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Elon Musk and Donald Trump sat down for a much-hyped live interview on X on Monday night.
Well eventually, after a 40-minute delay due to technical difficulties, which Musk blamed on an alleged cyber attack.
It has been dubbed by viewers as a bizarre and rambly conversation, with many criticising how the former president made a number of strange statements and false claims, without being challenged during the two hour discussion.
Our Deputy Political Editor, Jitendra Joshi, helps break down the key talking points from the interview and gives the latest updates on the US election as it stands.
In part two, The Standard’s Junior Fashion Editor, Joe Bromley, joins us to discuss whether British men are ready for the return of budgie smugglers? Following a surge in purchases of the controversial swimwear.
Despite Brits largely opting for a more modest swim short for years now, they’ve remained a staple for many in other European countries… and now it looks like they’re making a comeback here too.
Here’s a fully automated transcript of today’s episode:
From London, I'm Rochelle Travers, and this is The Standard.
My apologies for the late start.
We unfortunately had a massive distributed denial of service attack against our servers.
This massive attack illustrates there's a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
The two incredibly divisive figures sat down for a much hyped live interview on X on Monday night.
Well, eventually, after a 40 minute delay due to technical difficulties, which musk blamed on an alleged cyber attack.
It's been dubbed by viewers as a bizarre and ramble conversation, with many criticising how the former president made a number of strange statements and false claims without being challenged during the two hour discussion.
Joining me to break down the interview in more detail and share the latest updates on the US election is The Standard's deputy political editor, Jitendra Joshi.
Jit, there was a lot of build up to the Musk-Trump interview.
How did it actually go?
It didn't go so well for the first 40 minutes after, as you say, a lot of hype and a lot of build up.
And for the first 40 minutes, there was nothing at all, because not for the first time with political appearances involving Elon musk, the technical side of it seemed to let them down.
Now, Elon Musk claims that that was caused by a cyber attack brought on by who knows whom bombarding the X site with requests, technical requests to force it down.
Some experts are saying, well, what's the evidence for that?
You know, they're not seeing it.
And the company X have not offered any such evidence.
So, it could more be similar to what we saw previously when musk, after a lot of hype, hosted the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to launch his presidential campaign, a little while ago before that flamed out.
Similarly, that was launched on X and similarly suffered all sorts of embarrassing technical issues which came to define the appearance more than anything DeSantis actually said.
Then when it did finally get going, it was built by musk as more of a conversation than an interview, and certainly was not anything that any of us would recognize as a searching investigation into Donald Trump's views.
It was more Elon Musk having a loving with the Republican, basically agreeing with everything he said, and nodding and laughing appreciatively, even as Donald Trump was coming up with his trademark, outlandish claims and outright falsehoods.
That was the next two hours of it.
As you say, there were a number of bizarre moments, as well as false claims from Donald Trump in there, just walk us through some of those.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of them, if you're familiar with Donald Trump, if you listen attentively to his campaign speeches, you'll be familiar with a lot of this stuff, including his highly dubious claims about “inflation being at 100 year high in America”, that “Joe Biden more recently was forced out in some sort of coup in order to allow Kamala Harris to run as a Democratic candidate”.
Another one centred on Trump's claims about the extent of illegal immigration to the US.
He's now taken to claiming that 22, it's a weirdly specific number, “22 murderers have been released” from, in quotes, “the Congo”.
He doesn't spell out which of the two countries called Congo in Africa he means, but in any case, “22 murderers from that country have been released and sent to the US”.
It's weird and unverifiable.
But the weirdest one was probably when Trump likened Harris to his own wife, Melania, kind of praising both their looks while trying to portray Kamala Harris as somehow unpresidential for the way she was portrayed on the cover of Time magazine in quite a sort of stylistic artist's drawing.
You can read that comparison as sort of saying, well, you know, she's as good looking as my wife, or you could read it as saying, well, you know, she looks inauthentic and not to be trusted, which goes back to something Trump has been another weird claim of Trump, which is that Harris has only recently started claiming she's black.
We could be a while here trying to explain what he means.
It's weirdness basically, and maybe some of his supporters will get the political point.
Most other people are left scratching their heads.
There was another point that listeners started to pick up on, which is that at various moments, Trump sounded like he had a bit of a lisp.
Now, there's all sorts of questions as we know about age in this campaign.
Joe Biden at 81 was already dogged by severe doubts about his mental acuity and eventually had to bow out because of those.
Trump himself is showing his age sometimes, and certainly to his detractors, the apparent lip lisp was used as more evidence that he's getting a bit old and past it.
I mean, again, we're straying into the unknowns here, and it could well just have been down to some audio glitch, where we know already as we discussed already that there were technical issues with this.
Do you think this interview did anything positive for Trump's campaign?
We're at a point where it doesn't matter so much what he says for his base because they're going to be with him come hell or high water.
As ever in politics, the race concerns the floating voters, the centre ground, the few people left in the US who have yet to make up their minds.
And it's hard to see this in itself doing him many favours because if you're a Trump fan, you'll like what he says on his campaign stump speech, and you won't necessarily be deterred by his more outlandish claims and outright forcers.
If you do want to hear a candidate, give you a message that makes you want to tick their box, and if you were tuning in last night, well, certainly there's nothing positive in what Trump has to say.
And this is very much a point that the Democrats have now picked up on since Biden stood down.
They are now going full ball with the campaign message of what they would say is hopefulness.
You know, that it's not all about doom and gloom and a future vision of carnage, as Trump likes to espouse.
You know, there is an alternative now on offer.
There's nothing in what he said last night that offers that alternative, that instead he's relying on the well-worn, rather dismal, negative viewpoint that he has, which as I say, appeals well to his fervent base, less so to anyone who's looking for a positive message of change.
In terms of the big picture, how are things looking currently with the US election?
Do the Democrats still have most of the momentum behind them as it stands?
Yeh, certainly, yeah.
I mean, since Biden left the race, the race has been transformed.
The momentum is very much with the Democrats to the extent that Trump has really been struggling to respond.
One of his most fundamental flaws, which is arguing about perception when things like crowd size is now trying to make out that Harris is faking the size of the crowd at her rallies.
If you recall, on the very first day he entered the White house, this was exactly his complaint, that the media was minimizing the size of the crowd at his inauguration, unfairly making comparisons with the sort of numbers that Barack Obama used to drew.
These sort of things are an obsession with Trump, you know, where perception matters more than reality.
And it all comes down to a sort of virility contest.
Instead of playing that game, the Democrats have come back with a very different message now.
They're no longer having to defend themselves over Biden's physical and mental stamina, and they're trying to articulate a more positive platform.
And certainly that's the case with Harris' running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz.
So, and above all, they're carrying momentum going into their convention next week, the Democrats are when they convene in Chicago next week.
And traditionally, those conventions act as a platform to give a bit of a bounce to that particular party.
Trump had his own bounce at the Republican convention, which came right after he just survived that assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
Whatever bounce he got from that and whatever lift he's got from sympathy over the fact that he was nearly killed by an assassin seems to have ebbed away now, and that momentum is now with the Democrats.
However, the big question still facing Kamala Harris and her campaign is, what does she mean to do?
What's her policy on the economy, on immigration and foreign policy?
And she's only just beginning to articulate that.
So, there are big questions ahead.
We've got a debate to come up between the two in September.
There's a lot that could change between now and November.
Let's go to the ads.
Coming up in part two, The Standard's junior fashion editor, Joe Bromley, reveals why budgie smugglers are making a comeback.
Year on year searches are up for budgie smugglers 89%.
And those for speedos alone have more than doubled.
The Standard podcast will be back in just a moment.
Welcome back.
Budgie Smugglers.
It's a controversial piece of swimwear that is apparently having a bit of a resurgence in the UK.
Despite Brits largely opting for a more modest swim short for many years now, they've remained a staple for many in other European countries.
And now it looks like they're making a comeback here too.
Joe Bromley, The Evening Standard's junior fashion editor has been investigating their rise in popularity.
Joe, are we seeing the return of Budgie Smugglers to the UK?
Well, we might well be.
If you look at the statistics, searches are at a huge high, certainly after the outing of the French diver Jules Boyer at the Olympics.
And that is in part because of his Budgie Smugglers and indeed what they were smuggling.
But if you look at the other statistics, searches on List, which is a shopping app, which gives quite good data, found that year on year searches are up for Budgie Smugglers 89%.
And those for Speedos alone have more than doubled.
And so, when I was looking into this, there's an independent men's swimwear brand called Abtony.
And they've recorded in the last two years, more than an 85% surge in sales for their swim briefs.
And basically, I guess what we're looking at is whether or not these little swimming briefs have made their way across the channel, because of course you have in Europe, our Italian, Spanish, German counterparts never really stopped wearing the budget smugglers.
In France, in fact, long trunks are actually banned in a lot of pools for hygiene reasons.
But we have a tendency to be a little more prudish here in Britain.
So it's whether or not people are building up the confidence again.
What sparked this resurgence in the UK?
Well, it's been bubbling for a while.
I think, well, as Luke Day, who's a big celebrity stylist here in London said, men are really investing in their bodies at the moment.
If you've paid X amount of money for third space membership, you want to show it off.
So there's that.
And there's also been a couple of sort of cultural moments this summer that have pushed them back into the limelight.
So in July, there was leaked photos of a Dolce and Gabbana campaign with Theo James, most famous from The White lotus and also The Gentleman.
And he was sort of straddling Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriend on a speedboat, wearing some tiny white briefs.
So that went viral.
And they were actually the same white briefs as the ones that David Gandhi wears in his Dolce and Gabbana light blue fragrance ads, which began in 2007 and have become a pretty iconic image.
So there was Theo James in July.
And then obviously we had Olympic fever kick in.
So, there was Jules Boyer, the French diver.
And of course, we were all obsessed with Tom Daley and the rest of the Team GB divers.
So yeah, and that kind of leans in to the origins of the budgie smuggler or the speedo as we know them today.
So, to go into a little bit of history about them, the sort of sport briefs first gained acclaim back in the 50s when the Australian swimmer label, Speedo, then sponsored the Australian swimming team.
That was the 1957 Melbourne Summer Olympics.
They took home eight gold medals and kind of this image of a tiny trunk equalling sporting prowess kind of took hold.
So, by the 60s, because of their no drag design, they became very popular amongst water sport professionals.
And then by the 70s and 80s, they sort of boomed into this fashion statement before reclining in popularity into the 90s.
Do you think this is going to be a passing trend here, or could it stick around for a while?
So, the sort of the pros for them is as well as showing off your body, they are sort of nicer, more free to swim with.
For the same reason that divers like them, there is no drag and you are sort of free in the ocean.
So, I think the more people that try that out, the more people will be keen to carry that on.
Another celebrity stylist who spoke to Tom Stubbs said that actually they're kind of the anti-trend.
People that wear Speedos don't really care if they're trendy or not.
They do them because they enjoy the feeling and they're feeling free.
So, in that sense, no.
However, are they linked to a sort of fashion trend this summer potentially?
I spoke to my friends and family for this piece to see what they thought.
And actually it was a pretty divided pool between those that wanted to lean in and out.
So it also raised a couple of anxieties, I suppose, for men and their bodies and the budgie smugglers in terms of the people that did not want to try them.
And they sort of ranged from sort of uncontrolled body hair to worrying about their body, a couple of them about their age, and also quite a lot of consciousness over their endowment because, yeah, growers not showers were not keen on the idea.
So, in that case, I don't know, the trend is that people that want to get involved, but there's always going to be reasons that people don't want to wear them.
You can read more about these stories and others in The Standard newspaper or on our website, standard.co.uk.
That's it from this episode.
This podcast will be back tomorrow at 4 PM.
