Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign attacked former President Donald Trump after his appearance on billionaire Elon Musk’s podcast, slamming the 45th president for being on the side of “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class.”
Musk interviewed Trump on X Spaces, the live audio chat function within X — which is what the former president now calls Twitter that took place Monday night. The live tracker indicated that it was a crowded event, with millions tuning in for the conversation after some early technical issues.
Musk also packed quite a punch, saying he is open to hosting Harris on X Spaces.
The interview afforded Trump the opportunity to expound on his thoughts in a sprawling conversation covering a number of issues from immigration and an attempt on his life at a recent rally, to high inflation rates and abolishing the Department of Education for local control 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.
The Harris campaign took the chance post-interview to blast Trump on policy, and even knocked the technical problems that beset Monday’s X Space event.
“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, by contrast, is a blueprint of right-wing policy prescriptions for the Heritage Foundation – a conservative think tank — in the event that Trump wins his party’s primary and general election next year.
Among the plan’s proposals are purging civil service employees deemed disloyal to Trump, ending the Education Department and giving Americans a choice of criminal charges against people who willfully access pornography or helping states choose their health systems by reducing funding for Medicaid & Medicare; stripping abortion provisions as healthcare from Title X rules being enforced around passage off sterilization risk estimations – increasing financial accountability at Public Health Centers while infusing Christian principles across governments.
While Trump has been trying to disavow Project 2025, a plan that critics have decried as authoritarian and Christian Nationalist blueprint for suspending the civil liberties of millions, he acknowledged some aspects of it are “downright silly” but argued with its proponents’ characterization on them being apart from radical right.
Trump also visited with his political opponents, professing at the end of an interview to find a substitute from them and blossoming about Harris: “She is considered more liberal, by far, than Bernie Sanders. She’s a radical-left lunatic. And if she’s going to be our president, very quickly you’re not going to have a country anymore. And she’ll go back to all the things that she believes in. She believes in defunding the police. She believes in no fracking, zero.”
Trump also said that Biden “lost” the 2020 election and added to comments that it was a Democratic “coup” which led him to announce his retirement from re-election in light of worries over mental frailty.