On Monday night, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump sat for an interview with billionaire Elon Musk that was — eventually — broadcast live on the social media platform currently controlled by the latter: X, formerly known as Twitter. It got terrible reviews.
“This Trump interview is a complete disaster. He’s incoherent, he’s slurring his words, and he can’t even stay on track. This is not a man who should have access to the nuclear codes. He continues to be a threat to national security,” said activist Harry Sisson.
Hillary Clinton — Trump’s electoral opponent, of course, in 2016 — also commented, linking to an opinion article published in USA Today that accused Trump of slurring and rambling throughout the interview. “Serious question: Is Donald Trump OK?” she asked on Tuesday.
The actual article also torpedoed those behind the interview for its extremely delayed start. “It took more than 40 minutes before the interview could start and be heard by anyone. It was amateur hour, the last thing a campaign struggling to project competence needed,” wrote Rex Huppke. “It was an unmitigated disaster,” the article’s headline summarily added.
The reactions mirror what followed a recent press conference that Trump held at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris taking on the mantle of Democrats’ standard-bearer in this year’s presidential election.
She has ultimately replaced President Joe Biden as Democrats’ pick after the latter withdrew from this year’s election amid questions about his advanced age. Biden endorsed Harris to take his place, and despite Trump talking about an imagined but unsupported scenario in which Biden tries to get the nomination back after all, Harris’ campaign quickly rocketed forward within her party. There was no serious Democratic challenge.
Though the manner in which Trump was speaking in his Musk interview wasn’t listeners’ only complaint, one X user said it appeared to trace to an audio issue on the platform rather than Trump himself.
