Trump to be interviewed by Elon Musk tonight
Fox News National Correspondent Bryan Llenas reports on the anticipation surrounding former President Trump’s no-holds-barred interview with Elon Musk on X on ‘Special Report.’
Former President Donald Trump spoke with tech billionaire Elon Musk in a wide-ranging, wide-ranging interview Monday night on X, while Vice President Kamala Harris continues to avoid the media since leading the Democratic ticket for the White House.
“It’s very sad to think that someone who does this for a living can’t answer a question or is afraid to do an interview, and in her case, a very friendly interview. She has very friendly interviewers,” Trump said of Harris Monday night during his roughly two-hour interview with Musk at X Space.
Trump’s comments come as Harris has avoided the media for 22 days. She has avoided formal press conferences or one-on-one interviews, including a Time magazine cover story, since emerging as the DNC’s front-runner for the White House after President Biden dropped out of the race last month.
“She’s seen as much more liberal than Bernie Sanders. She’s a radical left-wing lunatic. And if she’s going to be our president, we’re not going to have a country anymore pretty soon. And she’s going to go back to all the things she believes in. She believes in defunding the police. She believes in no fracking, in nothing,” Trump added of Harris.
KAMALA HARRIS DECLINES TIME INTERVIEW AS SHE CONTINUES TO AVOID THE PRESS
Donald Trump Elon Musk (Getty Images)
Trump’s interview with Musk began after 8:30 p.m. Monday, following a “massive” distributed denial of service attack on the platform that caused delays, Musk explained on X. More than 1 million people ultimately listened to the interview, according to the live tracker throughout the discussion.
X MERGES AFTER TRUMP AND MUSK ‘SPACE’ INTERVIEW IMMEDIATELY LEAKS AWAY
The two had a relaxed interview, with Musk pitching Trump a few topics before the 45th president was given ample time to explain policy issues including immigration, the assassination attempt on his life last month, rising inflation and the closing of the Department of Education in favor of states taking control of school systems.
Vice President Kamala Harris says her swearing habits have gotten worse since she took office. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
“I want to close the Department of Education, return education to the states… Of the 50 [states]”I bet 35 of them would do very well. And 15 of them, or, you know, 20 of them, will be as good as Norway. You know, Norway is considered great,” Trump said, while noting that left-leaning states like California could struggle if he eliminates the DOE.
The 45th president also spoke at length with Musk about the current state of immigration in the United States.
“I think there are over 20 million people who have come to our country. Many of them are coming from jails, prisons, mental institutions, or in a broader version, mental asylums. And many of them are terrorists. And I’ll tell you one thing: They’re not just coming from South America. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Asia. They’re coming from the Middle East,” Trump told Musk, who endorsed Trump earlier this year.
Trump said that despite Harris’ recent rhetoric to address the growing migration crisis at the border, she and Biden have had years to address migration, but “they won’t do anything.”
“She’s had three and a half years, and by the way, they’ve got another five months to do something. But they’re not doing anything. They’re just talking shit. She’s incompetent and he’s incompetent. And frankly, I think she’s more incompetent than he is, and that’s saying something, because he’s not very good,” he said.
On the topic of immigration, Trump also attributed his life to a slide his campaign made showing immigration statistics in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month during a rally, when shooter Thomas Crooks tried to assassinate him. The 45th president was looking at the slide with immigration data when Crooks opened fire, which narrowly saved his life as the position of his head had abruptly changed.
“That slide, illegal immigration, saved my life,” he told Musk. “The amazing thing is that I used the chart less than 20% of the time. It was just a moment.”
“It’s always to my left, never to my right, and it’s always at the end of the speech,” Trump added of the slide’s position.
“I’m going to sleep with that graph forever,” he joked.
FBI investigating Iran hacking Trump campaign documents
The interview, billed as “a conversation” between former Twitter owner Elon Musk and former US President Donald Trump, which was originally due to start at 1am on Tuesday, eventually got underway shortly after 1.40am. Photograph date: Tuesday August 13, 2024. (Photo by PA Wire/PA Images via Getty Images) (Getty Images)
Trump went on to rattle off a list of wars and world events that the U.S. could have avoided if Biden were not in the Oval Office, while noting that he was tough on nations like Russia, China and North Korea and that he knows those countries’ respective leaders “well.”
“First of all, the Israeli attack would never have happened. Russia would never have attacked Ukraine, and we wouldn’t have had inflation, and we wouldn’t have had the disaster in Afghanistan, if you think about it… if you take away some of those events, you have a different world.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for a photo before their talks on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China, Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023. President Putin will pay a two-day state visit to China this week, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Sergei Guneyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)
HARRIS CAMPAIGN RELEASES DEBUNKING CLAIM THAT TRUMP CALLED CHARLOTTESVILLE NEO-NAZIS “VERY FINE PEOPLE”
He pointed to his 2017 tweets when he criticized North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as “little rocket man” as tensions rose between the two nations amid a series of North Korean nuclear and missile tests.
In this handout photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends a meeting of the Workers’ Party of Korea in Pyongyang, North Korea, Feb. 28, 2022. Independent journalists were not granted access to cover the event shown in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. The Korean-language watermark on the image provided by the source reads: “KCNA,” which is short for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korean News Service via AP)
“I resolved that issue very quickly,” Trump said of North Korea. “At first it was nasty with Rocket Man… [Jong-Un] “He said he had a red button on his desk. I said, ‘I have a red button on my desk, too, but my red button is much bigger and it works. ‘ And then I called him ‘Little Rocket Man.'”
“So the bottom line is this: I got a call from him all of a sudden and he said he wanted to meet me. We met… and I got along very well with him. We weren’t in any danger, but President Obama thought we were going to end up in a war, a nuclear war, with him,” he said.
Burglary at Trump campaign headquarters in Virginia caught on surveillance camera and under investigation
The Biden administration would support eliminating taxes on tipped wages, an idea first proposed by former President Trump, the White House said. (Left: (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images), Right: (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images))
Trump also addressed Biden’s exit from the 2024 race, saying it was a Democratic “coup” that put pressure on Biden to drop out. Biden dropped out of the race last month as concerns mounted about his mental acuity and his age of 81 and Democrats and traditional party allies called on him to drop out.
“It was a coup. It was a coup against a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way or we can do it the hard way,'” Trump said.
“They just took him out behind the shed and basically shot him,” Musk added before Trump slammed Biden as “the worst president ever.”
TRUMP CAMP THANKS WH FOR CONFIRMING ‘NO DAYLIGHT’ BETWEEN HARRIS AND BIDEN: ‘KAMALA CREATED THIS MESS’
Trump returned to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday after nearly a year of not posting on his favorite social media platform. Before X was sold to Musk in 2022, Trump was suspended from his Twitter account following the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. He rarely posted on the platform after Musk reinstated his account, only sharing his mugshot in August of last year.
Former President Donald Trump told the Columbia Journalism Review that he had to fight back against “incredibly false stories” during his presidency. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
“Are you better off now than when I was President? Our economy is in tatters. Our border has been erased. We are a nation in decline. Make the American Dream AFFORDABLE again! Make America SAFE again! Make America GREAT again!” Trump tweeted Monday amid a flurry of campaign ads.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Ahead of his interview with Trump, Musk touted the interview as one that “should be very entertaining” as it is “unscripted and has no boundaries as to the topics.”
“This country is going down the drain and these people we’re up against are bad people. And they’re liars. They make statements. They do very bad things. They say they’re going to build a strong border. They say they’ve been great on the border and they’ve been the worst in history. They say they stop crime,” Trump said toward the end of the interview.
“It’s so amazing.”
Get the latest updates on the 2024 election campaign, exclusive interviews and more in our Fox News digital election hub.
