Musk Interview Showed Trump Doesn’t Know How to Run Against Harris

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Finally, 41 minutes late and deflated by events far from his control, former President Donald Trump’s much-ballyhooed X conversation with the platform’s owner got underway Monday evening. The tech setback with Elon Musk was merely the latest in a three-week stretch of very bad breaks for the ex-President and his hopes of reclaiming the White House, events that have left him furious and fearful.

Crashing after a hagiographic span following the failed July 13 assassination attempt against him, Trump is facing his roughest run since he roared onto the political scene back in June of 2015. Once the only voice that could break through the political din, Trump now finds himself overshadowed by the Democrats’ dramatic swap of President Joe Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris as the leader of the presidential ticket. Physically, Trump’s voice even seemed slightly off during his conversation with Musk. Events have moved so quickly that, for perhaps the first time since he joined the political realm in a real way, Trump is flailing to reclaim the spotlight, going so far as to tilt at some truly unhinged ideas like Biden harboring a secret plan to topple Harris for the nomination.

“We never get the credit,” Trump said during a two-hour session that lacked the pizazz that was the hallmark of his rallies that, until recently, were the biggest draw in politics. That honor now goes to Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, who reset the race and overtook Trump’s superiority at the proverbial political box office. Trump’s fortunes now seem as feeble as they were when he woke up on Election Day 2016, expecting to coast to defeat. And the typically self-assured Trump clearly is not sure how to fix it.

Monday’s delayed conversation began with the failed assassination attempt that Trump vowed he would discuss only once, insisting “it’s actually too painful to tell” during his nominating convention in Milwaukee where he arrived with a bandaged ear. “Illegal immigration saved my life,” Trump told Musk toward the end of a meandering discursive about that day, explaining again how his head’s turn to a chart prevented the bullet from hitting his skull. 

Well, that was when he was riding high as an almost martyr. These days, it’s a different environment, and Trump finds himself returning to his recurring themes that immigrants coming to the United States bring “contagious diseases” and crime, currently total 20 million and could surge to 60 million if Harris prevails, and are offloaded from jails, prisons, and mental institutions. (None of this is true.) He highlighted “criminals that make our criminals look like nice people.” And he continued to push his debunked claims that Harris alone could have unilaterally shut the border down as its czar. 

In the weeks between Biden’s horrifying June 27 debate showing and his July 21 announcement that he was stepping aside, Democrats were in open crisis. Panic was not too strong of a word to describe the sentiment. Now, that crisis crouch falls on Team MAGA. Trump seems determined to be unhelpful. He has yet to figure out how to run against a Black woman two decades his junior who is matching him if not lapping him in crowds and fundraising. Instead of pushing for traditional on-the-ground campaign infrastructure, he clings to bogus claims that Harris’ campaign photo-shopped a crowd of 15,000 in Detroit and blames Democrats for the bullet that nicked his ear. In private, according to reporting from The New York Times, Trump has used a sexist pejorative to describe Harris, an allegation Trump’s allies deny. (Trump also took issue with TIME's latest cover story on Harris, which includes my reporting, but it's not clear if he even read it. His issue was the rendering of Harris, which he said makes her look "beautiful" like his wife "Melania," but "didn’t look like Kamala.")

For his part, Musk was more than eager to help Trump, whom he has endorsed. Musk described the border as a “World War Z zombie apocalypse” and warned that the United States was spending its way into an inflation-driven crisis. But it was clear Musk was pushing his own agenda, including a flight of deregulation, calls for looser limits on police, and support for carbon-based energy sources. “They’re keeping civilization going,” Musk said of oil and gas producers. 

Seemingly indifferent to Musk’s parochialism, a frightened and petty Trump repeatedly called Biden “stupid” and suggested he was working with perhaps an IQ of zero. “There’s nothing on the board,” Trump said. “The stupid threats coming from his stupid face” could start World War III, the real estate developer said in a sneer. The relationship is clearly hostile and at the front of mind, which is why Trump seems determined to will Biden back into the race with groundless claims of a convention coup.

“Do you think Biden could do this interview?” he asked his host, lingering on a man who is no longer his opponent. Unable to fully shift his thinking let alone his broader strategy, Trump seems determined to keep litigating perceived slights against his legacy and prosecuting the foibles of Biden. Only occasionally did he return to the woman who will be sharing the next debate stage with him on Sept. 10.

“She’s incompetent. She’s as bad as Biden,” Trump said of Harris, whom he said benefited from a sophisticated circumvention of democratic norms. “This was a coup,” Trump said. As the stream hit its 87th minute, Trump seemed to remember the real contours of the race. “She’s a radical left lunatic,” Trump said of Harris. 

As always, consistency and internal logic are optional for Trump. And it’s been spiraling since Harris rose to be his chief rival. In recent weeks, Trump has appeared outright desperate to reclaim his former spot atop the U.S. pecking order, resorting to more than two misleading statements or lies per minute during a 64-minute session with reporters last week, according to NPR’s counting. The 162 bends or breaks to truth left reporters gobsmacked and his apologists trying to avoid eye contact with skeptics.

So Trump is going around the country seeking the comfort of safe spaces. It’s been 12 days since Trump rallied in a battleground state. A weekend rally in Montana, which hasn’t gone for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton’s win there in 1992, left strategists scratching their heads. But even that trip out West revealed his inability to control for everything; on his way to campaign against an incumbent Democrats Senator whom he criticized for “the biggest stomach I’ve ever seen,” Trump’s plane had to divert for mechanical issues. 

By the time Monday evening’s X session arrived, a raft of polls in battleground states showed the race objectively tighter than it was when Biden was in the mix. Those handicapping the race also adjusted their field of play in Harris’ favor. Then the platform that Musk bought and remade into a MAGA playground would not cooperate.

In a way, Trump’s online fumble was a sort of karmic retribution for his campaign’s schadenfreude over a similar conversation that was meant to launch former rival Ron DeSantis’ own bid. At the time, Trump’s campaign was unrepentantly giddy of the troubled kickoff for the Florida Governor: "Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that's just the candidate." Well, that candidate is now Trump, and the mishaps stretch far beyond a conversation with the world’s richest man.

There is, of course, time for Trump to retake the microphone. He has consistently disproven the laws of political gravity. Consequences rarely reach Trump’s doorstep. Setbacks seldom stick around. But Trump has never faced a rival who has captured the nation’s imagination like Harris. During his 2016 primary, Republicans never coalesced around one of his competitors, and his head-to-head race against Hillary Clinton ultimately came down to fewer than 80,000 voters in three states. A pandemic-weary nation decided to shift lanes four years later with Biden, but it was a race that will always carry an asterisk next to it. This cycle, Trump didn’t even entertain the possibility of a Republican alternative, even as his invincibility showed signs of wobbliness.

Now, facing a rival who could well make history as the first female and first female of color president, Trump seems again unable to find solid footing. He has enough runway to lift off again in his now-fixed plane, but that airfield shrinks by the day while Harris is already sky high.

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