Karma is a botched interview plagued with technical problems. Donald Trump’s livestream with Elon Musk on X Spaces failed before it even began. On Monday evening, a major glitch on the Musk-owned platform delayed the event by 40 minutes.
The service troubles echoed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bumpy campaign rollout on X (formerly Twitter) last year, which Trump mocked at the time, writing on Truth Social: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!”
As the tables turned on Monday, Musk assured listeners that “worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.” The interview with Trump eventually began around 8:40 p.m. E.T. and the former president proceeded to rollout his usual laundry list of bigotry and rambled about immigration, crowd sizes, and his chummy relationships with dictators.
During the bumbling interview, Trump bizarrely cheered the Tesla CEO for firing striking workers. “You’re the greatest cutter,” praised the former president as Musk chuckled. “You just walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone … Every one of you is gone.'”
As Trump rambled about his crowd sizes and desperately attempted to attack Vice President Kamala Harris, Musk proved to be an unskilled interviewer and struggled to get a word in — making for a weird, meandering conversation that lasted over two hours.
Shortly after the interview ended, the vice president issued a statement on “whatever that was.”
“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,” read the 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.”
The high-profile interview — which Musk advertised as “unscripted with no limits on subject matter” — comes at a delicate moment for Trump’s presidential campaign, which seemed like a juggernaut before President Joe Biden ceded the Democratic nomination to Vice President Harris last month. Trump now finds himself trailing in several key polls, and on the defensive as the insurgent Harris — with the help of running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota — have taken control of the narrative around the race.
Musk is one of Trump’s most vocal public allies, but the former president and the X owner haven’t always gotten along. Musk said in 2022 that Trump needed to “said into the sunset,” to which Trump responded by taunting Musk over his “electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless.” A few months later, Musk said he would support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Republican primary.
DeSantis’ primary campaign went down in flames, and Musk has now been cozying up to Trump for months, at least. The New York Times reported in March that the billionaire met with Trump and other prospective donors in Florida. Musk responded by writing that he would not be donating to either presidential candidate, but in early July Bloomberg reported that he had donated a “sizable amount” to a pro-Trump super PAC.
Musk stopped playing coy following the assassination attempt against Trump in July, writing on X that he endorses Trump “fully.” Soon after the endorsement, The Wall Street Journal reported that he was donating a whopping $45 million per month to a pro-Trump super PAC, a report Musk later denied. Musk — who has long been spread right-wing propaganda and misinformation on X — has since been praising Trump and attacking the Democratic ticket.
Trump, meanwhile, has been speaking fondly of Musk. “We have to make life good for our smart people,” he said at a rally July 20, referring to Musk, the world’s richest person. “I love Elon Musk,” he added, touting the report about how much money Musk was supposedly planning to give him.
It isn’t surprising, then, that Trump gave Musk an interview, or that, in anticipation of the interview, he’s resumed posting on X, posting some campaign videos and a missive lamenting how “America is in decline.”
Trump’s only other X post since he was banned from the platform following the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was his mugshot after he was indicted in Georgia last August. Trump regularly posts on Truth Social, of course, and the stock price of TMTG, the company that owns the social network, started to tank after Trump dusted off his X account on Monday. Trump has a massive stake in TMTG, so posting on a competing social network and hurting the share price is pretty notable.
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.