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.
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Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.