Musk’s chat with Trump was a peek inside the right-wing bubble

In keeping with his preference that the universe continue to engage with him as though he is still president, Donald Trump’s team has adopted the habit of occasionally referring to his public comments and appearances as “addresses to the nation.”
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On Sunday, for example, Trump’s campaign team sent a fundraising email teasing that the former president would be “addressing the nation with Elon Musk” — a reference to Monday night’s social media conversation with the businessman. When that conversation was over, another email purported to be from Trump: “I just finished addressing the nation with Elon Musk!”

Highfalutin descriptors not withstanding, that conversation was not an address to the nation. It was two ideological allies touring the right-wing rhetorical bubble and, like new best friends in fourth grade, scrambling over each other to point out their favorite parts.

s you probably heard, the conversation, hosted on Musk’s social media platform (as opposed to Trump’s), was delayed for 40 minutes. Musk blamed the lag on an effort to flood X’s servers with bogus traffic, though internal sources told the Verge that this wasn’t substantiated. As with the glitchy campaign rollout of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on the same platform last year, the issue was probably simply that the pared-down company couldn’t handle the interest.

But in keeping with the conversation’s theme, Musk framed the glitch as a sign that he and Trump were terrifying to “The Establishment.”

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