Donald Trump returns – at least for one night – to give a live interview on Monday on X, the platform from which he was banned for nearly two years following the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
A “live conversation” is scheduled between Trump and Elon Musk, the owner of X, at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, which the tech giant described as an “unscheduled conversation with no topic restrictions.” “So it should be highly entertaining!” Musk is encouraging X users to ask their own questions.
Not only does the conversation serve as an opportunity for the former president to directly reach potentially millions of voters, it is also an opportunity for X, a platform that relies heavily on politics, to redeem itself after some troubles.
X has already been the scene of some of the most memorable moments of the 2024 election cycle. When he skipped the first Republican presidential debate in August, Trump launched his own counter-program, appearing in a taped interview with former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson that aired on X. Last month, President Joe Biden brought the news of his departure from the campaign in a letter published on the platform.
Also notable is that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis used the platform in May 2023 to officially announce his presidential candidacy. a catastrophic rollout marred by technical glitches, overloaded by more than 400,000 people trying to dial in.
Before his conversation with Trump, Musk posted on the platform that X was conducting “some scaling tests of the system” to handle the expected large number of participants.
Musk, who identified himself as a Democrat until a few years ago, endorsed Trump’s candidacy two days after the former president was injured in an attack on a rally in Pennsylvania last month.
Long before he supported Trump, Musk was increasingly moving to the right in his posts and actions on the platform and also tried to use X to influence political discourse around the world. He is in a Dispute with a Brazilian judge about censorship, ranted about what he calls the “woke mind virus,” and increased false allegations that the Democrats are secretly flying in migrants to bring them to the US elections.
Musk has also restored previously suspended accounts such as that of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Trump, who thrown from the platform — then known as Twitter — two days after the January 6 violence, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” In November 2022, Musk bought the company and Trump’s account has been restoredalthough the former president refrained from tweeting until Monday, and insisted that he was happier on his own site Truth Social, which he started during the ban.
Hours before his interview with Musk, Trump posted a two-and-a-half-minute video to his X account that included footage from his time in office and an audio recording of him saying one of his standard campaign slogans, alluding to the lawsuits against him: “They’re not after me, they’re after you, and I just happen to be in their way and I’m not going to move.”
But Trump’s audience on X is legions larger than on Truth Social, which became a listed company earlier this year. Trump has just over 7.5 million followers on Truth Social, while his mostly inactive X account has 88 million followers. Musk’s account, where the interview will take place, has more than 193 million followers.
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Trump’s campaign team did not immediately respond to a question about whether he would also publish his interview with Musk on his own accounts, including X.
The former president has recently posted only once on X, with a photo of his mug shot after he turned himself in at a prison in Atlanta a year ago because he was accused of conspiring to overturn his election defeat in that state.
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Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.
