Trump to interview Elon Musk tonight
Fox News national correspondent Brian Lenas reports on “Special Report” about the anticipation surrounding former President Trump’s candid interview with Elon Musk.
While former President Donald Trump gave a comprehensive and lengthy interview with tech billionaire Elon Musk on X on Monday night, Vice President Kamala Harris has continued to avoid media interviews since becoming the top Democratic candidate for the White House.
“It’s very sad when someone who does this for a living can’t answer questions or is afraid to be interviewed. In her case, the interviews have been very friendly. She has had friendly interviewers,” Trump said of Harris during the roughly two-hour interview with Musk at X-Space on Monday night.
Trump’s comments come as Harris has avoided the media for 22 days. She has avoided formal press conferences and in-person interviews, including a Time magazine cover story, since emerging as the Democratic National Committee’s presidential nominee after President Biden dropped out of the race last month.
“She’s considered much more liberal than Bernie Sanders. She’s a far-left lunatic. If she became president, we wouldn’t have a country any time soon. She would go back to everything she believes in. She believes in defunding the police. She believes in zero fracking,” Trump added of Harris.
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Donald Trump Elon Musk (Getty Images)
The interview between Trump and Musk began just after 8:30 p.m. on Monday after being delayed by a “massive” distributed denial of service attack on the platform, Musk explained on X. More than one million people ultimately tuned in to watch the interview during the debate, according to a live tracker.
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The two men conducted a relaxed interview, with Musk peppering Trump with questions before giving the 45th president ample time to elaborate on his policy agenda, including immigration, last month’s assassination attempt, soaring inflation and the shutdown of the Department of Education to prioritize state school systems.
Vice President Kamala Harris said his swearing habits have worsened since taking office. (AP Photo/Molly Gash)
“I want to close the Department of Education and give education back to the states. … Of the 50 states, [states]”35 states would do well. 15, no, 20 of them would do as well as Norway, which is considered a great country,” Trump said, noting that left-leaning states such as California could struggle if he abolished the Department of Energy.
The 45th President also had a lengthy discussion with Musk about the current state of immigration in the United States.
“I believe over 20 million people have come into our country. Many of them are coming from prisons, from psychiatric hospitals or larger psychiatric hospitals. Many of them are terrorists. And I’ll be very clear to you, they’re not just coming 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,” Trump told Musk, who endorsed Trump earlier this year.
Trump said Harris and Biden have spent years addressing immigration issues but “have done nothing,” despite Harris’ recent comments that she would address the worsening migrant crisis at the border.
“She had three and a half years. And by the way, they have five more months to do something. And they’re not doing anything. It’s all lip service. She’s incompetent, he’s incompetent. And frankly, I think she’s more incompetent than he is, and that’s saying something, because he’s not very good,” he said.
Speaking of immigration, Trump also said that a slide displaying immigration statistics prepared by his campaign saved his life when gunman Thomas Crooks tried to assassinate him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last month. The 45th president was looking at the slide about immigration data when Crooks opened fire, but was barely saved by a sudden change in head position.
“That slide, illegal immigration saved my life,” he told Musk. “Unbelievably, I used that chart less than 20% of the time. It was just for a second.”
“The slides are always to my left, never to my right, and they’re always at the end of the speech,” Trump added about the slides’ placement.
“I’m going to sleep with that chart all the time,” he joked.
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The interview, billed as a “conversation” between X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk and former US President Donald Trump, was originally scheduled to begin at 1am on Tuesday, but finally began just after 1:40am. Photographed on Tuesday, August 13, 2024. (Photo by PA Wire/PA Images via Getty Images) (Getty Images)
Trump went on to list off a laundry list of wars and world situations the US could have avoided without Biden in the Oval Office, saying Biden would be tough on countries like Russia, China and North Korea and that he knows their leaders “well.”
“First of all, the Israeli attack would never have happened. Russia would not have attacked Ukraine. There would have been no inflation. There would have been no chaos in Afghanistan. If you think about it, if you took away some of these events, the world would be different.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for a photograph ahead of their meeting on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China, Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023. China’s Foreign Ministry announced Tuesday, May 14, 2024, that Putin will make a two-day state visit to China this week. (Sergey Guneev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via Associated Press, File)
Harris campaign posts denying false claim that Trump called the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville “very fine people”
Amid rising tensions between the two countries following a series of missile and nuclear tests by North Korea, he pointed to a tweet he had made in 2017 in which he had criticised North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “Little Rocket Man.”
In this photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends a Workers’ Party of Korea meeting in Pyongyang, North Korea on February 28, 2022. Independent journalists were not granted access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image has been provided and cannot be independently verified. The Korean watermark on the image provided by the source reads “KCNA,” an abbreviation for the Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Agency via Associated Press)
“I solved that problem quickly,” Trump said of North Korea. “It started out badly with Rocket Man…” [Jong-Un] He said he had a red button on his desk. I said, ‘I have a red button on my desk, but my red button is much bigger, and my red button works.’ And I called him ‘Little Rocket Man.'”
“Anyway, here’s the bottom line: All of a sudden, he called me and said he wanted to meet, he wanted to meet me. And we met. And I got on very well with him. We were not in any danger, but President Obama thought we were going to end up in war with him, nuclear war,” he said.
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The White House said the Biden administration supports eliminating taxes on tipped wages, a proposal first made by former President Trump. (Left: (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images), Right: (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Trump also said it was a “coup” by Democrats to pressure Biden into dropping out of the 2024 presidential race. Biden dropped out of the race last month amid growing concerns about his intellectual disability and his age of 81, leading Democrats and the party’s traditional allies to call for him to drop out.
“This was a coup. This was a coup of the president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, but they said, ‘We can do it the soft way or we can do it the hard way,'” Trump said.
“They just took him out behind a shed and basically shot him,” Musk added, before Trump slammed Biden as “the worst president ever.”
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Trump returned to his once-favorite social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), early Monday after not posting on the platform for nearly a year. Before X was sold to Musk in 2022, Trump’s Twitter account was suspended following the January 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol. After Musk reinstated his account, Trump posted very little on the platform, only sharing a photo of his face in August of last year.
Former President Donald Trump told the Columbia Journalism Review that he had to contend with “incredible fake news” during his presidency. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnick, File)
“Are you better off now than when I was President? Our economy is collapsing. Our borders are gone. Our country is in decline. Let’s make the American Dream affordable again. Let’s make America safe again. Let’s make America great again!” Trump posted on Monday as part of a series of campaign ads.
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Ahead of his interview with Trump, Musk touted it, saying it would be “unscripted, open-ended” and “super entertaining!”
“This country is in decline and we’re dealing with bad people. They’re liars. They say they say they’re going to harden the border. They say they have great border security, but it’s the worst in history. They say they’re going to stop crime,” Trump said toward the end of the interview.
“It’s just unbelievable.”
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