Trump, Musk talk 2024 White House race, immigration, education, more

In an audio interview heard by more than a million people on X, Republican candidate for US Presidential Elections, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the owner of the platform, discussed a wide range of issues from immigration to the economy, education, climate change, Russia and Ukraine, the relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping in the context of the 2024 presidential election.

The X owner has endorsed the former president against his Democrat rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump had the upper hand in the 2024 presidential election till President Joe Biden was in the fray. The race has changed since Biden dropped out and endorsed his deputy, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris has changed the race. She has energised the Democratic party, raised more funds, and has taken the lead in polls, even in key battleground states.

“Illegal immigration saved my life”

Trump in the interview said that illegal immigration saved his life while talking about the assassination attempt on him at an election rally. 

They began by talking about the assassination attempt on Trump at an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Musk acknowledged that Trump won his support and endorsement when he called out “fight, fight” as he was being led out of the arena by Secret Service personnel.

Trump recalled that he had turned his head towards a chart on illegal immigration and that might have saved his life, agreeing with Musk. “Illegal immigration saved my life. You’re right.”

“The incredible thing though, when you talk about the odds, you had to be exactly at that angle, but, the incredible thing is that the chart I used it less than 20% of the time. It was just a moment, yeah, it’s always on my left, never my right, and it is always at the end of the speech. So we have it, it’s on the right, not the left. It’s at the beginning, not the end. And even the people that put it up, they were unprepared, and they did a great job. They got it up immediately, fortunately. But I looked to the right and the bullet came whizzing by, hitting my ear, so it was too busy. But when you think of the odds of that, and you know that normally, you wouldn’t use it, normally, I wouldn’t have the thing, and then, you know, would have been a very different story. It’s, it’s very much, I say, an act of God. It’s a miracle that it happened, and I’m honoured by it. I’m honoured by it.”

Trump has made undocumented immigration the centrepiece of his re-election campaign slamming the Biden-Harris administration for the surge at the southern border with Mexico.

“Will shut down US education department”

The former President also vowed to shut down the federal department of education that was created in 1980, according to its website, to lay down policies on federal financial aid for education, and distributing as well as monitoring those funds; collecting data on America’s schools and disseminating research; focusing national attention on key educational issues; and prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education.

Trump said: “We’re ranked at the bottom of every list of the top 40. We’re ranked number 40, number 38 Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, different countries are ranked good. Actually, China is pretty close to the top. There are top six or seven, but we’re ranked at the bottom, almost at the bottom, 38, 39, 40. In other words, horrible. And yet we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world. And what I’m going to do is one of the first acts, and this is where I need an Elon Musk. I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage in sports. I want to close up the Department of Education.”

Trump calls Harris a ‘radical Left lunatic’, Biden ‘close to vegetable’

Trump called his Democratic rival VP Kamala Harris  a “radical Left lunatic” and said that President Joe Biden was “close to vegetable stage.”

About Harris, Trump said: “Far Left, like far, far worse than Bernie Sanders,” referring to Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats.

“She is considered more liberal by far than Bernie Sanders. She’s a radical Left lunatic. And if she’s going to be our President very quickly, you’re not going to have a country anymore. And she’ll go back to all of the things that she believes in. She believes in defunding the police. She believes in no fracking, zero. You don’t know, all of a sudden she’s saying, No, I will. I really want to see fracking today, that is if they got it.”

Trump also said that Harris is “going to be worse than him (Biden), because she is a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco, and then as Attorney General, she destroyed California.”

“Now, Biden is, you know, close to the vegetable stage, in my opinion,” Trump said.

“I looked at him today on the beach, and I said, Why would anybody allow him? The guy could barely walk. Why would anybody allow him? He has a political advisor to think this looks good, you know, he thinks this looks good because it looks so bad. And it’s, it’s ridiculous, I mean, and he’s been doing that for a long time, you know, he can’t lift the chair. The chair weighs about three ounces. It’s meant for children and old people to lift, and he can’t lift it. The whole thing is crazy.”

He was referring to a video clip of Biden on the beach recently.

Musk educates climate change sceptic Trump

Elon Musk, a electric car magnate himself, sought to educate Trump about climate change, greenhouse gases, and the future of renewable energy.

In his conversation with the climate change denier who has derided electric cars and green energy, Musk gingerly approached the subject calling himself a moderate who doesn’t think the gas and oil industry should be vilified or immediately shut down.

Making the case for renewable energy, he spoke to Trump as if he were tutoring a kid, that there are two reasons for adopting it – the finite petroleum resources and carbon dioxide (CO2) build-up’s impact on health.

There has to be a move towards sustainable energy resources because eventually, “if you run out of oil and gas, it’s not there. It’s not infinite. And there is some risk” to the economies.

As for the health aspect, he said: “If you just keep increasing the parts per million [of CO2] in the atmosphere, long enough, eventually it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe.”

“We’re now in the sort of 400 range [and] we’re adding, I think, about roughly two parts per million per year … it means it is like we still have quite a bit of time” before disaster strikes, he added.

“So you get the solar power, combine that with batteries because, obviously, the sun doesn’t shine at night and then you use that to charge the electric cars and you have a long-term sustainable solution,” he said.

Trump, however, was a distracted pupil. First, he tried to change the subject by veering off into drilling for oil in Alaska and then into how “nuclear warming” – the danger of a nuclear war – was a greater threat than global warming.

A cyberattack delay

The Musk-Trump interview was way behind schedule because of technical issues.

“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X,” Musk posted on X 18 minutes after the scheduled start time of 8 pm US Eastern Time (5 am IST).

“Working on shutting it down.”

“Worst case,” he added, “we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyberattack in which an attacker overwhelms a website, server, or network resource with malicious traffic, according to one explanation.

Six minutes later, Musk posted again: “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”

Three minutes later, he wrote on X, “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8.30 pm ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter.”

Trump at odds with Twitter (now X)

The former president was permanently suspended from X in January 2021, when the social media platform was known as Twitter. The ban was lifted by Musk after he bought the platform. Trump returned to the platform in August 2023 and has posted just one message since. He remains active, however, on Truth Social, the look-alike social media platform that he launched after being banned from X/Twitter.

(Compiled from syndicated feed)