One million “people,” doubtlessly including an unknown number of Russian bots, purportedly attempted to access Trump and Musk’s staged, pre-arranged ‘conversation' this evening.
They were greeted with the modern equivalent of static. As reported by the New York Times:
Musk begins by apologizing for the late start and blaming a “massive” distributed denial of service attack. This was meant to be a flashy celebration of Trump’s return to the platform that Musk could celebrate — but after 40 minutes of silence and hold music, it’s unlikely to give Musk the victory he was seeking.
As reported by the Washington Post, this was despite some professed effort by Musk to anticipate… whatever it is people were supposed to hear.
As reported by the Post’s liveblog:
“Am going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote Sunday. But Musk had also suggested X might need a little bit of luck. “I hope it works,” he said, followed by a prayer-hands and cry-laughing emoji.
This is apparently what our political discourse has been reduced to. “System scaling tests” sounds so… nerdy and professional, doesn’t it? Especially those that end with a “prayer-hands and cry-laughing emoji.”
True to form, Musk blamed Democrats for his own system’s complete failure.
In a written reply on X, Musk replied affirmatively to Mark Pincus, who suggested without providing any evidence that the problems with the Space were due to the Democrats. Musk appeared to support Pincus’s idea that there was an attack on X from “Dems fighting to ‘save’ Democracy from two massive disrupters!”
The overgrown infant offered his usual excuses at 8:45 EST. As reported by the Times:
Elon Musk’s voice has now materialized in the Twitter Space and he is claiming that the technical malfunctioning is because of a “massive” cyberattack by people who are trying to silence Trump. We haven’t been given evidence of that yet. And, as we’ve written, this is the second time Musk’s X hasn’t worked in a big political event, after the DeSantis campaign introduction.
We have gotten one piece of new information from this fiasco.
Trump says he’s “more of a believer” in God after surviving his assassination attempt.
That’s nice. I guess he was “less” of a believer in God before this. How reassuring, I’m sure, for whoever votes for this guy. Whatever.
Here’s another good one, as reported by the Times’ liveblogging Shane Goldmacher:
Trump, mocking climate change, says rising oceans will mean “more oceanfront property.”
This is the Republican presidential candidate, folks.
According to the Times Michael Gold:
About 20 minutes in, Trump finally mentioned Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival, attacking her and President Biden over immigration policies he characterized as lax and for allowing undocumented immigrants to cross the U.S. border with Mexico. He also criticized her again for echoing his proposal to end federal income taxes on tips.
Trump was the one who intimidated Republican lawmakers into not signing the most comprehensive immigration bill ever proposed in the United States Congress. Apparently that’s not important enough to acknowledge.
Gold laconically observes:
Trump is augmenting a claim he often makes without evidence — that other countries are purposefully sending violent criminals and mentally ill people across the border — with another claim: that other nations are sending “their non-productive people” to America. There is no evidence of this.
There has been no group of people “less productive” in this country than the Republican Congress. I would wager that undocumented immigrants, to a man (or woman), typically produce one hundred times more labor and product than any Republican Congressman has in the last four years.
Apparently Trump continued speaking:
Trump sounded more animated, raising his voice, as he discussed President Biden’s exit from the race. He has previously griped about losing the opportunity to have his rematch against Biden. “This was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States,” Trump said of Vice President Kamala Harris’s takeover of the campaign, adding, “What they did with this guy — and I’m no fan of his. And he was a horrible president, the worst president in history.”
Says the guy who orchestrated an attack on our Congress that injured 174 police officers, wrecked millions of dollars worth of public property and ultimately killed at least six people.
As Gold notes, “Musk is proving a sympathetic partner, agreeing with all of Trump’s claims and staying out of the way as the former president rattles off his talking points.”
So this was basically a miserably handled infomercial.
I’m old enough to remember when presidential candidates took the American people seriously. It appears that for Trump and his enablers, that time has long since passed.
