In keeping with his preference that the universe continue to engage with him as though he is still president, Donald Trump’s team has adopted the habit of occasionally referring to his public comments and appearances as “addresses to the nation.”
On Sunday, for example, Trump’s campaign team sent a fundraising email teasing that the former president would be “addressing the nation with Elon Musk” — a reference to Monday night’s social media conversation with the businessman. When that conversation was over, another email purported to be from Trump: “I just finished addressing the nation with Elon Musk!”
Highfalutin descriptors not withstanding, that conversation was not an address to the nation. It was two ideological allies touring the right-wing rhetorical bubble and, like new best friends in fourth grade, scrambling over each other to point out their favorite parts.
As you probably heard, the conversation, hosted on Musk’s social media platform (as opposed to Trump’s), was delayed for 40 minutes. Musk blamed the lag on an effort to flood X’s servers with bogus traffic, though internal sources told the Verge that this wasn’t substantiated. As with the glitchy campaign rollout of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on the same platform last year, the issue was probably simply that the pared-down company couldn’t handle the interest.
But in keeping with the conversation’s theme, Musk framed the glitch as a sign that he and Trump were terrifying to “The Establishment.”
“This massive attack illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” Musk claimed. It was a fitting starting point, both because the claim itself was dubious and because it pivoted from a glitch or (assuming that there was a flood of traffic) a likely troll to fashioning Trump and Musk as victims and as targets.
The most important thing to know about the conversation between the two men is that there was no element of it that was really new or surprising, particularly if you have been attuned at all to the right-wing political conversation over the past nine years. The two began by discussing the attempt on Trump’s life last month, with Trump offering assessments of what happened that seemed to have been informed primarily by subsequent news reporting about the attack. Then, over the next two hours, the pair hopscotched around the political landscape, nodding along with each other about their views on immigration and crime and other topics that come up a lot in Sean Hannity monologues.
Near the end of the conversation, Musk — whose fawning credulousness throughout the discussion was palpable — summarized the sheer normality of their shared worldview.
“If I could summarize it, I think these are issues that I think most people in America would agree with, which is that we want safe and clean cities, we want secure borders, we want sensible government spending,” Musk said. “We want to restore both the perception, the reality of respecting — in the judicial system, you know, stop the lawfare.”
“How are those even right-wing positions?” he added. “I think those are — that’s just common sense.”
There are two answers to that question. The first is that, for example, wanting to “stop the lawfare” is a right-wing framing of the prosecutions of Donald Trump. Most Americans view the indictments as a function of Trump’s actions, not of political persecution. Those who see it as persecution? Republicans.
The other answer is that politics is about choices, and the issues Musk presents are ones that Republicans and others on the right think are most important. Sure, Americans think that the border should be secure, but lots of Americans also think that immigration to the United States is valuable and that, for example, there should be an easier path to citizenship. Many Americans also think that access to affordable health care or protecting access to abortion or funding schools are more important than “safe and clean cities” — itself an effort to mirror Fox News’s emphasis on the purported dangers of urban living — or “sensible government spending.” (Presumably, Musk believes that the funding his companies get from the government fall into the “sensible” category.)
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld was tuning in to the conversation and found it all very much to his liking, unsurprisingly.
“[T]he bigger story is that two of the most important world figures agree on the world,” he wrote on social media. “Whats that tell you? The most consequential technical genius perhaps ever and the most consequential political figure are talking about stuff on equal footing, and Trump knows everything Musk is talking about concerning energy, artificial intelligence and economic development.” Other politicians, he said, would “need a staff of ten doing packets of research for each topic.”
Which is right, since those politicians would seek both to be accurate and consistent. Trump doesn’t worry about that. His habit of agreeing with whoever is talking was very much on display during the conversation, meaning that, for example, he agreed with Musk that it would be great to have high-speed trains. Except that, as president, he spiked California’s effort to do just that. It wasn’t that he and Musk had similar, robust worldviews. It was that each simply agreed to agree. That was the point of the conversation.
“We can talk about tunnels and rockets and, electric cars. So many things. And now you’re into the AI, and that’s going to be another beauty out there,” Trump said at one point, sitting at a conference table underneath a portrait of himself at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. “So it’s — it’s an amazing thing you’ve done, Elon. It’s an amazing thing. And I congratulate you.”
All without a briefing book!
Over the course of the conversation, there were countless misrepresentations and dishonesties, the background noise of the Trumpian rhetorical space. But this — and the sort of hagiographic self-policing engaged in by people like Gutfeld — is why Trump both has a consistent base of support and why it never seems to get any bigger. There are rules and boundaries to the way in which the right approaches the world, and apostates rarely work their way inside that bubble. This is why the “weird” disparagement has gotten traction: To those outside the bubble, the verbiage and focal points and self-aggrandizement and victimhood are hard to understand.
With all of the confidence of an overconfident person new to a topic, Musk declared that the conversation was aimed at “open-minded independent voters who [were] just trying to make up their mind.” Bear in mind, though, that Musk views himself as just such a voter because even within the bubble there are gradations.
Watching from the outside, though, Musk and Trump both look pretty similar.