Donald Trump criticised the European Union and his Democratic opponents during a delayed, two-hour conversation with Elon Musk on X.
The interview, due to start at 1am on Tuesday, was put back by more than 40 minutes by technical problems with X owner Mr Musk blaming a cyber attack on the platform.
He made no mention of his disagreement with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer over Britain’s riots and free speech, but he did raise the open letter posted by EU internal market boss Thierry Breton’s asking him not to spread disinformation when interviewing the former president.
Mr Trump responded by claiming the EU is “bad” on trade with the US and criticising Nato for not spending enough on defence.
“That’s probably why they notified you,” Mr Trump said. “They don’t treat our country well.”
In a conversation that spanned more than two hours, the Tesla boss and Republican presidential nominee declared their mutual admiration and rehashed shared political views on immigration and the economy.
Mr Trump took the opportunity to take aim at President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who he blamed for a rise in illegal immigration.
“She is a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco, and then as attorney-general, she destroyed California,” he said.
“She’s going to be worse than him,” he added, referencing President Joe Biden, saying the country needed to prevent anything happening under “stupid people like Biden”.
Mr Trump started by talking about last month’s assassination attempt at a campaign rally, pledging to return to the Pennsylvania town of Butler where a bullet hit his ear.
“Doctors later told me that the ear is a place, that is a very bloody place if you’re going to get hit,” he said.
“If I had not turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now — as much as I like you.”
Mr Trump trumpeted his good relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim-Jong Un, Mr Musk questioned whether Ms Harris was tough enough to stand up to overseas leaders.
“There’s some real tough characters out there,” he said. “And if they don’t think the American president is tough, they will do what they want to do.”
Towards the end of the conversation, Mr Trump asked if 60 million people had tuned in to listen to him, and the listener count showed 1.2 million tuning in live.
A post to X advertising the conversation was viewed 93 million times.
Mr Trump’s X account had earlier posted a series of tweets for the first time in almost a year.
The Harris campaign responded to the interview with a statement which said: “Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.
“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down.
Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
The call, described by Mr Musk as a “conversation” rather than an interview, started late with people logging on to the online space initially greeted with music or silence rather than a conversation between the two men.
Mr Musk blamed an attack on X’s system for preventing access, posting: “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down.”
He appeared to accuse the Democrats for attacking X.
When an X user posted “Is Dems fighting to ‘save’ Democracy from two massive disrupters!”, Mr Musk replied “Yeah”
A distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack is an attempt to disrupt the traffic of a server or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic.
