The 7 biggest talking points from Trump's lengthy Elon Musk interview

Twitter/X users tuned in for a one-on-one conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk on Monday night (August 12), and it went almost exactly as you might expect.

X boss Musk — whose false or misleading claims about the 2024 election have amassed more than 1 billion views on the social media site — was hit by technical problems, which he claimed was the result of a cyber attack, and pushed everything back by around 40 minutes.

Things were eventually sorted after the long delay. What followed was a sycophantic, incoherent conversation which lasted a couple of hours, where Musk invited Trump to ramble about whichever subject he liked and Musk often heard giggling in the background.

These are the biggest talking points from the conversation.

His ‘lisp’

Technical issues may have been to blame, but one of the first things people picked up on was Trump’s voice – with some claiming they heard Trump speaking with a slight ‘lisp’ for the first time - leading some to ask whether he wears dentures.

“Did Trump pause campaign rallies because of this massive lisp he has on this Twitter interview with Elon?” one X user posted.

“Is it just me….. What is wrong with trumps voice??” another wrote. “Sound like he has a lisp??”

“Trump got hit by the CIA lisp gun” posted a third.

The Trump campaign was having none of it. In an emailed response to an inquiry about the lisp from a Huffington Post reporter, the Trump campaign said, “Must be your s****y hearing. Get your ears checked.”

The usual attacks on opponents

There were childish criticisms made of his political opponents, with Trump calling Joe Biden “stupid” - as well as branding him “the worst” US president in the history of the country – and describing Kamala Harris as “incompetent” and “a radical left lunatic".

Trump went on to say that if he loses the next election then “you're not going to have a country anymore”.

Insulting Kamala

There was a bizarre moment in the conversation where Trump then spoke about a recent Time magazine cover with Kamala Harris on the front, where he compared her to his wife Melania.

Speaking about the cover, Trump said "she looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live".

"It was a drawing, and actually she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania. She didn't look like Kamala. But, of course, she's a beautiful woman."

Assassination attempt

The pair spent a long time at the beginning of the conversation discussing the assassination attempt made on Trump last month at a rally in Pennsylvania.

Trump said: “It was a hard hit. It was very, I guess you would say, surreal, but it wasn’t surreal. You know, I was telling somebody, you have instances like this… where you feel it’s a surreal situation. And I never felt that way. I knew immediately that it was a bullet.”

Trump also said in the shooting had made him "more of a believer in God".

Praising authoritarian leaders

Getty Images

As well as criticising Biden, Trump also found the time to praise some of the world’s authoritarian leaders.

He praised Russian president Vladimir Putin, as well as Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who described as being “on the top of their game”.

He also questioned whether Harris would be able to stand up to them, saying: "There's some real tough characters out there. And if they don't think the American president is tough, they will do what they want to do."

Trump not challenged on illegal migration disinformation

The conversation touched on illegal immigration, with Trump repeatedly spouting disinformation. Speaking about current levels under Biden and Harris, he said: “I believe it’s over 20 million people came into our country, many coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger version of that is insane asylums.”

This is not true. As CNN reports, the numbers of “encounters” from February 2021 to June 2024 are actually around 10 million, and even then an “encounter” doesn’t mean a person was allowed to enter the country.

Claims about the Congo

His biggest claim about immigration came when talking about the “Congo”, while not specifying whether he was referring to the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the Republic of Congo.

“From Africa, from the Congo they’re coming, from the Congo and 22 people came in from the Congo recently and they’re murderers, and they drop them,” he said. “They take them out of jails, which is very expensive to maintain the jails. They don’t do too much maintaining… but they take them out of jails, prisons. They take them out and they bring them to the United States.”

Again, this isn’t true, and it’s a line he’s baselessly spouted before. Earlier this year, a spokesperson for the Democratic Republic of Congo denied it [via CNN], saying: “Everything he is saying isn’t true.”

Experts have also previously stated that there was no evidence of Congolese prisons being emptied, according to the publication.

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