Washington: In a highly anticipated interview with Elon Musk on his social media platform X, which was postponed due to a cyberattack, the former US president Donald Trump declared on Monday that immigration illegality saved his life while discussing the murder attempt on him at an election rally.
Trump and Musk discussed a wide range of topics in an audio interview that was heard by over a million people on X, including immigration, the economy, education, climate change, Russia and Ukraine, and their relationships with Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Xi Jinping of China regarding the 2024 presidential election. The owner of X has supported the outgoing president over Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president.
According to a post by Musk on X, a distributed denial of service attack delayed the interview. However, the two engaged in a free-flowing discussion for about two hours after it aired.
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They started by discussing the attempt on Trump’s life during an election event in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk said that Trump had gained his support and endorsement when he yelled, “Fight, fight,” while being carried by Secret Service agents out of the arena.
In agreement with Musk, Trump recalled that he had turned his head toward a chart regarding illegal immigration, and it may have saved his life. “Immigration from abroad saved my life. You’re accurate.
“The incredible thing though, when you talk about the odds, you had to be exactly at that angle, but, the incredible thing is that the chart I used it less than 20 per cent of the time. It was just a moment, yeah, it’s always on my left, never my right, and it is always at the end of the speech. So we have it, it’s on the right, not the left. It’s at the beginning, not the end. And even the people that put it up, they were unprepared, and they did a great job. They got it up immediately, fortunately. But I looked to the right and the bullet came whizzing by, hitting my ear, so it was too busy. But when you think of the odds of that, and you know that normally, you wouldn’t use it, normally, I wouldn’t have the thing, and then, you know, it would have been a very different story. It’s, it’s very much, I say, an act of God. It’s a miracle that it happened, and I’m honoured by it. I’m honoured by it.”
Trump, who blames the Biden-Harris administration for the spike at the southern border with Mexico, has made illegal immigration the focal point of his reelection campaign.
Due to technical difficulties, Elon Musk’s much-awaited interview with former US President Donald Trump on his social media platform X was held much later than planned.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X,” Musk posted on X 18 minutes after the scheduled start time of 8 p.m. US Eastern “Working on shutting it down”.
“Worst case,” he added, “we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
According to one explanation, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyberattack in which an attacker overwhelms a website, server, or network resource with malicious traffic.
Six minutes later, Musk posted again: “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.” Three minutes later, he wrote on X, “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter.”
The former president was permanently suspended from X in January 2021, when the social media platform was known as Twitter. Musk lifted the ban after he bought the platform. Trump returned to the platform in August 2023 and posted just one message. However, He remains active on Truth Social, the look-alike social media platform he launched after being banned from X/Twitter.
Trump returned to X with a flurry of posts and picked up over 3,000,000 new followers, bringing his total to 88.3 million followers, 80.8 million more than the 7.5 million he has on Truth Social.
X gives Trump a much bigger platform, which, according to Musk, has 600 million monthly active users (other estimates put it at 540 million). Truth Social is much smaller—according to papers filed during its IPO in March 2024, as reported by Axios, it had only 5 million monthly active users.
The vast difference in X’s reach and Truth Social’s will not be lost on Trump, who pays close attention to the size of the crowds at his election rallies and events.
Musk is a supporter of Trump and is likely to be a friendly interviewer, but the former president is known to be both a showman and unpredictable. The interview will be closely followed by allies and the Harris campaign.
Trump had the upper hand in the 2024 presidential election until President Joe Biden entered the fray. The race has changed since Biden dropped out and endorsed his deputy, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris has changed the race. She has energised the Democratic party, raised more funds, and taken the lead in polls, even in key battleground states.
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–IANS
