You will recall that Trump was suspended from Twitter on January 6th. Elon Musk un-suspended Trump earlier this year, provoking hysterical yips of fear from corporate media. But Trump did not use his Twitter account. Yesterday, he came back. It was a flex, an early sign of a shift in the Trump Campaign. He’s going on offense. Variety ran the first story yesterday, headlined “
Donald Trump Returns to Posting on X/Twitter After Year-Long Break Ahead of Elon Musk Interview.” Here is Trump’s first X post since January 6th, 2021:
I’ll get to the historic Twitter Space interview in a moment. But after his first tweet yesterday, Trump kept tweeting (mostly campaign videos) till bedtime. One was
this terrific ad (2:31), which inspired me, and it might inspire you, too.
I called Trump’s return to Twitter/X a ‘flex’ because, until yesterday, the Democrats have been running against a candidate who was
not on Twitter. Think about that for a minute. If Twitter is, as many report, the most viewed media platform in the world, Trump’s self-imposed Twitter exile was a major handicap.
What else has Trump been holding in reserve?
Setting that aside, Trump set history last night in what was probably the biggest Twitter Space in history. The last record was set when Elon Musk interviewed Ron DeSantis (300K concurrent listeners). Some sources showed over 17 million concurrent listeners tuned in for Elon’s Trump interview:
Corporate media was panicking long before the interview began. At yesterday’s White House press briefing, in a hilarious self-own, a Washington Post reporter actually asked whether the Biden Administration planned to “stop” the Musk-Trump interview (because of
misinformation):
CLIP: Media asks White House to censor media (1:19.)
But, despite WaPo’s heroic efforts to prevent it, the interview aired anyway. They were right to fear. The interview crushed all previous records. So the media was, reluctantly, forced to cover that which they’d most feared.
Foreign media had a fairly neutral take. For example, the BBC reported, “
Elon Musk hosts friendly chat with Donald Trump on X after tech delays..”
India Today even recognized the interview’s historic nature:
The Wall Street Journal was perhaps the only U.S. platform to report it straight: “
Trump and Musk, on X, Discuss Immigration and Shared Vision for U.S..” Having done that much, the Journal maniacially focused on the interview’s initial 35-minute delay (Musk said it was a DDOS attack), and
never mentioned how many folks tuned in.
Journalists are well aware Twitter replacing them, and worse, Trump is the Bad Orange Man. So apart from the WSJ, corporate media
hated the interview, reaching for their critical thesauruses to find synonyms for failure to describe the historically-successful interview. Here are a few example headlines. First,
Politico called it a ‘catastrophe’:
USA Today (op ed) described it as an ‘unmitigated disaster’ (op-ed):
Rolling Stone also deemed the interview was ‘disastrous,’ and said it failed before it even began:
CNN also focused on the technical problems over the interview’s substance or its ratings success, but ran a related article I found intensely interesting. CNN headline, “
Analysis: Musk tries to help Trump halt the Harris surge..” Remember that for later.
In case you missed it, here is a helpful ‘condensed’ version of the interview, boiling it down from just over three hours to only 69 minutes.
CLIP: Elon-Trump interview on Twitter August 12, 2024 (1:09:00).
That condensed ‘super cut’ version removes all the rambling, chit-chat, and throat-clearing, and makes for a quicker, more engaging listen. Also, YouTube thumbnail designer David Altizer created a handy ‘table of contents’ guide to the clip, which I include here for your convenience:
Trump lands back on Twitter and breaks the Internet; FBI digs into Iranian hacking; Mideast war drums continue unrestrained beating; astronauts still marooned; Trump's best lawsuit yet; more.
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