Trump's return to Twitter

On Monday morning, Donald Trump returned to X/Twitter. First, he posted a two-and-a-half-minute hagiographic video about his presidency and his battles to stay out of prison.

[...]

What followed was a seemingly random stream of videos, ads, and other content from the dark corners of the MAGA Internet.

[...]

From 2015 until January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump [...] used the platform to drive his message, savage his rivals, and control the four corners of the political conversation. Trump was so obsessed with Twitter that concerns about his tweeting often showed up in focus groups. His supporters were begging him to stop lighting himself on fire via tweet. Persuadable voters worried that Twitter was distracting Trump from the duties of the presidency. The former President was banned from the platform after January 6th — his tweets spread the Big Lie and helped foment the violence.

After purchasing Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk restored Trump’s account, but until yesterday, Trump had only sent one tweet. In August 2023, he posted a picture of his mugshot and a link to his website to sell t-shirts monetizing his criminality. Other than that, Trump kept most of his social media ranting to his fledging Truth Social.

  Dan Pfeiffer

Whose stock keeps tanking.

The specific timing of Trump’s return to Twitter is no mystery. On Monday night, Musk interviewed Trump live on X/Twitter. This was an absurd, painfully awkward conversation foiled by technical glitches.

Trump and Musk need each other.

Last night’s much-ballyhooed X “interview” of Donald Trump by Elon Musk involved two of the biggest villains and personalities of the MAGA pantheon—the felonious, megalomaniacal, deteriorating ex-president and the internet-poisoned, race-war-curious gajillionaire mogul. So why was it all so boring?

[...]

“Look, I love Trump on Twitter,” one Trump confidant told our Marc Caputo. “But one of the advantages on Truth Social was that nobody was on there and he could say basically whatever he wanted and a lot of the problematic stuff just didn’t get seen."

[...]

The talk started half an hour late due to widespread glitches; many of the million-odd people trying to tune in were unable to get into the space. Musk theatrically blamed the issues on scurrilous hackers, darkly suggesting that “there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.” (As the New York Times drily put it, “the attack could not immediately be verified.”)

[...]

Trump’s audio was oddly distorted, making him sound as though he were lisping throughout.

  The Bulwark

Maybe he was?

And Musk frequently seemed unable to steer a conversation, desperately interjecting with an ineffectual “yes” or “sure” in hopes of moving on to another topic.

Is there anyone on earth who could "steer a conversation" with Trump?

At other times, he seemed more interested in doing his own pontificating than in trying to get good answers out of Trump.

Which is what he had to do if he couldn't steer the conversation.

The pair eventually meandered through a laundry list of topics. Trump, who said last month at the Republican National Convention that he would never again retell the story of the attempt on his life “because it’s too painful to tell,” told that story with relish.

Surely no one believed he wouldn't tell it again and again and again.

He expounded at length on his usual moonbat fables about how countries around the world are emptying their prisons and mental institutions to send their convicts and lunatics to the United States. He insisted that every foreign policy problem facing the world today could be traced back to his having to leave office; nobody acted out when he was in charge.

“I said to Vladimir Putin, I said, ‘Don’t do it. You can’t do it, Vladimir. You do it, it’s gonna be a bad day. You cannot do it,’” Trump said. “And I told him things, what I’d do. And he said, ‘No way.’ And I said, ‘way.’”

Hilarious. Is he trying to seem younger?

To Trump’s obvious pleasure, Musk just vibed with anything he had to say. “You know, we’re having a great conversation right now,” Trump said. “Kamala wouldn’t have this conversation—she can’t, ’cause she’s not smart. She’s not a smart person, by the way.” Musk just giggled along.

[...]

He kvetched that the pencil sketch of Kamala Harris on the latest cover of Time was too attractive. “She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live . . . She looked very much like a great first lady, Melania,” And he accused Joe Biden of tempting Putin into invading Ukraine: “The stupid threats coming from his stupid face that he was using—I said, this guy’s gonna cause us a war.”

But those asides weren’t enough to spice up what was ultimately a snoozefest. There was no friction, no direction, no insight as the pair rambled along for two hours, each plainly unsure by the end how to end the conversation. The only thing it illuminated was how highly the two of them think of themselves.

[...]

Trump’s awfulness has been so obvious for so long, and we now take it so much for granted, that it seems silly or gauche to point it out.

Still at the risk of seeming overly earnest or moralistic, I am once again going to point it out: Trump. Is. Bad. Uncommonly bad, even by the standards of today’s politics. And he’s someone whose depravity makes today’s politics far worse than they would otherwise be.

[...]

Trump admires dictators.

As he said to Musk, “Elon, I know every one of them and I know them well. I know Putin, I know Xi, and Kim Jung Un. . . . They are at the top of their game. They’re tough, they’re smart, they’re vicious.”

And he went on to explain how well he got along with those vicious dictators. Vladimir Putin, who is right now conducting a brutal war of aggression that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives? “I got along with Putin very well, and he respected me.”

North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, who presides over the world’s most totalitarian hellscape: “You know, I got along with Kim Jung Un. We had dinner. We had . . . everything. He really liked me. And I got along with him really well. We had a good relationship.”

This isn’t realpolitik. It’s the public and unapologetic admiration of viciousness.

Two of the world’s most recognizable and can-do businessmen couldn’t get their online conversation to start on time last night.

Elon Musk, the host, blamed it on digital assailants trying to mute free speech on X, the social media platform he controls (an explanation which may not have been true).

[...]

[Trump] and Musk are entitled to engage in their odd carny acts, of course, but the White House is up for grabs and juvenile delinquents preoccupied with conspiracies aren’t reliable stewards of the ship of state.

[...]

Musk billed their chat as an opportunity for Trump to reveal himself in a welcoming setting that didn’t include antagonistic, gotcha journalism. And the same old Trump emerged anyway.

[...]

Trump has always campaigned on vibes, not specifics, and that approach has worked often enough that he remains in control of the Republican Party, in a presidential race and in the public eye. Still, his confab with Musk was exceptionally vapid and propagandistic and offered a bookend to his unhinged Mar-a-Lago briefing last week.

Taken together, both events also are stark reminders that Trump doesn’t really sit for interviews or conduct press conferences. He convenes group therapy sessions with the public, using everyone’s time to sort through the skein of insecurities, instabilities and inanities that inevitably cling to him.

  Bloomberg

There's only one Trump.

Musk went on to note that the European Union had warned him that his discussion on X with Trump shouldn’t feature disinformation, which both he and Trump agreed represented an effort to censor them.

[...]

“You got a lot of people listening to you right now, like 60 million or something. What is that number? It’s crazy,” Trump said to Musk. “You said 25 and you have much more than double that number, 25 million, I think you’re going to be 60 or 70. And I guess over a period of time. I congratulate you. Do I get paid for this or not?”

The interview, which was hosted on X Spaces and scheduled to begin at 8PM ET on Monday night, crashed immediately and didn’t begin until 42 minutes later.

Those who did manage to get into the Space, including several Verge staffers, said it kicked off with lo-fi techno playing from Trump’s account for roughly 30 minutes.

[...]

Musk claimed that X was the target of a “massive DDOS attack” that had made it impossible for the Space to proceed as planned.

The rest of X appears to be working normally, however, and a source at the company confirmed to The Verge that there wasn’t actually a denial-of-service attack. Another X staffer said there was a “99 percent” chance Musk was lying about an attack.

[...]

Musk repeated the DDOS claim when the Space finally began around 8:40PM ET. “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” he said.

[...]

Musk claimed the company tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners on Monday. Around the time that the interview began, X said there were 915,000 people listening to the Space.

[...]

The interview’s failure to get off the ground was reminiscent of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2023 announcement on X that he was running for president, which also began with technical difficulties. At the time, Musk attributed the problems to overloaded servers.

  The Verge

If I remember correctly, Musk fired all the savvy tech people at Twitter when he bought it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 10:23 am:  Ouch!

 

Her people are good at this.

Throughout the interview, which was delayed by about 45 minutes due to technical issues, the Harris campaign captured short soundbites and posted them to its rapid response page.

The campaign hit Trump for saying global warming and rising sea levels would produce “more oceanfront property” and claiming the issue is not as big a problem as “nuclear warming.” The campaign posted a clip of Trump praising Musk, the owner of X, for firing workers when they went on strike.

The campaign also posted a soundbite of the former president saying that, if elected in November, one of the first things he would do is close the Department of Education — a policy outlined in the conservative Project 2025 agenda.

  The Hill

And, if that's not just a slam on the US under democrats, I believe the US government would let him, because I don't think people at the top actually want to see a US president jailed.

UPDATE 04:50 pm: