Don’t Worry, All You Missed From Trump & Musk’s Twitter Spaces Chat Was Trump’s Lisp
Remember what happened to Ron DeSantis' Twitter Spaces campaign launch alongside Musk in 2023?? Surprise! (Not really.) This went about as well as that.
Photo: Screenshot Politics Donald Trump
Whatever plans you didn’t have on a Monday night because no one has plans on a Monday night, I hope you didn’t cancel them for Donald Trump’s bomb of a Twitter Spaces interview with the website’s neo-Nazi-embracing owner, Elon Musk. For starters, it began about 30 minutes late due to a predictable server crash, which was a moment that transported me back to May 2023 when Ron DeSantis launched his inevitably doomed presidential campaign via a Twitter Space that similarly crashed. This wasn’t because sOoOoO many people were trying to listen, but rather, because Musk long ago fired everyone who knew how to work Twitter’s back-end, rendering it all but impossible for large or even medium-sized events to run smoothly.
Musk attempted to blame his ineptitude on some sort of hack: “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on [Twitter]. Working on shutting it down,” he wrote in a post at 8:18 p.m. ET for the event that was slated to start at 8 p.m. The Verge reports that at least one Twitter staffer says there’s “a 99% chance” Musk lied about the so-called cyber-attack. Ya don’t say?
In any case, hack or no hack, we as a society would have been better off without two narcissistic, anti-social billionaires live-streaming their clumsy attempt at bro-ing out. We didn’t really learn anything new: They demonized immigrants. They reminisced about the assassination attempt on Trump from at least three news cycles ago. (At one point, Trump called the man who was fatally shot at his rally “a good man” and “a fantastic Trumper,” in remarks that remind me of the time Justin Bieber declared in 2013 that he hoped Anne Frank would have been a “Belieber.”) They also threatened to fire any and all workers who go on strike—that’ll surely do Trump a solid in the emphatically pro-labor Blue Wall states!
ELON: I think, I mentioned earlier, I’m, I mean, uh, uh, is it accurate to say that you, I don’t want to speak out of turn but , well, sometimes illegal immigrants are burglars, and that’s not good, right?
TRUMP: thafs wight, ewon— america’s lounge singer (@KrangTNelson) August 13, 2024
There was, however, at least one redeeming facet to all of this if you, like me, have the sense of humor of a middle schooler: Trump’s bizarre lisp. Throughout, as Musk—ever the beta in their interactions—pitifully mumbled his ascent to Trump’s every remark, it sounded like the 79-year-old former president’s dentures didn’t fit or weren’t in at all. Some—like Kamala Harris’ official campaign account on Twitter—observed he sounded like he was slurring. For the last decade, Trump’s astounding immaturity and child-like brain have gone a long way to conceal the reality of just how old he is—perhaps for the first time, he seemed genuinely old. When the BBC, who was live-blogging the event, made a comment about Trump’s audible slurring, a campaign spokesperson responded, “Must be your hearing.”
Trump, slurring, says he’s okay with climate change and rising sea levels because he thinks he’ll “have more oceanfront property” pic.twitter.com/AmdrdXCn0v
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 13, 2024
There were plenty of other, err, moments throughout the event, which lasted about two hours. Musk attempted to mansplain inflation to the former president. Trump called Harris “beautiful” (????) by saying that the Time cover drawing of Harris looks like his wife, Melania Trump. And there were some other very in-character moments, like when Trump, who, again, killed Roe v. Wade, insisted that the lives of women and people of color were much, much better while he was president. (I guess my eczema’s gotten worse during the Biden years, but other than that, I’d disrespectfully have to disagree!)
Nonetheless, at least one good thing seems to have come of this, in addition to Truth Social stock plummeting now that Trump’s back on Twitter and all the hilarious campaign material it gave Democrats. As of Tuesday morning, the United Auto Workers have filed federal labor charges against Musk and Trump for openly insisting they’d violate labor law and fire striking workers. Really can’t emphasize enough that these two are not particularly bright—Monday night offered no shortage of evidence of this.