Ex-US President Donald Trump, during a long-anticipated interview on the social media platform, said illegal immigrants may well have saved his life, referring an assassination attempt following one of the election campaigns. Moderated by Elon Musk, the interview itself was initially called off because of a cyber attack, although later it did go on air and became one of the most widely listened interviews — with audiences crossing one million listeners.
The topics discussed really ran the gamut, from immigration to the economy, education, climate change, and more, against the backdrop of the presidential elections due in 2024. Under an atmosphere that was very friendly and which Musk—a big Trump supporter pitting Kamala Harris against the president—in fact facilitated, the no-holds-barred discussion ranged far and wide.
It opened with Trump describing the would-be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania. He said he survived because of an improbable turn of events. He turned at the right moment to see a chart on illegal immigration that deflected the bullet that could have killed him. "Illegal immigration saved my life," Trump said, agreeing with Musk's assessment.
Trump then talked of the miracle of the event, stating that the chart he was speaking of is seldom used and is rolled differently. He declared it to be a hand of God and thanked God for the outcome. Some might say that this story just aligns too well or is too convenient to Trump's current obsession with illegal immigration, probably the central component of his re-election campaign, when one speaks of how the Biden-Harris administration "flung open the southern border" for hordes of lawbreakers.
The interview hit a few technical bumps as Musk announced to Twitter that the conversation would be delayed due to a distributed denial of service attack that swamped X's servers with bad traffic. After a short setback, the conversation later resumed, to a much smaller live audience. Musk confirmed that the unedited audio would be posted later.
The most notable comeback is Trump's return to X, given that he was permanently banned from the platform known as Twitter on January 2021. He was restored when Musk was in the lead of the platform, now known as X, and he came back to X in the month of August 2023. Despite being more active on his own social media network, Truth Social, which is gearing up for its big debut this month, Trump's return to X reached an enormous number: nearly 88.3 million followers in a short period of time.
However, what is most interesting is the gap in the sizes of their audiences: X has 600 million monthly active users, but Truth Social is limping haphazardly along with a paltry 5 million. That's an enlarged platform for Trump in the audience base for his 2024 campaign, to which he remains a towering figure, especially with recent changes in the Democratic race with President Joe Biden's withdrawal and subsequent endorsement of his vice presidential running mate, Kamala Harris.
The entry of Harris into the race seemed to galvanize the Democratic Party, where fundraising picked up and even changed some of the poll numbers favorable to her in some key battleground states. Most particularly, this interview between Musk and Trump will be scrutinized by Trump's allies and by the Harris campaign as election day in 2024 approaches.
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