Former president and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump spoke with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a lengthy conversation Monday, on X Spaces. The two discussed several policy issues such as immigration, the assassination attempt on his life last month, spiraling inflation and closing the Department of Education in favor of states taking the mantle on school systems.
"I want to close up Department of Education, move education back to the states. … Of the 50 [states], I would bet that 35 would do great. And 15 of them, or, you know, 20 of them, will be as good as Norway. You know, Norway is considered great," Trump said, while noting left-wing states such as California could struggle if he does eliminate the DOE.
The 45th president also spoke at length during the roughly two-hour conversation with Musk about the current state of immigration in the U.S.
"I believe it's over 20 million people came into our country. Many coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger version of that is insane asylums. And many are terrorists. And I'll tell you what, they're coming not just from South America. They're coming from Africa. They're coming from all over the world. They're coming from Asia. They're coming from the Middle East," Trump told Musk, who endorsed Trump earlier this year.
Trump said that despite Harris' recent rhetoric to address the spiraling migrant crisis at the border, she and Biden have had years to address migration but "won't do anything."
"She had three and a half years, and by the way, they have another five months that they can do something. But they won't do anything. It's all talk. She's incompetent and he's incompetent. And frankly, I think that she's more incompetent than he is, and that's saying something, because he's not too good," he said.
On the topic of immigration, Trump also credited a slide his campaign made showing immigration stats for saving his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month during a rally, when shooter Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate him. The 45th president looked over to the slide on immigration data when Crooks opened fire, which narrowly saved his life as the position of his head had abruptly changed.
"That slide -- illegal immigration saved my life," he told Musk. "The incredible thing is that the chart, I used it less than 20% of the time. It was just a moment."
"It's always to my left, never my right, and it's always at the end of the speech," Trump added of the position of the slide.
"I'm going to sleep with that chart always," he joked.
Trump went on to rattle off a list of wars and world events the U.S. could have avoided if Biden were not in the Oval Office, while noting he was tough on nations such as Russia, China and North Korea and knows the countries' respective leaders "well."
"First of all, the Israeli attack would have never happened," he said. "Russia would never have attacked Ukraine, and we'd have no inflation, and we wouldn't have had the Afghanistan mess, if you think of it well … if you take a few of those events away, and we have a different world."
The X Spaces conversation comes as vice president and Trump's opponent in the 2024 elections, Kamala Harris continues to avoid the media since landing on top of the Democrat ticket for the White House, after Biden was forced to leave the race.
Trump commenting on Biden's exit from the 2024 race, said it was a Democrat's "coup" that pressured the 81-year-old to drop out.
"This was a coup," Trump said. "This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn't want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way, or we can do it the hard way.'"
"They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him," Musk added before Trump slammed Biden as "the worst president in history."
Harris on her part, has avoided the media for 22 days; snubbed formal press conferences and even declined an interview for a Time magazine cover story.
"It's pretty sad when you think that somebody that does this for a living can't answer a question or is afraid to do an interview, and in her case, with a very friendly interview. She's got all friendly interviewers," Trump said of Harris during the X Spaces conversation with Musk.
"She is considered more liberal, by far, than Bernie Sanders," Trump added of Harris. "She's a radical-left lunatic. And if she's going to be our president, very quickly you're not going to have a country anymore. And she'll go back to all the things that she believes in. She believes in defunding the police. She believes in no fracking, zero."
Trump made a return to X earlier on Monday after nearly a year of not posting on his once-favored social media platform. Following his acquisition of the company, Musk reinstated the former president's X account which was suspended by then Twitter management.
The media has faced backlash for their blatantly biased coverage of the X Spaces conversation which started 40 minutes late because a "massive" distributed denial-of-service(DDoS) attack on the platform as Musk explained in a post on X. Their coverage focused on the technical delay, and false claims that Trump had a lisp and was "rambling." The former president was able to talk about policy issues at great length and many listeners on social media even leftists, admitted he also came across as funny.
More than 1.2 million people ultimately listened to the interview according to the live tracker throughout the discussion. And it has since gottr=en 1 billion hits and counting,
"Young, curious, engaged and tuning into X for a new kind of political conversation" X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote Tuesday in a post.
