Donald Trump is returning — at least for one night — to give a live interview Monday on X, the platform from which he was banned for nearly two years following the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.
Trump and Elon Musk, owner of ” Musk is asking X users to ask their own questions.
The conversation not only serves as a way for the former president to reach potentially millions of voters directly. It’s also an opportunity for X, a platform that relies heavily on politics, to redeem itself after some struggles.
X has already played host to some of the most defining moments of the 2024 cycle. By skipping the first Republican presidential debate in August, Trump launched his own counterprogramming, appearing in a taped interview with former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, which aired on X. Last month, President Joe Biden broke the news of his departure of the campaign in a letter posted on the platform.
Also notably, in May 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis used the platform as a way to officially announce his presidential candidacy, a disastrous launch hampered by technical failures, overwhelmed by the more than 400 thousand people who tried to dial.
Before his conversation with Trump, Musk posted on the platform that X was conducting “some system scaling tests” to handle what is expected to be a large volume of participants.
Musk, who called himself a Democrat until a few years ago, supported Trump’s candidacy two days after the former president was injured during an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania last month.
Long before supporting Trump, Musk turned increasingly to the right in his posts and actions on the platform, also using the X to try to influence political discourse around the world. He entered a disagreement with a Brazilian judge on censorship, criticized what he calls the “awake mind virus” and amplified false allegations that Democrats are secretly transporting migrants to vote in US elections.
Musk has also reinstated previously banned accounts such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Trump, which was kicked off the platform – then known as Twitter – two days after the January 6 violence, with the company citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” In November 2022, Musk purchased the company and Trump’s account has been reinstatedalthough the former president refrained from tweeting until Monday, insisting he was happier on his own website Truth Social, which he launched during the ban.
Hours before his interview with Musk, Trump posted a two-and-a-half-minute video to his X account, featuring video from his time in office as well as audio of him saying one of his standard campaign lines referencing the legal cases. who piled up against him: “They’re not coming for me, they’re coming for you, and it turns out I’m in their way and I’ll never move.”
But Trump’s audience on X is much larger than on Truth Social, which became a publicly traded company earlier this year. Trump has just over 7.5 million followers on Truth Social, while his mostly inactive X account is followed by 88 million. Musk’s account, which will host the interview, has more than 193 million followers.
Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a message about whether he would publish his interview with Musk through his own accounts, including on X.
The former president recently posted to X just once, with a photo of himself after he surrendered in an Atlanta prison a year ago, on charges of conspiring to reverse his electoral defeat in the state.
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Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.
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