The hissing ex-president and his giggling cue giver

FR The hissing ex-president and his giggling cue giver Article by Karl Doemens • 16 hours • 5 minutes reading time US election campaign The online conversation between billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk first suffered from massive technical problems and then from a complete lack of distance. The tech investor and Twitter boss also begged for a position At the end, after three agonizingly long hours, at least two men were satisfied. "I want to congratulate you. It's impressive what you've achieved," Donald Trump praised the host Elon Musk. And the second richest man in the world was also impressed by the evening: "You can have a conversation like that with you. You couldn't have it with Kamala Harris or Joe Biden." The owner of Twitter's successor platform X was probably right. But whether that speaks against the Democratic politicians mentioned is highly questionable after Musk's bizarre conversation with the Republican presidential candidate. The event on Monday evening on the audio service X Spaces in the USA, which had been hugely hyped by the two participants beforehand, will probably be remembered less for its content than for massive technical glitches, an embarrassing and submissive conversation, countless failures by the guest and extremely tiring repetitions. For three quarters of an hour, the listeners had to endure annoying elevator music before Musk spoke up. Meanwhile, thousands tried in vain to join the discussion. They were shown an error message. The X boss, who had experienced a similar disaster a year ago at the presentation of the then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, quickly blamed it on an alleged cyber attack. When the technical problems were finally solved, around a million listeners tuned in. That is around a third of the evening's audience on the right-wing channel Fox News and far from a record. It quickly became clear that Musk, who has turned into an ultra-right activist and is spreading alarmist messages and conspiracy myths with increasing aggression, did not want to be a critical interviewer, but at best a source of prompts for the ex-president. Even this role clearly exceeded his rhetorical ability, which was expressed in stammering statements, uncritical acclamations ("Sure," "Yeah") and an unmotivated giggling laugh. Musk was clearly extremely proud to have the Republican presidential candidate on his platform. And Trump did not hesitate for a minute to use the megaphone held out to him for his own purposes. Right at the beginning, Musk gave him the opportunity to talk about the assassination attempt. And although the 78-year-old had declared at the Republican convention just three weeks ago that he would only describe the incident once and then never again, "because it is too painful," he now spent half an hour laying out all the details of his heroic moment and the "miracle" that saved his life. Like an altar boy, Musk waved the verbal censer and assured: "Many people admire your courage." Then followed a typical Trump rally on inflation, migration and his own alleged political persecution by the judiciary. Without being questioned or even rebuked by Musk, Trump was able to denigrate migrants as "escaped prisoners," "terrorists" and "rapists." He ranted that Ukraine was "Putin's eye" and said that the dictators of the world were "at their best." He made fun of the climate crisis by saying that rising sea levels would soon mean there would be more coastal properties. He also spread his lie about election fraud without being contradicted and claimed that he was being pursued by the public prosecutor's office because he wanted to prevent the vote from being manipulated. Fact check Donald Trump and facts usually exist in separate universes. If anyone was expecting the opposite during the conversation between the presidential candidate and tech investor Elon Musk... Some statements were made by Trump, but their veracity may still require checking. "There are a lot of people listening here right now, something like 60 million or so." That is an extreme exaggeration: The 60 million were the page impressions of the conversation - that is, the number of people who saw the so-called space in which they could have listened to the conversation. Musk's network itself showed that 15.5 million people were listening - which in turn includes everyone who tuned in at some point. During the conversation, the number of listeners was usually displayed as around one to 1.2 million.