It began with 40 minutes of technical difficulties and only got worse. In more than two hours of aimless ranting and ego-stroking with Elon Musk, former President Donald Trump garbled through the greatest hits of his grievances, praised strongmen like Vladimir Putin, and painted his opponent Kamala Harris as an existential threat to America: “If she’s going to be our president, very quickly, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said to Musk—whose Xcampaign launch for Ron DeSantis last year was beset by similar technical issues. Absent from the proceedings? Anything coherent or compelling. “Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself,” the Harris campaign said in a statement afterward. “Self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
The Trump Show has, indeed, grown old and stale, and lately, the Republican presidential nominee finds himself desperate to regain any of the momentum he lost once Harris became the Democrats’ new star. But that reset didn’t come Monday, despite Musk’s best efforts: “It’s essential that you win, for the good of the country,” Musk told Trump. But the former president couldn’t land any of the softballs the right-wing billionaire threw his way. He recounted last month’s Pennsylvania rally shooting and promised the “largest deportation” in history if reelected, but otherwise said nothing newsworthy—quite a feat, given the considerable length of the interview. He also sounded rough while regurgitating his rally fare, with sometimes muddled speech that emphasized the vigor of his now-younger opponent. In one strange tangent, he described Harris as looking like the “most beautiful actress ever to live” in a Time magazine cover rendering. “It was a drawing, and actually, she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania,” Trump told Musk.
The sense one gets listening to all this is of a man out of ideas, reaching into an old bag of tricks that aren’t as interesting as they used to be. This isn’t to say Democrats should get overconfident: There’s still a big market for what Trump is selling—and powerful interests, embodied by Musk, are seeking to propel him back to power. But the candidate appears capable only of doing the same things he’s done a million times before, except now much worse. He had hoped to regain his footing Monday night with Musk, who has become one of his most prominent backers. Instead, he underscored the personal “weirdness” Harris’s campaign has sought to highlight—and the extremism of his agenda, as seen in his praise of Musk firing striking workers, his vow to shutter the Department of Education, and his comments in support of climate change because, he said, global warming will mean “more oceanfront property.”
Musk said Monday that his goal with this livestream was to help people “understand how [Trump] talks when it’s a conversation, rather than an interview.” “Nobody is quite themselves in an interview,” Musk posted, “so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like.” Turns out, though, that Trump is always like this—and after eight years of the same old bullshit, perhaps Americans are finally ready to move on.