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:
Early this morning (2:30 am EST), Elon Musk reported the stunning news that, adding the people who tuned in to the interview to the folks who listened afterwards, Trump’s interview had been heard more than an astounding billion times.
That astonishing figure will increase today, probably by a lot. This news is extremely significant, and it took the fretful elite media completely by surprise. For weeks it’s appeared as though corporate media successfully froze Trump out of the public eye, swamping even negative coverage with its fawning reporting on Kamala “Plan B” Harris. Recall CNN called the coverage a “Harris surge.”
But Trump flexed. It didn’t take money or time or ad buys or teams of paid-off influeners. Trump merely returned from his self-imposed Twitter exile, crushing the Internet in what might be the single biggest media event in history. They can deny it. They can report it badly, focusing on the DDOS attack. But it happened — and millions of people heard the President for themselves.
I’ll concede how fortunate Trump appears. This couldn’t have happened had Elon Musk not bought the failing social media platform eighteen months ago. It couldn’t have happened had California not driven Elon’s companies to Texas and turned him conservative. It’s another sort of miracle.
I gave up on watching it last night and just finished it today.
The only thing I’d have loved to hear about is the disaster unfolding in space with the ISS and the Boeing pod stuck on the docking bay so the astronauts cannot get home.
Only Starlink, only MUSK can rescue these astronauts.
But joe won’t allow it because it makes for bad headlines for him.
joe would rather see those astronauts die than be rescued by Elon Musk.
joe has ordered the astronauts to stay put until February!
He expects Boeing to be able to decouple by then, or, he will at least be out of office and then he doesn’t care.
Elon should just do it anyway. If he can’t, he has a lot of bright people working for him who can figure it out. If Obama gets pissed and tries to retaliate… Well, let the chips fall where they may. With great publicity.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, try to destroy those who can.
It would be interesting to see how many total views anyone of these entities, be it the dems or any of these fake news outlets, have received this year for all of their articles combined and then compare it to this one event.
I’d say he is better with a live audiences of 10s of thousands.
Nothing new or different.
He empowered way too many Bush “Republicans”! They sabotaged much of his work; and lied about Don. Current Bush man Don empowered C. WRY “Trump was not shot!”
Bush “republicans” have hated conservatives since “VOO DOO ECON”, 44 years!
Wray not wr
If Klueless Kowardly Kamala is such a force, why is the left so damned scared of Trump speaking?
I see t hat even the New York Slimes is turning on Biden. I guess he failed his Globalists/UN/CFR Masters