Former U.S. President Donald Trump has returned to the social media platform X where he was interviewed by the platform’s owner, American-South African billionaire Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump in the U.S. presidential race.
In the two-hour interview, Musk praised the way Trump handled himself during the assassination attempt on his life a month ago. “If I had not turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now,” Trump said. After being struck in the ear by a bullet, and ducking down on the floor, Trump—surrounded by Secret Service personnel—got up, raised his fist, and shouted “Fight, fight, fight!” to the crowd, while being whisked away to safety. Musk called this act “incredibly inspiring,” saying that was the moment he decided to endorse Trump.
“I think we’re at a fork in the road of destiny, of civilization, and I think we need to take the right path, and I think you’re the right path,” Musk told Trump.
Musk, a pioneer businessman and investor, founder of space company SpaceX and CEO of electric vehicle-manufacturing firm Tesla, is disliked by the Western liberal elites for his conservative views. He acquired Twitter, one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, two years ago, rebranded it as X, and has aimed to make it a platform for free speech. He has restored the banned accounts of public personalities, including Donald Trump.
Trump has been using his own media platform Truth Social ever since his ban from Twitter following the Capitol riots on January 6th, 2021. Trump has just over 7.5 million followers on Truth Social, while his Twitter/X account is followed by 89 million.
Despite the restoration of his Twitter account in November 2022, Trump has stayed away from the platform until now. He uploaded a series of election campaign messages on Monday, August 12th, and also announced his upcoming interview with Musk.
In the interview, Trump called the Democratic Party’s decision to dump incumbent President Joe Biden as their candidate in the November presidential elections and replace him with Vice President Kamala Harris, a coup and a scam—a sentiment shared by many Republican politicians, as well as some decidedly leftist organisations, like Black Lives Matter—who believe Democratic voters were robbed of their choice for president. Trump said:
This was a coup. This was a coup on a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way, or we can do it the hard way.’
Trump referred to Harris as “third rate,” “incompetent” and “a radical left lunatic,” criticising both her and Biden for letting in millions of illegal migrants over the past three-and-a-half years.
I believe it’s over 20 million people came into our country. Many coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger version of that is insane asylums. And many are terrorists. And I’ll tell you what, they’re coming not just from South America. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Asia. They’re coming from the Middle East.
Musk agreed with Trump, saying “you’re not a country unless you have a secure border.”
Trump declared that if he is reelected as president, his administration “will undertake the largest deportation effort ever seen in this country,” and would restore order and enforce immigration laws to their fullest extent.
Trump also said there would be less geopolitical tension in the world, had he been reelected in 2020, as he was tough on nations such as Russia, China, and North Korea, and knows the countries’ respective leaders “well.”
First of all, the Israeli attack would have never happened. Russia would never have attacked Ukraine, and we’d have no inflation, and we wouldn’t have had the Afghanistan mess. … If you take a few of those events away, and we have a different world.
He also criticised Kamala Harris for having avoided the media for 22 days. As Fox News reports, she has snubbed formal press conferences or sit-down interviews since she emerged as the Democratic nominee for the White House.
According to nationwide opinion polls, Biden was lagging behind Trump by 2-3 percentage points, but Kamala Harris has revived the Democratic Party’s chances, and polls suggest that the race for the White House will be close.
