Elon Musk’s marathon “conversation” with Donald Trump on X on Tuesday night was a nightmare, a hideous glimpse inside the budding bromance between two rich, powerful men with gargantuan egos who admire each other for all the wrong reasons.
Their more than two-hour chat was rambling and repetitive and because of a technical glitch—Musk claimed his site was hacked—listeners were blocked for more than 40 minutes beyond the scheduled start of the interview. That meant only about a million people succeeded in tuning into the delayed Elon-Donald Show and I suspect, given their palpable lack of conversational chemistry, many listeners probably dropped off.
Though I managed to make it through to the bitter end, my overall takeaway was of two white guys, each totally lacking in either intellectual or moral seriousness, desperately trying to cling to their fragile—and possibly fading—power and status. Since Kamala Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, Trump has been flailing. His lead in the polls has evaporated. As for Musk, Tesla’s electric vehicle sales and stock price, which made him the richest man in the world, have slumped and advertisers have been fleeing from X because disinformation and white nationalism have become pervasive on the site.
When two men who once bestrode the world come undone, the wreckage begins to stink. Neither Trump nor Musk can be written off, of course, but their interview, billed as a stunning agglomeration of star power, was a titanic dud.
Still, it was revealing and, to my ears, shocking. As his candidacy falters, Trump has made more and more comments that Democrats and others have called out as racist. It was on display at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he drew audible gasps after saying of Harris, “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?” And it was there again in the Musk interview, when he purposely mispronounced Harris’s name. It’s become the leitmotif of his campaign.
In the interview with Musk, Trump repeatedly portrayed Harris as dumb. “She’s not a smart person, by the way. She can’t have this conversation,” Trump told Musk, adding, “We need a man or person who’s unbelievably sharp in order to stop all the nuclear danger and all the dangers that I’m talking about… we need smart people and we need people that have an ability to lead. And she doesn’t have that ability.” As if this was not insulting and dismissive enough, he closed with: “She’s terrible but she’s getting a free ride.”
White racists have long held that black people have inferior intelligence. It’s a heinous trope dating back to pre-Civil War times, when anthropologists such as Harvard’s Louis Agassiz set out to prove that the brains of African slaves were smaller and that enslaved people were a separate, lesser species.
Musk, meanwhile, recently retweeted a fake video purporting to be a Harris campaign ad in in which she calls herself “the ultimate diversity hire”, selected because she’s both a woman and a person of colour. “So if you criticise anything, I say you’re both sexist and racist,” the voice purporting to be Harris says. X’s own rules forbid the posting of these deep fakes.
Some Republican Trump supporters have branded Harris the “DEI candidate”, referring to workplace policies that promote the diversity, equity and inclusion that conservatives abhor. Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee called Harris a “DEI hire” and others have made similar slurs.
If Musk had any decency as an interviewer, he would have challenged Trump’s description of Harris as dumb, pointing out that it takes obvious smarts to serve successfully as a prosecutor, state attorney general, US senator and vice president. And it takes smarts to get under Trump’s skin, which Harris has clearly done. But given that Musk has allowed X to become a refuge for neo-Nazis and racists, it isn’t surprising that he let Trump’s insults go unchallenged.
My former New York Times colleague James Risen wrote perceptively this week for the Intercept about the racism underlying Trump’s candidacy. “Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority,” he says. Risen notes that white Americans may become a minority in the next 30 years.
“Every component of the Trump-Republican agenda flows from these demographic fears,” he continues. “The Trump phenomenon and the surge of right-wing extremism in America was never about economic anxiety… It was, and still is, about race and racism.”
Musk has vowed to donate vast sums to a pro-Trump SuperPac (a political action committee which can raise unlimited sums to back or challenge candidates), so he has to be taken seriously. His relatively new bid for political clout has not received the attention it should. If Trump manages to reclaim the White House, Musk will have considerable influence. Having formerly ridiculed electric vehicles, Trump’s tone towards them has now softened.
Musk and X need Trump, despite the former president’s own social media platform Truth Social being a competitor. Trump once had more than 88m followers on Twitter and since being banned in 2021—until the lead-up to Tuesday’s interview, when he resumed posting on X—he had returned only once, with a viral post sharing the mug shot taken when he was indicted in Georgia for scheming to overturn the state’s electoral votes in 2020.
During the interview, Musk mostly underscored his agreement with Trump’s statements, which included a “best of” litany of his grievances and falsehoods, from the allegation that the 2020 election was stolen to his claims of being unfairly prosecuted. Musk mainly came off as a weak sycophant, although he did voice his own well-worn complaints about regulation.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump were both once huge stars on the American scene, great disrupters of business and politics. On Tuesday night they both sounded like spent forces, not men in the arena but men sinking under the weight of outmoded white male privilege.
