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      ‘He has a proven track record’: behind Tim Walz’s appeal to workers

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      Vice-presidential picks have little effect on who wins a presidential election, many political scientists say. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s choice as her running mate, could prove the exception to that rule. Not least because of his track record of successfully appealing to working people.Angela Ferritto, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, voiced confidence that Walz will help the vice-president win in three pivotal states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin: “I strongly believe that Governor Walz will help the ticket. He has a proven track record of accomplishing things for working people.”Ferritto noted that as Minnesota’s governor, Walz enacted paid sick days, guaranteed more protection to construction workers against wage theft, and gave teachers greater negotiating power “over class sizes so they can give students the attention they need”.Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster, said Walz had an underappreciated strength that is political gold. “He gets policies out of the left-right divide and gets people to agree that this is the right thing to do,” she said. “Who’s for large class size? Who’s for poorly paid teachers? Who’s not for letting Mom and Dad have time with their new baby? He has a way of taking ideology out of policies and making them seem like things we can get together on.”Steve Rosenthal, a political strategist and former political director of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, said Walz had another important trait – he is the type of candidate blue-collar workers would be happy to have a beer with. Walz likes to hunt and fish, he was long a union member while a teacher, and his financial disclosure forms show he owns no stocks or bonds.“What the two parties’ vice-presidential picks say is that both sides recognize the critical nature of winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” Rosenthal said. “I think Walz is a huge addition in those states.”He explained that people normally focus on who is at the top of the ticket, but “to the extent Harris has someone who can represent her in those three states, he can be a big help. He can camp out in those states. He can walk a picket line and go to union halls. He can be a huge plus.”While history shows that vice-presidents don’t often move voters to the polls, with Walz things “could be a little different”, said Lake, noting that Harris’s selection of Walz was getting huge attention partly because it was the biggest, early decision of her presidential campaign. “I think Walz definitely helps in terms of the blue wall strategy [of winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin]. It’s great to have someone from the midwest on the ticket. His story is great and complements hers.”On paper, political experts say, Walz should be an alluringly strong running mate because he served in the army national guard for 24 years, was a high school teacher for two decades and coached his football team to a state championship. Moreover, Walz, a 60-year-old father of two, grew up on a farm in a Nebraska town of just 300 people.Ever since Walz’s selection was announced, he and Harris have trumpeted his rural roots and decades of public service, while Donald Trump and his campaign have rushed to portray Walz as “dangerously liberal” and in other unflattering ways. In recent days, the Harris and Trump campaigns have been rushing to put forward clashing definitions of Walz, and which side prevails in defining him to the nation could have a major effect on how much Walz boosts the Democratic ticket.“A handful of national polls show that 60% and up of voters say they don’t know enough about Walz to have an opinion,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Milwaukee-based Marquette Law School Poll. “The Republicans are pushing hard to paint him in a negative way. Things are wide open as to whether he will be defined as a Minnesota dad or the socialist governor of Minnesota.”The Trump campaign’s attacks “are really exploding on him”, Franklin said, adding, “If Walz deals with them effectively, more power to him. If he ends up being swiftboated, just like John Kerry was, that’s not so good.”JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has accused Walz of leaving the military early to avoid serving in Iraq, but Walz says he retired from the national guard in 2005 to run for Congress, months before his artillery unit received orders to deploy to Iraq.Many Democrats voice confidence that Walz will beat back the Trump-Vance attacks and be a boon to the ticket. They point to his superb communications skills – he’s down to earth, clever and humorous, and he came up with the term “weird” to describe and deride Trump and Vance. Many Democrats applaud the policies he ushered in as Minnesota governor, including 12 weeks’ paid family and medical leave, free breakfasts and lunches for public school students, strong protections for reproductive freedom, and free college tuition at public universities for students from families making less than $80,000 a year.Even though studies have shown that vice-presidential picks usually affect election results by only a small margin, Walz’s addition to the ticket – and his midwestern, pro-worker bona fides – could make a crucial difference in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won each of those states by less than 1% in 2016.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn June, Emerson College Polling and the Hill did a poll in Minnesota that found that Walz was plus 12 with women, minus nine with men, and plus 11 with 18-to-29-year-olds. Spencer Kimball, director of Boston-based Emerson College Polling said Walz could certainly help Harris attract and motivate younger voters. “Younger voters had moved away from Biden, not necessarily to Trump, maybe to a third party,” Kimball said. “What we’ve seen recently is the youth vote moving toward Harris, and I think Walz helps double down on that. The youth vote is one of the Democratic party’s bases. To get young people excited about the race is a potential gamechanger and can help reset the election map.”With regard to the three key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Ken Kollman, director of the University of Michigan’s center for political studies, said that there was “a big mother lode” of votes in Detroit and that voter turnout in Philadelphia and Milwaukee was hugely important. “The national election may very well hinge on turnout in those areas,” he said, adding that he didn’t think Walz would make much difference in those three cities.Walz could prove important, however, Kollman said, in making overtures to Democrats and blue-collar voters who have gravitated to Trump. “There is a group of Trump supporters who are pretty liberal on issues, which is one of the paradoxes of Trump’s appeal – people who actually rely on or believe in government support and active government intervention in their lives, their industry or their company.”Kollman said that Walz, because of his rural background and pro-worker record, “might be able to get some of them to break away from Trump. That remains a big question.”Lake, the pollster, agreed that Walz “can provide an opening” to voters leaning toward Trump, but said that Walz’s personal appeal alone could not win over many Trump-leaning voters. Lake said the “whole ticket has to improve” its efforts to reach them and persuade them.Ferritto of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO voiced optimism about Walz’s ability to win over Trump voters. “He flipped a congressional district that borders Iowa from red to blue,” she said. “He wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that unless he appealed to blue-collar voters.”Some, perhaps many, blue-collar Trump supporters will never hear Walz’s or Harris’s message, Ferritto acknowledged, because they are inundated from one side. “But I believe there are blue-collar voters who are willing to listen,” she said. “They want to hear facts. They want to hear about achieving real results. I do believe that Walz can reach those voters.” More

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      So Donald chatted with Elon, and here’s the future as they see it – losers win, incompetence rules | Marina Hyde

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      Would you like to travel in the advance party to Mars, aboard the space rocket of a man who can’t sort a livestream? Ideally you would have to get in line for this species-level honour behind thousands of Earth’s leading shitposters, who not only trust implicitly in X owner Elon Musk, but truly believe that if they grind away for hours a day telling him that on his platform, one day he will see one of those posts. I hope he does, guys!In the meantime, my favourite recent headline on this interplanetary settlement programme ran “Elon Musk denies his sperm will seed Mars colony”. Sure. It’s just a hunch, but I feel like they’re going to have way more sperm than they need up there. It’s the other bit necessary for human life that you sense will be in shorter supply.Anyway, from the future of the red mist planet to the future of political discourse: Monday night’s conversation between Musk and Donald Trump on X (audio only, only almost an hour late, and only for massively fewer live listeners than advance estimates suggested). It was so dysfunctional that even Trump’s dentures were trying to escape. Hours after it had taken place, Musk issued an intriguing APB: “Anyone have a More

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      Donald Trump is in full meltdown mode. Could he destroy his own campaign? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      What do you think Donald Trump does for stress relief? Massages, maybe? Or perhaps he binge-drinks Diet Coke while bed rotting. Maybe he writes down his grievances on pieces of paper and then flushes them down the toilet. It’s also possible he lets off steam by smashing gold trinkets with his golf clubs and throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans. That feels very on-brand.Whatever Trump does to manage his stress, I imagine he’s doing a lot of it right now. The convicted felon has had a terrible three weeks. Ever since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, things have been going rapidly downhill for Trump. His campaign had been built around bashing Biden, whose frailty and questionable mental acuity made him an easy target. With the far more energetic and coherent Kamala Harris as his opponent, Trump clearly doesn’t know what to do. His campaign now seems to consist of nothing but racism, the revival of old grudges, conspiracy theories and insults.This strategy isn’t exactly working out for him. A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Saturday found Harris four points ahead in the crucial battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. This is a big deal: when Biden was the nominee, Trump was either always slightly ahead in those states or the two men were neck and neck. It’s not just the polls that have shifted, media coverage has, too. A month ago, every headline seemed to be questioning Biden’s mental competence; now, headlines are focused on Trump’s unhinged rambling.While Harris’s campaign has huge momentum and exudes competence, Trump is embroiled in chaos. One of the latest debacles? He was hacked. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed the hack was “by the Iranian Government” and added: “Never a nice thing to do!” No – but it provides a good opportunity to remind everyone that Trump’s Twitter (now X) account was compromised in 2020 by Victor Gevers who successfully guessed the password was “maga2020!” This was after the ethical hacker hacked Trump’s Twitter in 2016 by guessing the password was “yourefired”, the catchphrase from The Apprentice. The man who wants voters to think he can manage national security can’t even manage his own passwords.Even an interview on Monday night with his pal Elon Musk was a rambling, grievance-filled disaster. It was also beset by serious technical issues, leading a Harris spokesman to quip that Trump’s campaign is in service of “self-obsessed rich guys who … cannot run a livestream in the year 2024”.Trump isn’t dealing with his stream of setbacks very well; according to Republican sources quoted in a recent Axios report, he “is struggling to get past his anger”. The New York Times has similarly reported that a seething Trump repeatedly called Harris a “bitch” in private – claims that Trump has denied, despite the fact that he’s happily called the vice-president all manner of names in public. Essentially, he’s in full meltdown mode.So, too, are Trump’s allies, who are desperately begging their candidate to get a grip and start focusing on actual issues, rather than personal attacks. Instead of heeding this advice, however, Trump seems intent on alienating the people who can help him win. At a campaign rally in Atlanta earlier this month, Trump picked a fight with Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular Republican governor, whom he termed “little Brian” and accused of having turned Georgia into a “laughing stock”. Georgia is an important state to win and, before Biden dropped out, it seemed as though it was in the bag for Trump. Now he’s polling the same as Harris. Making an enemy of Kemp is a terrible strategy.While it’s highly satisfying to think of a furious Trump setting his own campaign on fire, it’s important not to be complacent. As we know, things change quickly. Harris may be on the up now, but she hasn’t won this election yet. It’s also important not to underestimate the dangers a desperate Trump poses. There’s a chance he might implode, yes. But there’s also a chance he might explode, leaving a hell of a lot of collateral damage in his wake. In an interview this weekend, Biden said that, if Trump loses, he’s “not confident at all” there would be a peaceful transfer of power. Nor am I.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn case you were wondering, by the way, there is a real answer to the question about how Trump manages his stress. During a 2004 interview with Larry King, he said: “I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters … That’s how I handle stress.” I wish I could give that technique a go myself. The problem is, if you’re keen on things such as bodily autonomy and democracy, then this election really does matter. More

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      Kamala Harris must speak to the press | Margaret Sullivan

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      I can understand why Kamala Harris hasn’t given a sit-down interview to a major media organization or done a no-holds-barred press conference since she began her presidential campaign a few weeks ago.From a tactical or strategic point of view, there’s little reason to.After all, she’s enjoying a honeymoon phase with a lot of positive media and a nearly ecstatic reception from much of the public.Just this week, as one example, Time magazine published a story on her ascendency with the cover line: Her Moment. The illustration showed the Democratic candidate with a beatific expression, looking serenely (but somehow powerfully) into a promising future. Granted, Time isn’t the opinion-maker that it was decades ago, but you can’t buy that kind of exposure.What’s more, when the vice-president has interacted with reporters in recent weeks, as in a brief “gaggle” during a campaign stop, the questions were silly. Seeking campaign drama rather than substance, they centered on Donald Trump’s attacks or when she was planning to do a press conference. The former president, meanwhile, does talk to reporters, but he lies constantly; NPR tracked 162 lies and distortions in his hour-long press conference last week at Mar-a-Lago.But Harris needs to overcome these objections and do what’s right.She is running for the highest office in the nation, perhaps the most powerful perch in the world, and she owes it to every US citizen to be frank and forthcoming about what kind of president she intends to be.To tell us – in an unscripted, open way – what she stands for.We don’t know much about that, other than vague campaign platitudes about “freedom” and “not going back”.As journalist Jay Caspian Kang recently put it – under the New Yorker headline How Generic Can Kamala Harris Be? – the candidate hasn’t explained “why she has changed her mind on fracking, which she once said should be banned, and has wobbled on Medicare for all, which she once supported, or what she plans to do with Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is said to be unpopular among some of Harris’s wealthy donors; or much about how a Harris administration would handle the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East”. And that’s just a start.I don’t have a lot of confidence that the broken White House press corps would skillfully elicit the answers to those and other germane questions if given the chance. But Harris should show that she understands that, in a democracy, the press – at least in theory – represents the public, and that the sometimes adversarial relationship between the press and government is foundational.The pressure on Harris to open up is growing. It’s a constant complaint on Fox News, both by Fox anchors and by Republican politicians, including her rival Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance.And mainstream media, perhaps tiring of being so unnaturally positive, has picked up on it, too.“Time’s just about up on Harris to avoid this becoming a thing,” warned Benjy Sarlin of Semafor. He was responding to a front-page story in the New York Times about Harris’s inaccessibility, whose headline included another ominous phrase, describing her campaign as spirited but “shrouded from public scrutiny”.Hear the drumbeat building?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIdeally, Harris will do both a lengthy press conference and a televised, in-depth interview – perhaps with Lester Holt, Jake Tapper or Rachel Scott – or with a major newspaper or equivalent.Apparently feeling the heat, Harris has said she plans to get something scheduled before the end of this month. But that’s too long to wait.Not everyone agrees, of course. One Democratic politician, Jon Cooper, posted on Twitter/X: “My thoughts on Kamala Harris largely ignoring the media and instead speaking directly to American voters: F*** the corporate media.”Harris, while she will probably be effective in the 10 September debate with Trump, isn’t especially skilled when answering questions on the fly. She tends to conjure a vague “word salad” as she did when asked a softball question just after the prisoner swap involving Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.When she finally does speak to the press at length, I’m sure some unfavorable headlines will result. There will be some nonsensical controversies and unnecessary intrigue.Even if you very much hope that Harris prevails in November over her corrupt, felonious rival, that’s not a good enough reason to cheer on her press avoidance.If Harris is truly “for the people”, as she has long claimed, she needs to speak to their representatives – flawed as they may be.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Lone Democrat on Georgia state board defends elections amid new rules

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      Sara Tindall Ghazal was scouring her closet as 8pm approached on Wednesday night. She was preparing for her first appearance on cable news, something she has avoided her entire career.In fact, Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the Georgia state election board (SEB), has shunned media attention and appearances since she was appointed to the board in 2021. Back then, even as Georgia became the focal point of former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and as rightwing media and a nationwide network of election denial activists homed in on the state, Tindall Ghazal kept to herself, quietly carrying out her duties in previously obscure meetings of the board.But after two days of public board meetings last week in which her Republican counterparts on the board adopted myriad rules at the behest of some of those very election denier activists, Tindall Ghazal’s cable news debut had become unavoidable.“The makeup of this board has changed from being a board that followed the rule of law and made decisions based on what state and federal law required, and what was best for running elections, to one that is being driven by far-rightwing narratives,” she said.For more than 16 hours on 6 and 7 August, Tindall Ghazal had sat with her fellow board members, all Republicans, and listened to speakers complain that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – and propose rules that would prevent that from happening again in November but that Tindall Ghazal said will “cause chaos” in November.They include a rule that gives local election officials more power to refuse to certify election results, and another that provides more complicated procedures for voters filling out absentee ballots, as well as constant video surveillance at ballot drop box sites. Tindall Ghazal also voted against reopening a case pushed by election deniers that claims results in 2020 in Fulton county were flipped to benefit Joe Biden.Voting with her in dissent was John Fervier, a Republican and the board chair. Voting for the rules and investigation into Fulton county were a trio of Republicans who were praised by Trump at a recent campaign rally in Atlanta. All three have expressed beliefs in widespread election fraud that even conservative groups have said does not exist.“It’s an iterative process,” Tindall Ghazal said of the SEB’s descent into election denialism. “The narratives exist already and are deeply embedded in the minds of some of the board members and certainly much of the audience and petitioners, and everything that is done in the meetings is done to perpetuate those narratives.”Just as Tindall Ghazal’s Republican colleagues voted to reopen the case against Fulton county, Trump was already promoting the decision on his social media platform, Truth Social.“The Attorney General of Georgia MUST get moving on this,” Trump wrote. “So must Governor Kemp, and the Secretary of State.”Despite Trump’s Truth Social post, nothing has changed in the Fulton county case. Following his loss in 2020, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, ordered an audit of votes in Fulton, the state’s most populous county and home to heavily Democratic Atlanta.The audit found 345 more votes for Trump than had been counted during the election. But that didn’t change the fact that Biden had received 243,000 more votes than Trump in Fulton county, the audit confirmed.Still, election deniers like those who have successfully pressured the board in recent years to investigate claims of voter fraud have insisted that the case needs further attention. Last week, they got a major win, when the pro-Trump trio of SEB members Janelle King, Rick Jeffares and Janice Johnston sent the case to the attorney general for a new investigation.“We take election integrity very seriously, and we will apply the constitution, the law and the facts as we have always done,” a spokesperson for the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, a Republican, told the Associated Press.The SEB also passed rules that Tindall Ghazal said were “far outside our authority as a rule-making body”. Of the rules passed last week, Tindall Ghazal says the most problematic is one that allows for county election board members in Georgia’s 159 counties to refuse to certify results – which courts have largely ruled is a “ministerial” task not up to the discretion of local election officials – if a “reasonable inquiry” can be conducted into allegations of election fraud or errors.“Reasonable inquiry is about as uncertain a standard as I can think of,” Tindall Ghazal said.Several Democratic members of the state legislature spoke out against the rule, as did voting rights groups. Former chair of the Fulton county board of elections Cathy Woolard, a Democrat, said that the certification rule will invite scores of lawsuits challenging the ability of county election board members to use their discretion to hold up certification of election results.“It’s hard for me to imagine the sheer volume of lawsuits that will be filed to challenge the process, the rules, the disregard for the rule of law,” Woolard said.In voting with Tindall Ghazal against the certification rule, Fervier, a political appointee of the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, previewed the legal fight ahead over certification.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Please make sure the votes are in the record for any potential future litigation,” Fervier said at the meeting.At a recent Trump rally in Atlanta, Johnston stood and waved to the crowd as they applauded her, King and Jeffares for “fighting for victory”, as Trump himself put it.“They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job,” Trump said, naming the three of them but not Fervier.“Three pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”After a second, eight-hour day on the dais on 7 August, Tindall Ghazal said she needed “some protein” before preparing for her first major television interview. Her hair was already sorted: close-cropped in a growing-out buzz from losing her hair to chemotherapy treatments for stage two breast cancer.Tindall Ghazal received her cancer diagnosis during a meeting of the state election board in October, then had a mastectomy the following month. The episode was “transformative”, she said, proving that she had a strong network of family and friends to support her. Undergoing the procedure and chemo, Tindall Ghazal never missed an election board meeting.“I don’t do well when I have too much time on my hands, so having the board work kept my mind busy on something that I care deeply about.,” Tindall Ghazal said.An eighth-generation Georgian and attorney, Tindall Ghazal has monitored elections and peace talks for former president Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center in Syria, Rwanda and Liberia, where she met her husband, Patrick, in 1998. After leaving the Carter Center, Tindall Ghazal became the director of voter protection for the Democratic party of Georgia.In 2021, Georgia Democrats appointed her to the SEB. At the time, she knew she’d be the only Democrat – but she also had faith that Republicans on the board would work for the benefit of all Georgians. For a time, Tindall Ghazal says, that was the case. Republicans had appointed relative moderates to the board.Since 2021, three moderate Republican appointees have been replaced by King, Johnston and Jeffares. Johnston has been receptive to complaints and calls for investigations from election denial activists, the Guardian found in March; Jeffares has openly posted about his belief in Trump’s election lies, although he told the Guardian that he believed Trump legitimately lost in Georgia in 2020. King, a conservative media personality with no experience managing elections, is married to Kelvin King, who ran against the former football star Herschel Walker in the Republican primary in 2022 but lost. (Walker went on to lose to Raphael Warnock in the general election.) King hosts a podcast and appears on a political panel at a TV station in Atlanta, but has no experience administering elections, nor does Jeffares.Leftwing groups like Fair Fight Action, which was founded by the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, said the trio of Johnston, King and Jeffares had been chosen for their roles on the board not because of their experience administering elections, but because of their fealty to Trump.“The state election board has become a Maga government body, with three new members likely chosen not because they have elections experience, but because they’re seen as loyalists who will defer to Trump’s 2020 election fraud lies,” Fair Fight’s communications director, Max Flugrath, said in a statement.As non-elected officials hearing complaints about elections, ballots and other minutiae of the election process, the SEB was a relatively obscure government body whose meetings have not typically provided scenes of great political theater. But that changed in 2020, when the SEB became the focus of election denial activists’ attempts to prove the election was stolen from Trump. Now the board’s meetings have garnered greater attention from a nationwide network of election deniers, Georgia’s political press, voting rights advocacy groups and left-leaning watchdogs.Trump’s mention of King, Johnston and Jeffares put an even bigger spotlight on the previously obscure body. Johnston, who attended Trump’s rally and waved at the cheering crowd, did not return a request for comment, but King said that while she did not attend the rally, if she had, she was well within her rights to “attend any Republican event freely as I would expect [Tindall Ghazal] to do the same if she wishes”. Jeffares also didn’t attend the rally, he said. In a lengthy conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares, a Trump supporter, said he believed Trump lost fair and square in Georgia in 2020, but repeatedly expressed belief in possible election fraud taking place in the state, especially in Fulton county.Jeffares said he wasn’t watching Trump’s rally in Atlanta when the ex-president mentioned his name. He heard about it several days later.“It makes me mad that we’ve been labeled” as election deniers, Jeffares said. “I didn’t even watch it, but when I heard he mentioned our name, you know my first thought was? Damn, we’re in trouble now.”But Jeffares’ concern over Trump’s mentioning of the board’s work didn’t stop him from saying he’d be open to a position in a second Trump administration. In a conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares said he proposed himself as a candidate for a regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency. The proposal came during a conversation with a former Trump campaign adviser, Brian Jack, who is running for a US congressional seat in November. Jeffares, who runs a company that deals with sewage and wastewater projects, helped Jack with his campaign, he said.“I said if y’all can’t figure out who you want to be the EPA director for the south-east, I’d like to have it,” Jeffares said. “That’s all I said.”With a Democratic ticket marked by surging enthusiasm following the replacement of Biden as candidate with Kamala Harris, Georgia’s status as a swing state has once again become a focal point of both Republican and Democratic campaign strategy. As the state election board continues to implement rules that will affect how Georgia’s elections are run – and is dominated by pro-Trump Republicans who hold the majority – the focus on Tindall Ghazal and her work on the board may be about to get a lot bigger.“All I know is this is where we are, and I am just trying to stop a disaster,” she said. More

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      The Musk-Trump X interview: a surprisingly dull meeting of two planet-sized egos

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      Oscar Wilde once described the English country gentleman galloping after a fox as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump surely qualifies as the incoherent in full pursuit of the unendurable.The men’s joint appearance in an audio conversation on X on Monday night was, as expected, a display of two planet-sized egos, toxic masculinity and breathtaking mendacity. More surprisingly it was also dull, like sitting with two drunks at a bar trying to set the world to rights over more than two hours.The main message: if Trump doesn’t win the election, and if Musk doesn’t become the emperor of the universe, you’re not going to have a country any more.Musk and Trump’s banal chatter about subjects such as radioactive vegetables and the defeat of Napoleon made you crave a return to what came first: a blissful 40 minutes of wallpaper music. That was because crippling technical glitches left thousands of people unable to join.After 18 minutes, billionaire Musk posted that his X platform was under a “massive” DDOS, or denial-of-service attack, which involves flooding a site with data in order to overwhelm it and knock it offline. It was an exquisite replay of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s buggy Republican primary campaign launch on X in May last year.“Wow! The DeSantis TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Trump wrote back then on his Truth Social network. “His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”When the limbo finally ended and Musk got going, Trump had a different interpretation. “Congratulations on breaking every record in the book,” he gushed, as a more than 1 million people were listening as the conversation started, according to a counter on X.Indeed, this was not going to be a head to head reminiscent of David Frost skewering Richard Nixon or Emily Maitlis grilling Prince Andrew. Musk remarked: “No one is themselves in an adversarial interview,” which meant we were going to get the 45th US president and the world’s richest man unfiltered and it wasn’t going to be pretty.Musk kicked off by asking Trump to describe his attempted assassination on 13 July, in which his ear was struck by a bullet, calling his courage under fire “inspiring”. Trump had promised the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee: “You’ll never hear it from me a second time because it’s too painful to tell.” But for you, Elon? Go on, you twisted my arm.This time there were additional dreary details about the immigration chart that Trump turned to look at, sparing him from the bullet. “Illegal immigration saved my life,” he quipped. Musk endorsed Trump shortly after the shooting.They went on to grumble about immigration. Musk said a secure border is essential or America will not function as a country. The South African-born businessman described himself as a “legal immigrant” and asked: “Who do you want on your team? Who do you want on Team America?”Not for the first time, Trump reflexively tapped into dehumanising colonial narratives that portrayed African savages threatening white peace and prosperity. “Elon, what’s happened is unbelievable. You have from Africa, from the Congo, they’re coming. From the Congo. And 22 people came in from the Congo recently and they’re murderers.”A real interviewer could have demanded evidence of these 22 people and their alleged crimes to reassure us that Trump did not pluck the claim of out thin air. Instead Musk, in full space nerd mode, offered: “It’s just not possible for the United States to absorb everyone from Earth or even a few per cent of the rest of Earth. It’s just not possible.”It took more than 20 minutes for the first mention of vice-president Kamala Harris, who was inevitably dubbed “Border tsar” and “a San Francisco liberal”. Trump ranted: “If you’re a Jewish person or if you believe in Israel … if you vote for her – it’s worse than Biden and Biden was bad – but if you vote for her, you ought to have your head examined.”The Republican nominee promised to avert a third world war. If all this was sounding familiar, it was basically a rehash of stuff that Trump trots out at every campaign rally. Musk was about as much use as a wobbly lectern. When Trump comes to debate Harris next month, he will surely say it all over again.But as the conversation rumbled interminably on, some strange topics arose. The ever transactional Trump, long a climate change denier and sceptic of green energy, is suddenly saying nice things about electric vehicles because Tesla boss Musk endorsed him.“I’m sort of waiting for you to come up with solar panels on the roofs of your cars and on the trunks of the cars, and it just seems like something that at some point you will come up with – I’m sure you’ll be the first – but it would seem that a solar panel on the roofs, you know on flat surfaces, on certain surfaces might be good at least in certain areas of the country or the world where you have the sun,” the former president said.Another stellar idea by the very stable genius who brought you injecting bleach as a cure for coronavirus.Trump heaped praise on Musk as a “fertile mind” and embodiment of the “American dream”. Yet he couldn’t stop himself insulting his host too: “In your business everything you do is obsolete. Well, not the tunnels. But everything is obsolete. Even your rocket ships, like, a month later, they’re obsolete. You find a better way to – the only thing that’s not obsolete is a wall and a wheel.”Clearly both participants thought all this was worthwhile. For Trump, it was another exercise in reaching Musk’s army of young white men in the hope that they will turn out for him on election day.For Musk it was a reassuring sign that the death of X, still a hub for Washington’s political class, has been greatly exaggerated. As of Monday, Trump appears to be tweeting regularly again, a potential throwback to the days when his preposterous posts would dominate every news cycle.It also marked a supposedly rare political intervention for Musk. “They try to paint me as a far right guy, which is absurd because I’m making electric vehicles and solar and batteries, helping the environment,” he protested, adding that he had stood in line for six hours to shake Barack Obama’s hand when he was running for president.“It’s not like I’m some sort of dyed in the wool long term Republican. I’d actually call myself historically a moderate Democrat but now I feel like we’re really at a critical juncture for the country.” Trump represents the “path to prosperity”, he argued.Musk sounded as if he could have gone on all night but Trump finally wound things up after two hours and five minutes. If these are two of the most powerful men on Earth, it’s surely time to jump on the next SpaceX rocket to Mars. More

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      Familiar vitriol, and Musk the enabler: key takeaways from Trump’s X interview

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      Donald Trump returned to the social media platform that skyrocketed his career for a live discussion with Elon Musk. The former president unleashed familiar rambling, vitriolic talking points to a sympathetic Musk.Here are key takeaways from the event.1. A terribly slow startThe event started about 45 minutes later than scheduled, with listeners struggling to join the live stream. The issues echoed the meltdown that took place during Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch on X last year, which experts at the time attributed to infrastructure issues on the platform after Musk laid off much of its workforce and shut down multiple data centers.On Monday, Musk attributed the delay to a cyberattack, namely, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in which bad actors deliberately flood a website with traffic to overwhelm its servers. That claim could not independently be verified, and it can be difficult to distinguish between a deliberate DDoS attack and a routine outage caused by an influx of legitimate traffic to a site.Trump, meanwhile, attributed the glitches to regular traffic, congratulating Musk for “[breaking] every record in the book with so many millions of people” on the live interview.2. The greatest hits Once the conversation got going, Trump rehashed the greatest hits, and biggest lies, from his rallies – absurdly claiming he oversaw the “greatest economy in the world”, lying about his own record, about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s records, and spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic, his criminal cases and election security.His most dangerous lies were about immigration and climate change. He baselessly claimed that migrants arriving at the US southern border were dangerous, calling them “murderers” as well as “non-productive” people. Trump, who built his political career on promises to “build the wall” at the southern border, has ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric lately, and promised a dystopian vision for mass deportations and migrant labor camps if he is reelected.He also dismissed climate change as a threat, saying that rising sea levels would at best create more “oceanfront properties”. That latter point, which he has made before, is, of course, wrong – rising sea levels are more likely to destroy beachfront property, devastating coastal communities. Sea level rise is, however, an actual driver of global migration – as it creates climate refugees. 3. Trump derides HarrisTrump also seemed to sharpen his critiques of Kamala Harris, who he has struggled to attack as her nascent campaign gains momentum. The former president attempted to paint Harris as a “radical” leftist, falsely suggesting that she wanted to ban fracking and defund the police. He also came at her with classic sexism, insisting on calling her by her first name, rather than by her title or surname, as he does for Joe Biden. He also lingered on her looks, saying that she was a “beautiful woman” who looked like Melania Trump, his wife.And for a measure of intersectionality, he also repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s south Asian first name.  4. Musk the enablerThroughout the conversation, the two men lavished praise and admiration on each other. Trump, who has been a critic of electric vehicles, called Musk’s Teslas “incredible”. Musk, meanwhile, nodded along and agreed as Trump that it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry. At the beginning of the event, the tech billionaire had noted his belief that “no one is themselves in an adversarial interview” and that the conversation was “aimed at kind of open-minded independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind”.But in the end, the softball format seemed like it was aimed more at those who had already bought into Trump and Musk’s rightwing politics. At the end, Musk told Trump he was “on the right path”. More