The Trump and Musk Alliance

A couple of nights ago Donald Trump had a rather interesting interview with Elon Musk on X, and considering the sheer magnitude of these two individuals, it certainly was of interest to millions of people. Here are a few things that stood out.

1) Technical difficulties delayed the start by more than 40 minutes

Technical difficulties delayed the start by more than 40 minutes, but Musk stated almost immediately that the issues stemmed from a distributed denial of service attack on X, and that they were working on shutting it down.

“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.” – Elon Musk

However, the technology news website The Verge reported that a source told them that a denial of service attack had NOT hit X, with another source stating that there was a “99 percent” chance that Musk was lying.

All of this was reminiscent of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ launch of his failed run for the Republican presidential nomination last year, which he tried to do on a Twitter Spaces event with Musk.

The event with DeSantis was delayed by 25 minutes and marred by technical difficulties that resulted in a much smaller audience than the 500,000 who had initially attempted to join and listen. At the time, Trump poked fun at DeSantis for the botched attempt.

“Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster.”

It turned out that Trump was right about DeSantis, because not all of the GOP had learned that no one can fight the beast. But besides the delayed start, there was yet another curious problem to come.

2) People talked about Trump’s strange voice

When Trump’s interview finally got going a new problem emerged: Trump’s voice was very strange, often either sounding as if he was slurring words or speaking with a lisp. Video soon emerged of Trump doing his interview with Musk, showing him hunched over as he spoke into his phone.

A hunched-over posture would have undoubtedly played at least a small role in the way he sounded, as anyone speaking like this would have more saliva toward the front of the mouth, making it a bit more difficult to enunciate properly.

For his part, Trump apparently did notice the reactions to how he sounded, and released what he called a corrected version of the audio, which did make a noticeable difference in how he sounded.

You can definitely hear that he sounded better in the corrected version, which makes me wonder how much the original audio was manipulated.

3) Trump recounts failed assassination attempt

Trump went into the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, which led Musk to endorse him a few days later. Trump called the moment “surreal” and claimed that his faith had grown deeper due to his survival.

“The bigger miracle was that I was looking in the exact direction of the shooter, and so it hit, it hit me at an angle that was far less than any other angle,” Trump recounted.

“So, that was the miracle, that was for those people who believe in God. I think we got to all start thinking about that, you have to, you know, I’m a believer. Now, I’m more of a believer, I think.”

Here Trump referred to this as a miracle, and considering how many evangelical Christians tell him he was chosen by God, it sounds like Trump is starting to believe his own press. Trump also said he would return to Butler, Pennsylvania in October.

4) Trump’s Iron Dome pledge

Trump promised to build an Iron Dome system in the United States comparable to Israel’s Iron Dome. “One of the things we’re going to do is we’re going to build an Iron Dome over us. You know Israel has it. We’re going to have the best Iron Dome in the world.”

The Iron Dome is a missile defense system that Israel created in 2006 in the aftermath of the conflict with Hezbollah. It can protect against incoming short-range weapons, but experts have stated that building one to protect the U.S. is not practical due to the exceptionally high costs.

“We need it, and we’re going to make it all in the United States. We’re going to have protection because it just takes one maniac to start something.” Trump is certainly right about that. All it takes is one maniac to start something.

5) Trump declared that he would close the Department of Education

“I want to close up Department of Education, move education back to the states. If you moved education back to the 50 [states], you’ll have some that won’t do well…but they’ll actually be forced to do better, because it’ll be a pretty bad situation.”

What makes this quote so interesting is that Trump had made no such claim about abolishing the Department of Education in his original Agenda 47 policy proposals, but this IS one of the major goals of Project 2025.

If you recall, a few weeks back Trump started disavowing Project 2025 as not only not speaking for him, but that he didn’t even know a whole lot about it. However, for not knowing a whole lot about Project 2025, Trump is now talking about one of its major policy ideas.

6) The Trump andMusk alliance

Although they have a history of criticizing one other, Trump and Musk do have a few things in common. They both have extreme egos, they both lash out at those who criticize them, and they both see themselves as victims.

Those things in common have led Trump and Musk to form a kind of symbiotic relationship – one that is mutually beneficial. In the case of this interview, it was an opportunity for each of them to promote themselves in a way they could never have done on an individual basis.

Despite the troubled start and the problems with Trump’s voice in the original audio, both Trump and Musk spun the interview as an incredible success, and both talked about how it had 1 billion views. The astonishing number of views directly feeds into both men’s egos.

But even more than that, the interview served to align the world’s most famous man, who is also a political force that’s never been seen before, with the world’s wealthiest man, who also happens to control a wide range of cutting edge technologies.

And, coincidentally, the interview came at a time when Musk also introduced his next step in AI technology.

7) Meet Grok 2

The day after his interview with Donald Trump, Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI launched a beta version of its latest AI assistant called Grok 2. This is an image generation tool similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E and Google’s Gemini.

But, unlike its competitors, Grok 2 has substantially fewer restrictions on the types of images that can be generated. It will not only produce images of copyrighted content, which the others do not, but it also doesn’t have any guardrails around creating images of political leaders.

Thus, a technology that allows users to fabricate any political image they desire is now exclusively on X, the platform run by a man who already aligns himself with Trump. And it’s now being released just before the 2024 election.

Even more, Grok 3 is scheduled to be released by the end of the year, which is within the window between the November election and before the next president would be inaugurated in January.

The man who lines up with the biblical descriptions for the Antichrist now has a golden opportunity to use deception as a means to bring himself back to power, or at the very least, create absolutely chaos surrounding the election.

And make no mistake about it, now that Trump and his hardcore supporters have a tool to deceive the masses, they will use it – and it’s courtesy of Elon Musk. ♦