REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST/FILE PHOTO
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are seen in Launch Room Four after the launch of a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket and the Crew Dragon spacecraft in NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 project to the Space Station around the world from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. in May 2020. Trump returned to social media platform X ahead of his interview today with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, an occasion that could inject more surprises into the turbulent United States presidential election.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is returning to social media platform X ahead of his interview with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk today, an occasion that could inject more surprises into the turbulent United States presidential election.
The interview, scheduled for 8:00 p. m. Eastern Time (2 p. m. m. , Hawaii time) may give the former president a chance to be discovered at a time when his crusade is slowing.
His Democratic rival in the Nov. 5 election, Vice President Kamala Harris, erased Trump’s lead in opinion polls and energized the Democratic electorate with a series of lively rallies.
Trump returned to X this morning for the first time in a year, releasing a video highlighting his claim that the four criminal charges he faces were politically motivated. He temporarily followed up with a dozen more posts, a possible indication that he will be more active on X in the future.
His last post
Trump’s access to his account, @realDonaldTrump, was restored a month after Musk owned X after he suspended it through the platform’s previous owners following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress through his supporters.
Trump posts on his Truth Social platform, introduced in February 2022, but his posts there reach a much smaller audience than on X.
The interview on Musk’s social media platform may allow Trump to succeed in a different audience than the conservative faithful who attend his rallies and watch his interviews on Fox News. However, the occasions on the platform have been plagued by technical issues.
“I will be doing formula scaling tests tonight and before the conversation,” Musk wrote on the platform, formerly known as Twitter.
The interview will be conducted on Trump’s official X account, his crusade announced on Sunday.
Some X users also reported seeing classified ads supporting Trump. X and the Trump Crusade did not respond to a request for data on whether there had been any pro-Trump ad buying.
Advertisers have fled X since Musk bought it in 2022. X earlier this month sued a global advertising alliance and several major companies, accusing them of illegally conspiring to boycott and cause him to lose revenue.
MUSK’S TURN TO THE RIGHT
It is possible that Musk will turn out to be an interviewer. The world’s richest user supported Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020, but he has since moved to the right and supported the Republican following Trump’s assassination attempt in July.
Musk, who runs the electric car company Tesla, has also created an outside spending organization Super PAC to help Trump’s campaign. The political action committee is currently under investigation in Michigan for possible violations of the state’s voter data collection laws.
Trump, a longtime critic of vehicles, reversed course after Musk’s approval.
“I’m in favor of cars. I have to be, because Elon has been very supportive. So I have no choice,” Trump said at a rally in early August.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fein, who campaigned for Harris, called Trump a “betrayal. “
The Biden administration has been working to popularize electric vehicles through tax breaks and other supports as part of its broader goal of reducing carbon emissions from climate change.
Congressional Republicans opposed those subsidies. Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, said Biden’s policies only subsidize other people who buy cars.
Musk has become embroiled in a whirlwind of new controversies. He falsely accused Biden and the Democratic Party of opening America’s borders to undocumented immigrants in an effort to increase the pool of potential Democratic voters. Non-citizens can vote in federal elections.
In November 2023, Musk endorsed an anti-Semitic article on X that claimed members of the Jewish network were stoking hatred against white people. He defended himself by saying the user was telling “the genuine truth. ” Musk also attacked the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization that fights anti-Semitism, accusing it, without evidence, of being to blame for a decline in advertising on X.
Additional reporting via Alexandra Ulmer.