After being largely absent from the platform since leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump, the current GOP nominee for president, returned to X on Monday, the site formerly known as Twitter, making a series of campaign posts and returning for an “interview” with site owner Elon Musk.
Trump had made just one post on the site in his post-presidential career, tweeting his mugshot from August 2023 with a caption that falsely described indictment charges against him as being “election interference.” His last post before that one was on January 8, 2021 — two days after the Capitol attack that was carried out in his name — in which he stated that he would not attend the inauguration of President Joe Biden.
Trump’s first post breaking his long drought on X was a campaign video promoting himself and featuring falsehoods about the charges against him stemming from his removal of documents from the White House upon his departure from the presidency to his estate at Mar-a-Lago, where he kept highly classified material in unsecured locations, including in his office, ballrooms and bathrooms on the property. The video featured audio of opinionated pro-Trump commentary errantly describing the charges against him as prosecutorial “abuse” and a “dangerous and unstable” moment in U.S. history.
Trump made at least 10 more posts after that one, mainly additional campaign videos and promotions of his planned “Spaces” event for Monday evening, which Musk was set to host. Observers suggested more posts would be coming.
“Monday’s slew of updates are unlikely to be his last, instead marking the start of a more regular presence on the platform,” Semafor’s Shelby Talcott wrote.
However, as of Tuesday morning, Trump has not posted any more content on X, instead posting multiple missives on his own social media site, Truth Social. It remains unclear how often Trump intends to use X going forward, but the safe bet is to assume he will use it more as the 2024 campaign season ramps up, as it was an instrumental tool for him in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Trump was long considered one of the most infamous users of X back when it was called Twitter, even before he ran for president. He frequently shared his opinions on celebrities and culture in general, including political topics. Notably, he also spread political falsehoods, such as promoting the errant claims that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, a conspiracy theory dubbed “birtherism.” As president, he continued to issue false tweets against his political opponents, such as his attacks against four congressional women of color, utilizing the common racist trope of telling them to “go back” to their supposed home countries even though all of them were citizens and only one had been born outside of the U.S.
Both Trump and Musk — the latter of which has pledged to donate millions of dollars to help elect the former — hyped up the X “Spaces” event held on Monday night. However, that event was delayed by more than 40 minutes due to glitches on the platform, which Musk initially claimed had been a cyber attack of some kind, at one point agreeing with a user that Democrats might have been behind the problems, a contention that had no basis in fact to support it.
In fact, a source at X indicated to The Verge that no such attack appeared to have happened, and that there was a “99 percent” chance that Musk was lying.
The event itself was less of an interview, as it was billed, and more of a promotion of Trump with little, if any, pushback from Musk. Indeed, the discussion “was largely a Trump monologue, not unlike his public rallies, with Musk occasionally jumping in with friendly questions about subjects on which the two men generally agree,” according to reporting from NBC News. The Washington Post further described the questions from Musk as being “softballs.”
The two discussed many topics that appear in Project 2025, a wish list of ideas from the Heritage Foundation and other far right groups that Trump has tried (and failed) to distance himself from out of apparent fears that it could scare voters away from him.
In one of his first policy statements during the event, Trump called for the dismantling of the Department of Education. The former president also cheered Musk for firing his workers who went on strike. He and Musk also took turns blasting immigrants coming to the U.S.
In true Trumpian fashion, the Republican nominee continued to blast his political opponents, describing them as “dangerous for our country,” and hyperbolically stating that, should his Democratic opponent Vice President Kamala Harris win the presidency, “you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
Trump also engaged in antisemitic tropes, deriding Jewish Americans who support Democratic politicians as not being loyal to Israel itself by doing so.
Noticeable by viewers throughout the event was Trump’s slurring and lisping of his words. But beyond the aesthetic issues of the Spaces event, observers opined that the former president’s proposals were in alignment with some of the most extreme parts of Project 2025, adding that the characterization of the event as an interview was deeply problematic.
“It’s not an interview when the person asking the questions has endorsed you and is a donor to your campaign,” CNN’s Jim Sciutto said.
“Trump is talking total gibberish and Elon Musk keeps agreeing with him, like he’s making sense. This is not an interview,” said linguist Paula Chertok.
“All Trump’s Spaces did was remind us Project 2025 is his best friend,” Democratic Coalition co-founder Scott Dworkin said.
The Harris campaign also spoke out against Trump’s comments during the Spaces event, writing in a statement that his “extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature, not a glitch, of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com.”
“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself,” the campaign added, describing the two as “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
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