A glitchy X/Twitter conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk

The great Dr. Johnson was once asked what he thought about John Milton’s famous work, Paradise Lost. His reply, “None would have wished it longer.” Were Johnson alive today, he would have stamped the same label on Donald Trump’s two-hour tête-à-tête with Elon Musk. 

The lengthy interview began forty minutes late, a technical glitch the mainstream media celebrated with unrestrained joy. They hate, hate, hate Elon Musk (despite his electric vehicles) — and they hate a media rival. They hate his transformation of Twitter, now X, into an open forum with very little censorship. They much prefer the cooperative censorship regime forged between the other social media giants and the Biden administration. 

And, of course, they hate Musk’s foray into politics since he has taken the wrong side. Until now, Musk has largely avoided politics. He still describes himself as centrist who supported Obama; he said so in the talk with Trump. But Musk has committed what mainstream media pundits consider a mortal sin. He has endorsed Trump. For those reasons and more, Musk’s media competitors celebrated the technical problems that delayed the interview. 

What caused the delay? Musk attributed it to a massive online attack, called a distributed denial of service, or DDOS. If he is correct, then the attack constitute deliberate interference in the American election process. We need to know whether the problem was the one Musk claims — and not his own team’s failure. If the problem really was a DDOS, who caused it. Were the malevolent actors domestic or foreign? Foreign actors are a real possibility since that is the likely source of the hackers who penetrated the Trump campaign’s computers and gave the stolen, confidential material to US publications. Iran is considered the most likely culprit. 

The interview itself covered familiar themes in familiar ways. It didn’t break any news, with the possible exception of Trump’s commitment to dismantle the Department of Education and return those functions to the states. The rest of the interview covered all the big topics: immigration, crime, the economy, lawfare against Trump and reestablishing American deterrence abroad. 

On full display were the personality and policies that have deeply divided Americans since Trump descended the escalator in 2015. Half the country loves him. Half hates him. 

That was the Trump who spoke with Musk. He was both candid and hyperbolic, unrestrained in lacerating both Biden and Harris. He repeatedly said Biden had always been “dumb” but the problem was now much worse because the president was in steep cognitive decline. 

Biden’s policies, he said, were as confused as his brain. He had taken a low-inflation economy and ruined it, and done the same thing with a secure southern border. Other countries were emptying their prisons and psychiatric wards and sending them and their criminal gangs to the US, where Biden and Harris left the border open. Foreign policy was just as bad, he said. Biden’s weak posture abroad encouraged Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and Iran’s on Israel. Harris would be even worse, especially for Israel. 

Since Biden is out of the race, Harris was the focus of Trump’s jeremiad. She is “a radical left San Francisco liberal,” who would ruin America just as she and Gavin Newsom had ruined that beautiful city and then that beautiful state.  

Musk guided the conversation, mostly through his comments rather than direct questions, and gave the floor to Trump. Elon’s big push was for much more extensive deregulation, as well as faster decisions from a sluggish federal bureaucracy. As Musk put it, soon everything will either be illegal or take forever to get done. Trump agreed heartily and touted his own record cutting back regulations before Biden and Harris reimposed them. 

The deepest agreement between Trump and Musk was that American now faced “a fork in the road,” with very different futures depending on who was elected president. Musk made the statement gravely. Trump, the campaigner and salesman, boomed it. If Kamala wins, he said repeatedly, we won’t have a country. 

The Democrats display a fearful symmetry. If Trump wins, we won’t have a country. On that grim foundation, we have reached bipartisan agreement.