Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is blasting former President Trump’s interview with billionaire Elon Musk, saying Trump’s campaign is in service of ‘self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class.’
Trump joined Musk on X Spaces, a live audio chat feature on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, for an interview Monday night, although it had a shaky start due to technical difficulties. Millions of people ultimately listened to the interview, according to the live tracker throughout the discussion.
Musk said in a post after the interview that he would also be happy to host Harris on X Spaces.
During Monday’s interview, Musk gave Trump ample time to explain his stance on various issues such as immigration, the assassination attempt he survived at a campaign rally last month, inflation and the idea of eliminating the Department of Education to allow states authority over school systems.
‘I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the states … Of the 50 [states], I would bet that 35 would do great. And 15 of them, or, you know, 20 of them, will be as good as Norway. You know, Norway is considered great,’ Trump said, adding that deep blue states like California may struggle if the department is eliminated.
The Harris campaign hit Trump following the interview for the policy proposals the former president touched on and took a jab over the technical difficulties the X Space endured.
‘Donald Trump’s 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,’ Harris campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello said in a statement. ‘Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.’
Project 2025 is a controversial initiative organized by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation that was authored by a number of conservatives, including some former Trump administration officials.
The initiative offers right-wing policy recommendations for Trump should he win the presidency, including replacing civil service employees with Trump loyalists, abolishing the Department of Education, criminalizing pornography, eliminating DEI programs, cutting funding for Medicaid and Medicare, rejecting abortion as health care and infusing the government with Christian values.
Trump has sought to distance himself from the initiative, which has been criticized as being an authoritarian and Christian nationalist plan that would undermine civil liberties, saying he knows nothing about it, that parts of it are ‘absolutely ridiculous and abysmal’ and that its backers are on the ‘radical right.’
Monday marked Trump’s return to X after nearly a year of not posting on the social media platform, posting a series of campaign ads prior to the interview with Musk.
Before Musk purchased X in 2022, Trump was suspended from the platform following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, when the platform was still known as Twitter. But even after Musk reinstated his account, Trump’s only post was sharing his mugshot in August of last year.
‘This country is going down, and these people are bad people that we’re running against. And they’re liars. They make statements. They do things that are so bad. They say they’re going to make a strong border. They say they’ve been great on the border, and they’ve been the worst in history. They say they’ll stop crime,’ Trump said towards the end of the interview.
Trump also addressed President Biden’s decision last month to suspend his re-election campaign, saying it was a Democratic ‘coup’ that pressured the president to step aside. Biden’s decision came amid pressure from Democrats to drop out of the race over concerns about his mental acuity.
‘This was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way, or we can do it the hard way,” Trump said.
‘They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him,’ Musk responded before Trump criticized Biden as ‘the worst president in history.’
Fox News’ Emma Colton contributed to this report.