The Interview With Orange Man and Rocket Man the Bad Guys Didn’t Want You To Hear
Donald Trump is America’s Rasputin. His enemies have done everything they can to stop him, but so far, he’s invincible.
On Monday evening, I was privileged to witness history being made: the first-ever former president-slash-current-presidential candidate interview live on X (formerly Twitter).
Sitting in front of the computer at my office in downtown Tucson, I watched people walk past my window as I anxiously logged into the official X Space hosted by @realDonaldTrump to hear what was sure to be an interesting discussion about the 2024 election by two American billionaires.
I waited… and waited… and waited…
I sat patiently for ten minutes, then twenty, then thirty. I listened to the boring hold music for forty whole minutes. This is ridiculous, I thought.
If there’s one thing you can say for sure about Elon Musk, though, it’s that he is eternally (and often wrongly) optimistic about delivery targets, start times, deadlines, and launch dates.
I got ready to unplug everything and head home, then, right at the 42-minute mark, out of the silence, Elon Musk’s voice finally came online.
“ All right. Hello everyone. So, my apologies for the late start. We unfortunately had a massive, distributed denial of service attack against our servers…”
Okay, so better late than never. We were off to the races.
I plinked away at my keyboard for a few hours while listening to Musk and Trump talk, joke, laugh, and jibe about everything from the cost of food and gasoline to China, crime, inflation, and a whole gamut of issues related to (and unrelated to) politics and the election.
I heard the entire thing, from the moment I pressed “start listening” until it said: “This Space has ended.” Three whole hours from start to finish, including more than 40 minutes of radio silence.
I smiled. I laughed. I cringed. I rolled my eyes.
It was everything I expected from a live interview that was announced by a pinned post at the top of the screen saying: “This is the biggest interview in history…”
Then I left my office, hopped in my car, and drove to the gym to get in a workout before going home.
When I walked in the door, I saw the row of televisions in front of the treadmills. Everything from CNN, MSNBC, to Fox News: they all featured Musk’s interview with Trump on X Spaces.
Wow, that sure is quick, I thought. It had literally just ended minutes ago, and the talking heads on the big networks were already arguing about it on screen.
They were pretty harsh. But I noticed they weren’t even talking about the substance of the discussion.
Were they offering crisp, journalistic takes, hard-hitting reporting, truth-seeking, and fact-checking? Not really. Mostly just saying that it had serious technical problems, was late to start, and was plagued with glitches.
That was what was newsworthy?
Over the next day or two, I saw news reports all over the internet that were so bizarre it was hard to take it all in:
Musk's interview with Trump marred by technical glitches (The Hill)
Musk's rambling chat with Trump on X plagued by technical issues (Yahoo News)
Malfunction junction: Elon Musk chats up Donald Trump amid X tech glitches (USA Today)
Trump returns to X with technical glitches, softball questions from Musk (WaPo)
X melts down after Trump-Musk's interview 'Space' immediately crashes (Fox News)
Rambling Trump, Musk interview marred by tech issues (Reuters)
Elon Musk’s X suffers tech failures at start of Donald Trump interview (The Guardian)
Just look at these headlines. It’s insanity.
None of this is newsworthy, and they’re being intentionally obtuse.
It’s like the Titanic just sank, and they’re reporting on what everybody wore to dinner.
Love or hate Trump (or Musk), the fact that it took a groundbreaking interview during election season on a groundbreaking new technology 45 minutes to start is not the story. It was the least important aspect of the entire interaction.
Speeches and interviews often start late for all kinds of reasons. (When Musk interviewed Ron DeSantis in May of this year, there were also technical difficulties because the X servers were so overloaded with more people than expected tuning in.)
Fox News, which is usually castigated for “being friendly to Republicans,” even dared to claim: "Musk alleged the crash was the result of a 'DDOS attack on X.’”
Alleged?
People are now saying there wasn’t really a DDoS attack? Musk made it up?
What. The. Actual. Hell.
Maybe people who don’t have a background in web development don’t understand how real and serious DDoS attacks are. They’re the kind of thing that took down the Kremlin’s website for days after Russia invaded Ukraine, and they’re often instigated by one country against another country’s critical political figures or institutions, often as an act of war or to shut down journalism.
Leaving aside whether Musk’s “allegation” that X was under a DDoS attack was accurate, it does beg the question: “Who would want to DDoS attack a public conversation between a former president and a private citizen?”
This is a far more important question, and the potential answers are far more concerning.
Really, who could the culprit be? Who would be most interested in preventing the world from hearing a friendly chat between Musk and Trump?
China? Russia? Iran? Venezuela?
The fact that the Trump campaign was hacked just a few days earlier, and fingers are pointing at Iran is telling. Clearly, and obviously, many foreign governments—hostile actors who are avowed enemies of America—want to see Trump fail.
Yet, it’s abundantly clear that so do CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post.
Here’s a hint: if the people who literally want to destroy your country are trying to silence a particular political figure, and so are you, it is time to ask yourself: “Hans... are we the baddies?”
(On a side note, Google has an entire service called Project Shield that “defends news, human rights, and elections-related sites from DDoS attacks.” It’s a free tool, only available to “news, human rights, and election-related organizations, as well as to individual journalists.” Surely, Twitter/X has its own version of this, but I’m not familiar enough with the inner workings of their system. After almost an hour, they were able to get the attack under control.)
At this point, I can’t tell which is worse: foreign enemies carrying out a DDoS attack on a former American president to prevent him from getting re-elected or domestic enemies carrying out a public relations attack for the same reason.
If you think I’m exaggerating the threat of the enemy within the gates, I beg you to watch this video clip of “White House Reporter” Cleve Wootson literally asking President Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre what role Biden has in “stopping… or intervening” in Musk’s interview of Trump.
“Banana Republic” is too kind a description. This is Communist Party of Cuba-level election interference. So shocking, so bold, so brazen, it simply beggars belief that this is happening on American soil.
Do my eyes deceive me? A “reporter” at a paper of record actually is asking the executive branch of America’s federal government to “intervene” and stop a former president from speaking to… a business owner on his own platform?
I thought homeowners’ associations were bad at interfering in the lives of private citizens, but this is truly a quantum leap in governmental interference.
And, really, The Washington Post?!
“Democracy dies in darkness,” indeed.
And by the way, where’s the outcry from the other reporters in the pool? Are they unaware of how cosmically ironic it is that a journalist who works at a media platform owned by tech billionaire Jeff Bezos is asking the current president to prevent a former president from being featured on a platform owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk?
Beuller? Beuller? Beuller?
Nobody cares?
The irony is thicker than a Cybertruck’s body panel.
The biggest problem with this whole “Musk and Trump interview” thing, among others, is the fear of people speaking. Right now, a lot of people in positions of power are very afraid of letting their opponents even be heard in the first place.
This is terrifying.
Who doesn’t want people to speak freely? Why don’t members of the White House press corps want President Trump to be heard? Why don’t nearly all of the mainstream media networks want him to be heard?
What are they afraid of? As I said, I sat through the entire conversation live as it happened. I heard every single word. It wasn’t a meltdown at all. After the painfully long, awkward silence, it went on without a hitch or even a glitch.
But let me tell you, this “interview” was no masterclass in presidential eloquence.
Trump was his usual self: bullying and brash, he was long-winded, threw around insults like a chimpanzee flinging poop at spectators in a zoo, and filled up most of the airtime with blustering hyperbole and statistics of questionable veracity.
Just looking at a transcript of the discussion, I see that he called people “stupid” 13 times, said Biden was “close to vegetable stage,” called the Biden administration “incompetent” 7 times, said things are “horrible” 9 times, and claimed that the situation in America is “the worst” it’s ever been 7 times.
There was also the fact that, for whatever reason, he seemed to have a strange “lisp” that he’d never had before, which was very distracting. He sounded slobbery, like Sylvester the Cat. I kept waiting for him to finally come out and say: “Sufferin' Succotash” at any moment.
So what was everyone afraid of again? Trump was being Trump: he’s a guy we’ve all gotten to know now, and he is himself everywhere he goes. Nobody puts Trump in a corner. Nothing about this conversation was new, or threatening, or dangerous.
But this concentrated effort, from digital DDoS attacks to verbal attacks from members of the press pool in DC and even rhetorical attacks from the current president himself, is totally outrageous and extremely dangerous in a Republic.
To put it in context: right now, Musk and Trump were attempting to have a one-hour conversation (which turned into three) that was live, unedited, and shared for free in the digital town square, without ads or interruption, to anybody on the planet who wanted to tune in.
How could anybody possibly be against that?
Shockingly, the full weight of all the established media platforms was against them, as were hostile actors overseas, as were currently sitting politicians, including those in the White House.
If that wasn’t enough, to add a cherry on top, the day before the X Space, some random guy who is allegedly a man but looks like my dead grandmother with thicker glasses and has the impossibly-boring-and-artificially-inflated title: “European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services” sent an ominous open letter (on X, no less!) to Musk warning: “With great audience comes greater responsibility.”
Are you with me now?
Thierry Breton, an unelected, 69-year-old Spiderman-quoting, bureaucratic soy boy from France who ostensibly speaks on behalf of 27 countries was openly threatening Musk with legal action if he dared have a dialogue with a former president of the United States.
We are not living in normal times. This is not normal behavior.
(By the way, the fact that Breton was later rebuffed by other, more official non-posers in the EU with actual authority after the fact doesn’t change anything. I commend Musk for standing firm against the long, bullying arm of Europe’s meddling thought police that reached across the Atlantic, rightly telling Breton: “Take a big step back, and literally f**k your own face.”)
Let’s call what we saw this week what it is: de-platforming of the highest order. It’s the heckler’s veto, magnified a million percent, where those who don’t want to hear a message attempt to prevent others from hearing it as well.
As I’ve said, whether you’re a fan of Trump or Musk at all is entirely irrelevant. It is completely asinine to suggest that a conversation like this shouldn’t even happen just because you don’t like it.
And all that poppycock from some stations about how it wasn’t a real interview and how Musk lobbed him softballs? Musk already headed that off at the pass in the beginning. He explicitly stated in the very first minute that it wasn’t an interview. It was a “conversation.”
Obviously.
Musk is a serial entrepreneur who makes cars and rockets for a living. He isn’t going to give Trump a Barbara Walters-style interrogation. That’s not his skill set. Everybody knew that going into it.
There’s nothing wrong with that: Joe Rogan, probably the most influential “interviewer” in the English-speaking world right now, similarly has no journalistic chops. For Pete’s sake, he’s a stand-up comedian, stunt/dare game show host, and martial arts fighter who simply asks good questions to interesting and people like listening to him.
On camera, he burps, smokes cigars, makes penis jokes, recommends people try psychedelic drugs, plumbs the depths of wild conspiracy theories, and says, “Dude, that’s f**ked up” every few minutes, and episodes are almost always three hours long.
And people absolutely love it.
It’s good. It’s fun. It’s fine. It’s very, very popular right now: way more popular than the empty suits with journalism degrees and five-figure student loans wasting their lives on CNN despite the massive budgets and fancy camera lighting.
As of this writing, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is the #1 ranked podcast on Spotify and the #3 ranked podcast on Apple.
What Musk did earlier this week was almost as impressive. I still can’t fully understand how analytics work on X, and I don’t entirely trust them (video and audio “views” are counted even if a user only watches or listens for a few seconds, for example), but I know this: looking at the recording of the Space right now, it says that 28.9 million accounts tuned in, and the post itself has 272.6 million views.
No matter how you slice it, that is darn impressive.
That’s not a “meltdown” by any stretch of the imagination. It’s fear that’s driving this pinnacle of cancel culture, and you can smell it.
They’re terrified of Trump, and will do almost anything to prevent him from succeeding at just about anything.
Donald Trump, at this point, is America’s Rasputin. His enemies have done everything they can to stop him, including: cancel his Twitter account and ban him from the platform, censor his posts on Facebook and, eventually ban him there too, call him an “illegitimate president,” arrest him, impeach him (twice), indict him, try him in court in multiple states, remove him from the ballot, attempt to strip his Secret Service protection, and in the end, even shoot him.
They literally shot him with a gun, but the motherf*cker just won’t die.
So, failing all that, they’ve resorted to trying to shut him up.
Today, in America, during the 2024 election, the news media are not serving the public at all. Americans deserve better than the monopolistic cabal spouting the same propaganda at the same time in unison.
It’s creepy how baldly they all read from the same sheet of music: you can change the channel all you want, but it’s still the same tune. It all seemingly orchestrated by one central figure, which begs a horrible question with an even more terrifying answer.
Who is the maestro?
Right now, all the major news companies, and even entire countries, have locked arms in cooperation with one big story: that Republicans are “weird,” and can’t stop going on glitchy Twitter/X spaces with Elon Musk that have technical issues.
Ouch. Sick burn.
I don’t know what to make of all this. It’s a vexing mess, and it’s far more worrisome than just despairing that a political candidate who received 75 million votes in the last election and actually served as president of this country “isn’t being treated fairly” (although that is certainly true).
I think this deranged behavior stems from a pathological belief in one simple axiom:
“Orange man” = bad.
“Space man” = bad.
Therefore, “Orange man + Space man” = very bad.
One thing I’m absolutely certain of is that this gives a lot of credence to claims by Trump, Musk, and others that the mainstream/legacy media are all just “fake news.”
It’s clear that a lot of people, companies, and even countries want Trump and Musk to fail. And not just to fail as a interviewer and presidential candidate, respectively, but as business owners and human beings.
Probably the most unhinged headline of all that I saw came from that reliable commie rag Newsweek. (That they still have the word “news” in their name is pure parody at this point.) It said: “Donald Trump says he will flee to Venezuela if he loses election.”
This was no accident. It is so utterly, entirely, completely wrong as to be intentionally written in bad faith in order to help sway an election. There’s simply no other explanation.
In any other context, with this level of malicious falsehood, if it were more damaging to him personally, it would surely qualify for libel deserving of damages.
Trump’s actual quote was about having a second conversation on X Spaces after the election was over. He suggested that if he loses the election (fairly or unfairly, he doesn’t specify), they should meet in Venezuela to talk:
“In fact, the next time what we'll do is if something happens with this election—which would be a horror show—we'll meet the next time in Venezuela, 'cause it'll be a far safer place to meet than our country. Okay?
So we'll go, you and I will go, and we'll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela because that's what's happening. Their crime rate’s coming down, and our crime rate’s going through the roof.”
When it comes to election-year coverage, in 2024 at least, I’m afraid to report that what you’re getting from “Newsweek” and the rest of the legacy media giants is indeed fake news.
But it isn’t just fake news; it’s useless. And that is far worse.
I liked your thought process on this piece. It is truly scary.
The way this entire election is going is beyond just “another crazy election season.” This is scary. Between state media, persecuting and attempted silencing of any opposition, blatant censorship, skipping the voting process for the Dem nominee, and the Dems refusal to stand on a position so people can cast informed votes, I do not recognize our country today.
Saw on Politico today that the Dems strategy is to not bother with a policy platform until “after Harris wins.”
I feel like Alice in Wonderland, down the rabbit hole into an upside down world where nothing is what it seems.