Musk Chat Takeaway: Trump is panicking

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Finally, 41 minutes late and disheartened by events beyond his control, former President Donald Trump’s much-vaunted X conversation with the platform owner started on Monday night. The technological setback with Elon Musk was just the most recent in a three-week period of terrible disruptions for the former president and his hopes of regaining the White House, events that left he is furious and afraid.

Falling after a hagiographic period following the failed assassination attempt on him on July 13, Trump is facing his most difficult journey since bursting onto the political scene in June 2015. Once the only voice that could cut through the political noise, Trump has now become is overshadowed by the dramatic attitude of the Democrats to replace from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris as the leader of the presidential ticket. Physically, Trump’s voice sounded a little strange during his conversation with Musk. Events have evolved so quickly that, perhaps for the first time since joining the political world in a real way, Trump is struggling to regain the spotlight, going so far as to attack some truly unbalanced ideas, such as Biden harboring a secret plan to to tear down Harris for the nomination.

“We never get the credit,” Trump said during a two-hour session that lacked the enthusiasm that characterized his rallies that, until recently, were the biggest draw in politics. That honor now goes to Harris and his running mate, Tim Walz, who restarted the race and surpassed Trump’s superiority at the proverbial political box office. Trump’s fortunes now appear as poor as they were when he woke up on Election Day 2016, hoping for defeat. And the typically self-assured Trump is clearly not sure how to fix that.

Monday’s delayed conversation began with the failed assassination attempt that Trump promised to discuss only once, insisting that “it’s actually very painful to say” during his nominating convention in Milwaukee, where he arrived with a bandage over his ear. “Illegal immigration saved my life,” Trump told Musk at the end of a meandering speech about that day, explaining again how his head turned toward a graph stopped the bullet from hitting his skull.

Well, that was when he was almost like a martyr. These days, it’s a different environment, and Trump returns to his recurring themes that immigrants coming to the United States bring “contagious diseases”and crime, currently total 20 million and could rise to 60 million if Harris prevails, and are downloaded of jails, prisons and mental institutions. (None of this is true.) He singled out “criminals who make our criminals look like nice people.” And he continued to insist on his debunked claims that Harris alone could have unilaterally closed the border as his czar.

In the weeks between Biden’s horrific June 27 debate and his July 21 announcement that he was stepping aside, Democrats were in open crisis. Panic wasn’t a very strong word to describe the feeling. Now, this crisis falls to Team MAGA. Trump seems determined to be useless. He still hasn’t figured out how to run against a black woman two decades his junior, who is matching him if not surpassing him in crowds and fundraising. Instead of promoting traditional campaign infrastructure on the ground, he clings to false claims that Harris campaign bought in photos one crowd of 15,000 in Detroit and blame Democrats for the bullet that hit his ear. In private, according to reports from New York TimesTrump used a sexist pejorative to describe Harris, an allegation Trump’s allies deny. (Trump also took issue with TIME’s latest cover story on Harris, which includes my reporting, but it’s unclear whether he read it. His issue was the portrayal of Harris, which he says makes her look “beautiful” like his wife “Melania,” but “didn’t look like Kamala.”)

In turn, Musk was more than eager to help Trump, whom he supported. Musk described the border as a “World War Z zombie apocalypse” and warned that the United States was spending its way into an inflation-driven crisis. But it was clear that Musk was pushing his own agenda, including an avoidance of deregulation, calls for looser limits on police and support for carbon-based energy sources. “They are keeping civilization going,” Musk said of oil and gas producers.

Seemingly oblivious to Musk’s parochialism, a frightened and petty Trump repeatedly called Biden “stupid” and suggested he was perhaps working with a zero IQ. “There’s nothing on the board,” Trump said. “Stupid threats coming from your stupid face” could start World War III, the real estate developer said scornfully. The relationship is clearly hostile and at the forefront, which is why Trump seems determined get Biden back into the race with baseless allegations of a convention coup.

“Do you think Biden could do this interview?” he asked his host, lingering on a man who is no longer his opponent. Unable to fully change his thinking, much less his broader strategy, Trump appears determined to continue litigating perceived slights against his legacy and prosecuting Biden’s weaknesses. Only occasionally has he returned to the woman who will share the upcoming debate stage with him on September 10.

“She is incompetent. She’s just as bad as Biden,” Trump said of Harris, who he said benefited from a sophisticated evasion of democratic norms. “This was a coup,” Trump said. When the broadcast reached the 87th minute, Trump seemed to remember the real contours of the race. “She’s a radical left lunatic,” Trump said of Harris.

As always, consistency and internal logic are optional for Trump. And the situation has escalated since Harris became his main rival. In recent weeks, Trump has appeared completely desperate to reclaim his former place at the top of the US hierarchy, resorting to more than two misleading statements or lies per minute during a 64-minute session with reporters last week, according to NPR’s count. The 162 bends or breaks in relation to the truth left reporters open-mouthed and their apologists trying to avoid eye contact with skeptics.

Thus, Trump travels the country seeking the comfort of safe spaces. It has been 12 days since Trump rallied in a swing state. A weekend rally in Montanawho has not run for a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992left strategists scratching their heads. But even that trip to the West revealed his inability to control everything; on his way to campaign against a sitting Democratic senator, whom he criticized for “the biggest belly I’ve ever seen,” Trump’s plane had to divert due to mechanical problems.

When Monday night’s Session X arrived, a series of polls in swing states showed the race is objectively closer than it was when Biden was in the race. Those who harm the race too adjusted his playing field in Harris’s favor. So the platform that Musk bought and turned into a MAGA playground wouldn’t cooperate.

In some ways, Trump’s online mayhem was a kind of karmic retribution for the results of his campaign. sadness about a similar conversation that was intended to pitch former rival Ron DeSantis’ bid. At the time, Trump’s campaign was unrepentantly dizzying on the Florida governor’s rocky start: “Problems. Technical problems. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate.” Well, that candidate is now Trump, and the problems go far beyond a conversation with world authorities. richest man.

Of course, there is time for Trump to take back the microphone. He consistently refuted the laws of political gravity. Consequences rarely arrive at Trump’s doorstep. Setbacks rarely persist. But Trump has never faced a rival who has captured the nation’s imagination like Harris. During the 2016 primaries, Republicans never coalesced around one of their competitors, and their head-to-head race against Hillary Clinton ultimately came down to fewer than 80,000 voters in three states. A pandemic-weary nation decided to change course four years later with Biden, but it was a race that will always have an asterisk next to it. In this cycle, Trump did not even consider the possibility of a Republican alternative, even when his invincibility showed signs of wavering.

Now, facing a rival who could very well make history as the first female and first black woman president, Trump again appears unable to find solid footing. He has enough runway to take off again in his now-repaired plane, but the airfield gets smaller every day, while Harris is already soaring.

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