On Monday night, Elon Musk’s love affair with Donald Trump culminated in a glitchy interview livestreamed on X. Musk — who once identified as a “moderate Democrat” but has recently swayed far enough right to organize a super-PAC that election investigators suspect is scraping voter data in swing states — officially endorsed Trump shortly after his assassination attempt. The chummy conversation, which started 40 minutes late and had even Musk’s billionaire friends complaining about technical issues, offered little in the way of information but plenty oof vibes — weird ones. Here were the strangest moments.
Trump’s speech sounded slurred.
Reporters listening in Monday night immediately said that it sounded like Trump was slurring and lisping throughout the two-hour-plus conversation with Musk. In audio clips, his speech certainly does sound weird. Some people have blamed the audio quality of the livestream, while others have claimed it’s dentures.
According to a White House correspondent for the Huffington Post, the Trump campaign responded to an inquiry about whether he was slurring with a different explanation: “Must be your shitty hearing. Get your ears checked.”
The boys chat job opportunities …
Without an ounce of pushback from his interviewer, Trump’s usual talking points were on rotation — his assassination attempt, Biden’s and Harris’s incompetence, immigration, and government overspending. Praising the way Musk gutted X’s staff when he bought the app, Trump told him, “You’re the greatest cutter.” They talked about closing the Department of Education and appointing Musk to oversee “government efficiency.”
… And real estate.
Also on the docket: lots of misinformation about global warming. Trump touted his claim that “nuclear warming,” or the threat of other countries with nuclear weapons, is a more pressing concern than climate change. “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years,” he said. “You’ll have more oceanfront property, right?”
This isn’t the first time Trump has made this joke — it got him a lot of laughs at a 2022 rally in Alaska, and he worked it into his material again this past June on Fox & Friends. You can take the real-estate scumbag out of New York, but … well, you get it.
Trump said Kamala looked “beautiful” — and also like his wife?
In an attempted jab at Kamala’s appearance, Trump brought up her new Time magazine cover. “She looks like the most beautiful actress to ever live,” Trump said, trying to suggest that the illustrated cover was more flattering than a photograph would have been. “It was a drawing, and actually, she looked very much like a great First Lady, Melania.” In his usual deliberate mispronunciation of Harris’s name, he plowed on: “She didn’t look like Camilla, but of course, she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that.” Let’s!
