Oscar Wilde once described the English country gentleman galloping after a fox as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump surely qualifies as the incoherent in full pursuit of the unendurable.
The men’s joint appearance in an audio conversation on X on Monday night was, as expected, a display of two planet-sized egos, toxic masculinity and breathtaking mendacity. More surprisingly it was also dull, like sitting with two drunks at a bar trying to set the world to rights over more than two hours.
The main message: if Trump doesn’t win the election, and if Musk doesn’t become the emperor of the universe, you’re not going to have a country any more.
Musk and Trump’s banal chatter about subjects such as radioactive vegetables and the defeat of Napoleon made you crave a return to what came first: a blissful 40 minutes of wallpaper music. That was because crippling technical glitches left thousands of people unable to join.
After 18 minutes, billionaire Musk posted that his X platform was under a “massive” DDOS, or denial-of-service attack, which involves flooding a site with data in order to overwhelm it and knock it offline. It was an exquisite replay of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s buggy Republican primary campaign launch on X in May last year.
“Wow! The DeSantis TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Trump wrote back then on his Truth Social network. “His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
When the limbo finally ended and Musk got going, Trump had a different interpretation. “Congratulations on breaking every record in the book,” he gushed, as a more than 1 million people were listening as the conversation started, according to a counter on X.
Indeed, this was not going to be a head to head reminiscent of David Frost skewering Richard Nixon or Emily Maitlis grilling Prince Andrew. Musk remarked: “No one is themselves in an adversarial interview,” which meant we were going to get the 45th US president and the world’s richest man unfiltered and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
Musk kicked off by asking Trump to describe his attempted assassination on 13 July, in which his ear was struck by a bullet, calling his courage under fire “inspiring”. Trump had promised the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee: “You’ll never hear it from me a second time because it’s too painful to tell.” But for you, Elon? Go on, you twisted my arm.
This time there were additional dreary details about the immigration chart that Trump turned to look at, sparing him from the bullet. “Illegal immigration saved my life,” he quipped. Musk endorsed Trump shortly after the shooting.
They went on to grumble about immigration. Musk said a secure border is essential or America will not function as a country. The South African-born businessman described himself as a “legal immigrant” and asked: “Who do you want on your team? Who do you want on Team America?”
Not for the first time, Trump reflexively tapped into dehumanising colonial narratives that portrayed African savages threatening white peace and prosperity. “Elon, what’s happened is unbelievable. You have from Africa, from the Congo, they’re coming. From the Congo. And 22 people came in from the Congo recently and they’re murderers.”
A real interviewer could have demanded evidence of these 22 people and their alleged crimes to reassure us that Trump did not pluck the claim of out thin air. Instead Musk, in full space nerd mode, offered: “It’s just not possible for the United States to absorb everyone from Earth or even a few per cent of the rest of Earth. It’s just not possible.”
It took more than 20 minutes for the first mention of vice-president Kamala Harris, who was inevitably dubbed “Border tsar” and “a San Francisco liberal”. Trump ranted: “If you’re a Jewish person or if you believe in Israel … if you vote for her – it’s worse than Biden and Biden was bad – but if you vote for her, you ought to have your head examined.”
The Republican nominee promised to avert a third world war. If all this was sounding familiar, it was basically a rehash of stuff that Trump trots out at every campaign rally. Musk was about as much use as a wobbly lectern. When Trump comes to debate Harris next month, he will surely say it all over again.
But as the conversation rumbled interminably on, some strange topics arose. The ever transactional Trump, long a climate change denier and sceptic of green energy, is suddenly saying nice things about electric vehicles because Tesla boss Musk endorsed him.
“I’m sort of waiting for you to come up with solar panels on the roofs of your cars and on the trunks of the cars, and it just seems like something that at some point you will come up with – I’m sure you’ll be the first – but it would seem that a solar panel on the roofs, you know on flat surfaces, on certain surfaces might be good at least in certain areas of the country or the world where you have the sun,” the former president said.
Another stellar idea by the very stable genius who brought you injecting bleach as a cure for coronavirus.
Trump heaped praise on Musk as a “fertile mind” and embodiment of the “American dream”. Yet he couldn’t stop himself insulting his host too: “In your business everything you do is obsolete. Well, not the tunnels. But everything is obsolete. Even your rocket ships, like, a month later, they’re obsolete. You find a better way to – the only thing that’s not obsolete is a wall and a wheel.”
Clearly both participants thought all this was worthwhile. For Trump, it was another exercise in reaching Musk’s army of young white men in the hope that they will turn out for him on election day.
For Musk it was a reassuring sign that the death of X, still a hub for Washington’s political class, has been greatly exaggerated. As of Monday, Trump appears to be tweeting regularly again, a potential throwback to the days when his preposterous posts would dominate every news cycle.
It also marked a supposedly rare political intervention for Musk. “They try to paint me as a far right guy, which is absurd because I’m making electric vehicles and solar and batteries, helping the environment,” he protested, adding that he had stood in line for six hours to shake Barack Obama’s hand when he was running for president.
“It’s not like I’m some sort of dyed in the wool long term Republican. I’d actually call myself historically a moderate Democrat but now I feel like we’re really at a critical juncture for the country.” Trump represents the “path to prosperity”, he argued.
Musk sounded as if he could have gone on all night but Trump finally wound things up after two hours and five minutes. If these are two of the most powerful men on Earth, it’s surely time to jump on the next SpaceX rocket to Mars.
