegal immigration saved my life,” Trump joked on Monday. He and Musk chuckled.
Musk, who endorsed Trump after the attempted assassination, praised Trump’s in-the-moment response. “You can’t fake bravery under such circumstances. … I think a lot of people admire your courage under fire there,” Musk told Trump.
Trump also repeated his hope to shut down the Education Department, a longtime goal for some conservatives. He said he wants to “move education back to the states” but conceded that “not every state will do great.” He predicted that maybe 35 of them would “do great.”
The former president’s speech during the interview sounded different from his usual delivery, drawing the attention of many social media users and an attack from Harris’s campaign. Some on social media said it sounded like he was slurring his words. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for an explanation.
Trump has been trying different ways to break through with the electorate at a challenging moment for his campaign. With President Joe Biden in the race earlier this year, polls showed Trump leading in several key battleground states. But after Biden’s withdrawal and his endorsement of Harris, Democrats have quickly coalesced around her newly formed ticket with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The two have drawn big crowds, and polls have shown them gaining ground.
In the reshaped race, Trump has struggled to settle on a line of attack against Harris, trying a range of insults and inaccurate claims. He has drawn headlines for falsely questioning her heritage, reigniting a feud with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and holding a meandering news conference last week.
During Monday’s conversation, Trump portrayed Harris as the “border czar” (Though Biden asked Harris to negotiate with Central American countries to help address the root causes of migration, he never put her in charge of border policy) and criticized her limited access to questions from the press. He continued to mispronounce Harris’s first name, a move critics have suggested is an attempt to “other” her, and suggested she would be unable to negotiate with world leaders.
After Trump downplayed the threat of global warming, Musk addressed the issue of climate change minutes later, saying efforts to address it should happen without “demonizing people.” “It’s not like the house is on fire immediately,” Musk said.
Some research has predicted catastrophic levels of climate change in less than a decade if countries do not significantly reduce their pollution. Trump suggested to Musk that he feels little urgency to curb fossil fuel use and speculated that the world has “100 to 500 years left.”
Trump made a flurry of posts on X earlier in the day ahead of the interview, reviving a social media account that was central to his 2016 election and turbulent presidency but had been dormant since last August. For years, Trump used Twitter as his primary megaphone as he railed against undocumented immigrants, the results of the 2020 election and virtually anyone who crossed him.
Trump had been banned from the site, then called Twitter, after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Musk restored Trump’s account about a month after purchasing the site in 2022, but Trump largely stayed off the platform in favor of Truth Social, a similar platform in which he owns a majority stake. His postings on Truth Social haven’t garnered the same attention that his tweets once did.
The conversation gave the former president a much greater audience than he reaches on Truth Social and adds to the entrepreneur’s recent efforts to use his platform to sway the election. But the site repeatedly crashed as users attempted to access an audio conversation streamed using X’s Spaces feature, complicating efforts to maximize the event’s reach.
As hundreds of thousands of users initially waited for the event to start, Musk claimed a “massive DDOS attack on X” was to blame for the delay.
Monday night’s technical problems echo an episode last year when Musk’s site crashed repeatedly as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attempted to launch his presidential campaign using the platform. Musk had previously said he was making preparations to avert a similar outcome this time around.
Still, the revival of Trump’s account potentially heralds a new era for the former president’s campaign. It’s unclear whether or how much Trump will continue using Musk’s platform, but in a campaign email Monday, the former president stated: “I’m back on X for a short time.” A permanent return to the platform by Trump would be a major win for Musk, who has begun to more actively court a right-wing audience to his platform.
Trump could also widen his audience by shifting to the larger platform, where he has more than 88 million followers compared with only 7.5 million on Truth Social. The same campaign ad posted around the same time on both platforms Monday attracted 172,000 likes on X within two hours, compared with less than 9,000 on Truth Social.
Trump’s posts came hours before the interview streamed on X. No leader of a major social media site has actively used their platform to support a presidential candidate, an unprecedented dynamic that has raised alarm among some Democrats, who have accused Musk of tilting X in favor of the former president.
A representative for the Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the candidate was offered a similar opportunity to appear on X. In response to a post last week speculating about whether Harris would agree to a similar interview with Musk, he replied, “I’m open to it.”
On Monday, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to investigate claims of bias on the platform. A handful of pro-Harris accounts have been labeled as spam or restricted in recent weeks. “Egregious falsehoods and conspiracy theories are becoming commonplace on X,” Nadler wrote. “While we may have significant disagreement over the degree and extent of content moderation, I hope that we can at least agree that enforcement on a major platform like X should be fair to both sides.”
Also on Monday, a top European Union official pointedly warned Musk that his live broadcast with Trump would be subject to the bloc’s sweeping social media law. European Commissioner Thierry Breton in a letter citing the E.U.’s Digital Services Act, directed Musk to take measures to address “the amplification of harmful content,” or face action to “protect E.U. citizens from serious harm.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino immediately criticized the letter, suggesting that it “patronizes” European citizens and was an “unprecedented attempt to stretch a law intended to apply in Europe to political activities in the US.” Musk later responded with a profane recommendation for the European Union.
For about an hour Monday, Trump fired off posts on X that included an attack ad against Harris and a link to his fundraising account. The posts were his first since August 2023, when he posted his mug shot after his surrender and release from an Atlanta jail on charges connected with his attempts to reverse the 2020 election results. Each of Monday’s posts attracted hundreds of millions of likes, replies and other engagements. Trump’s campaign sent out an email alerting its subscribers to his post on X.
Musk, X and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In the months after Trump was banned from Twitter, he teamed up with former contestants of his show “The Apprentice” to create Truth Social. The social media site, which does not publicly report how many users are on the site, has consistently reported significant losses.
The former president has told people close to him that he wants to stick with Truth Social because he stands to gain from the platform’s success. He owns about 60 percent of its parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which has a public market value of more than $4 billion. The company’s stock price had fallen about 5 percent Monday afternoon.
Trump asked Musk last summer whether the billionaire would be interested in buying Truth Social, but the proposal appears to have gone nowhere. Meanwhile, the former president continued to post on his own social platform Monday, mostly to attack Harris and polls that show him losing ground to the Democratic presidential nominee, accusing them of being “fake” without providing evidence to back up that claim.
As the Monday conversation appeared to come to a close, Trump took a moment to praise Musk for how many users tuned in to the event. Trump erroneously claimed that “60 million or something” were listening to the stream. Only 1.1 million were listening at that moment. Musk did not correct him.
(c) 2024, The Washington Post · Marianne LeVine, Faiz Siddiqui, Hannah Knowles, Trisha Thadani, Drew Harwell