SOCIAL MEDIA X

MUSK $ TRUMP ON X

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Electric eTech entrepreneur Elon Musk conversing on X with United States Presidential Candidate and Former President Donald Trump sounds like a formula with a multiplication factor of the 2 hour runtime the talkers took to talk to each other and about 60 million X users.

In typical eGeneration fashion, with digital graffiti, false information and all, the right wing populist surge in the United States had to wait 40 minutes for X to put an end to a denial-service attack before the conversation could begin. The likelihood of a denial service attack being the cause of the disruption was later denied by various naysayers suggesting the delay was only a reflection of the incompetence of the social media platform.

Twitter had been taken over by Musk and rebranded, eventually changing the name but only after disrupting the workforce and thereby causing an internal rebellion. Musk held on to the eTech asset while advertisers withdrew their business and boycotted the social media platform.

The host opened the podcast by underscoring that the program was to be just a conversation, although he didn’t highlight that the conversation was to take place between the richest person in the world and the other person who was at one time the most powerful person in the world and wants to be the most powerful person in the world again.

And no one highlighted the popular paradox of two elites shaping distinct messaging about issues that affect a broad population base while also advancing their own agenda often imbued in self interest.

Trump wants to reoccupy the Oval Office as the 45^th/47^th President of the United States. And Musk wants to colonize Mars as a modern day Flash Gordon.

Trump’s second bid for a repeat, after losing to current United States President Joe Biden in 2020, is well underway with the Republican National Convention having wrapped in Milwaukie, Wisconsin, and the Democratic National Convention underway in Chicago, Illinois tomorrow.

Musk noted that the service denial attack was just another example of how people did not want to allow Trump the time to speak.

That assertion of censorship is absolutely undeniably true. The deep left liberals burn their ears when having to listen to Trump without liberal criticism dubbed overtop the fantastical statements compelling his re-election campaign.

Why though is unclear, as the truth of political statements has never been reliable since the reign of the Roman Cesars.

Trump had previously been cast an outlaw of free speech on the social media platform, prior to Musk obtaining control, with many Fifth Estate pundits claiming that the political misinformation that occurred, every time Trump opened his mouth, to be a form of censorship.

A so called Trump lie allegedly neutralized or wiped out entirely a truth spoken by someone else, or even a material fact that just is beyond a doubt.

Musk reiterated that he and Trump were just going to have a conversation, and people watching were to catch a ‘vibe’ about Trump which a person might not be able to do in a more adversarial interview setting, such as between a liberal minded network journalist and the Former President.

“There is a lot of opposition to just hearing what Trump has to say,” asserted Musk.

For sure, mumbled everyone else who either did not want to hear what Trump had to say or who wanted to hear what Trump had to say but was tired of the cat calls and heckling and snipers trying to silence out Trump’s spoken word.

Musk clearly was under pressure to impress, not just the presidential candidate, but also the alleged 60 million X subscribers who had logged on to watch.

The two public figures did not agree on everything, but they seemed to have had, during negotiations to participate in the podcast, decidedly agreed not to agree in a non-adversarial manner by simply reiterating their own position or changing the subject, but allowing the other party to finish answering, nevertheless.

At random intervals, I reflected on the possibility that the program was scripted in a kind of stream of consciousness manner.

Inflation was one topic. Government over-regulation was another topic. And there seemed to be an effort made to loosely connect the effects of one and the other on each other’s futures and on the economy.

Inflation was said to be a tax on the people by making everything more expensive and therefore making people reach further into their pockets to pay for average day to day expenses.

This carefully crafted answer spoke to the populist audience that Musk has been nurturing as he brands consumers of electrified eTech products with his labels and also to the highly charged adoring voter base of Trump.

Deregulation would speed up progress by making the development process less cumbersome and less time and financially consuming, according to the information dropped in the conversation.

Decentralize – make the states compete with each other – many states are badly run, stated Trump as part of a free-wheeling discussion about how to make government work better.

American had the potential for a self sustaining energy economy.

Musk leaned towards making more natural clean, green energy come out of the sky for the eTech generation who buy electric vehicles and desire space travel, while Trump underscored the potential to make more oil spit out of the ground for the old school dark fuel factory workers and their families who vote in Presidential elections.

Trump undercut the need to shift away from fossil fuels to clean energy by declaring 500 years left of fossil fuels – including for America, in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), in or under the northeastern corner of the state of Alaska.

Exploration in ANWR, which was approved by Trump and unapproved by Biden, could allegedly result in a bigger oil reserve than the big tanker under Saudi Arabia.

Musk and Trump were sharing views but not entirely in agreement on the answers or on the direction of the conversation, although the program seemed to follow an outline.

Springing fossil fuels in ANWR seemed to be one of those issues that Trump leaped into, but Musk stayed away from and desperately wanted to move on before he became pinned to that ecological ideology which is clearly in opposition to his consumer branding efforts.

The increasing threat of nuclear war was broached. Trump referred to the rising risk of a nuclear exchange as ‘nuclear warming’ when several countries possess nuclear weapons – with China having a ‘way lower’ number while Russia had more of a parity with the USA.

USA, Russia, China, UK, France, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel have nuclear weapons. USA and Russia have enough individually to destroy global affairs many times over.

The biggest threat was not climate change but ‘nuclear (weapon) power’ and the possibility of World War 3 involving nuclear exchanges, according to Trump.

Trump said the problem with a future global war was that battles would no longer be fought with army tanks shooting back and forth at each other but with the new eTech weapons and inevitably with nuclear weapons of every size and shape.

Musk, ever the scientific engineer, suggested that the nuclear fall out might not be as severe as people allege, citing the nuclear bomb sites in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan as having regenerated into vibrant cities.

And nuclear electricity was underrated. Musk stated that nuclear electricity is one of the safest forms of electrical generation and that the popular knowledge about nuclear power is just a ‘huge misunderstanding’ – with relatively few deaths occurring as a result of nuclear electricity generation in comparison to deaths at other mining operations in the fossil fuel industry.

The nuclear energy industry is a victim of ‘so much’ regulation that people cannot get it done. Trump said nuclear energy has a ‘branding problem’.

With the seeming eventuality of a nuclear exchange, Trump wants an Iron Dome defense system for America that would protect America from inbound missiles of every sort. Israel has an Iron Dome Defense, as does Europe, although in different shapes and sizes.

Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris was not left out of the free streaming populist opinions. Musk accused the Harris camp of rewriting her story as a moderate when in reality she is an extremist.

‘She believes in defunding the police, no fracking – she will end fracking,’ Trump chortled – and then Trump repeated the chortle.

Numbers were thrown around about the amount of the USA trade deficit to the European Union, like a $250 billion deficit, while the lack of high speed trains in the United States was much lamented.

Apparently, according to Trump, this $250 billion could be used to get the high speed trains that Europe already has had for many years. Trump alleged that the system of European tariffs that had caused the trade deficit with Europe was an unfair advantage that had marginalized American transportation infrastructure.

And the government regulations involved in America meant that the development of a bullet train or just high speed trains in the United States would take years instead of months.

The so-called migrant invasion was discussed, with reference to the millions of people having illegally entered the United States during the four years of the Biden Administration.

Musk called the so-called migrant ‘invasion’ an existential issue because the migration of only a few percentages of people from the global population would overwhelm the national identity.

‘I’m not sure if we would have a country at that point – the rest of Earth (is coming through the Mexican border) – not just Mexicans coming through the border with Mexico – it would only take a few percent from the rest of the earth, and we would be overwhelmed.’

Trump chortled that people from all over the world are entering the country illegally through the Mexican Border – including recently 22 people from Congo. “All those people cannot be kept in a jail.”

Trump vowed to embark on the largest deportation in history – ‘otherwise people will not have a country to call America’.

Two hours later there was this sense that a deep meaningful conversation just did not happen, with the billionaire and the right wing populist having speedily gone through a bucket list of topics as part of an ever so subtle messaging.

People could, I think they thought, clip, shake and stir, bits and pieces of the program as part of their own stories, and thereby post the specific policy messaging to an even broader audience in the runup to the Presidential Election in November.