Illegal immigration saved my life: Trump tells Musk in interview

Washington, Aug 13 (IANS) Former US President Donald Trump on Monday said that illegal immigration saved his life while talking about the assassination attempt on him at an election rally in a highly anticipated interview with Elon Musk on his social media platform X that was delayed because of a cyberattack.

In an audio interview heard by more than a million people on X, Trump and Musk discussed a wide range of issues from immigration to the economy, education, climate change, Russia and Ukraine, the relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping in the context of the 2024 presidential election. The X owner has endorsed the former president against his Democrat rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

According to a post on X by Musk, the interview broadcast was delayed by a distributed denial of service. But once it went on air, the two had a freewheeling conversation that lasted about two hours.

They began by talking about the assassination attempt on Trump at an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Musk acknowledged that Trump won his support and endorsement when he called out “fight, fight” as he was being led out of the arena by Secret Service personnel.

Trump recalled that he had turned his head towards a chart on illegal immigration and that might have saved his life, agreeing with Musk. “Illegal immigration saved my life. You're right."

“The incredible thing though, when you talk about the odds, you had to be exactly at that angle, but, the incredible thing is that the chart I used it less than 20 per cent of the time. It was just a moment, yeah, it's always on my left, never my right, and it is always at the end of the speech. So we have it, it's on the right, not the left. It's at the beginning, not the end. And even the people that put it up, they were unprepared, and they did a great job. They got it up immediately, fortunately. But I looked to the right and the bullet came whizzing by, hitting my ear, so it was too busy. But when you think of the odds of that, and you know that normally, you wouldn't use it, normally, I wouldn't have the thing, and then, you know, would have been a very different story. It's, it's very much, I say, an act of God. It's a miracle that it happened, and I'm honoured by it. I'm honoured by it.”

Trump has made undocumented immigration the centrepiece of his re-election campaign slamming the Biden-Harris administration for the surge at the southern border with Mexico.

The highly anticipated interview of former US President Donald Trump by Elon Musk on the social media platform X that the latter owns was way behind schedule because of technical issues.

“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X,” Musk posted on X 18 minutes after the scheduled start time of 8 p.m. US Eastern “Working on shutting it down”.

“Worst case,” he added, “we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyberattack in which an attacker overwhelms a website, server, or network resource with malicious traffic, according to one explanation.

Six minutes later, Musk posted again: “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.” Three minutes later, he wrote on X, “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter.”

The former president was permanently suspended from X in January 2021, when the social media platform was known as Twitter. The ban was lifted by Musk after he bought the platform. Trump returned to the platform in August 2023 and has posted just one message since. He remains active, however, on Truth Social, the look-alike social media platform that he launched after being banned from X/Twitter.

Trump returned to X with a flurry of posts and picked up over 3,00,000 new followers taking up his total to 88.3 million followers, which is 80.8 million more than the 7.5 million he has on Truth Social.

X gives Trump a much bigger platform, which according to Musk has 600 million monthly active users (other estimates put it at 540 million). Truth Social is much smaller -- it had only 5 million monthly active users according to papers it filed during its IPO in March 2024 as reported by Axios.

The vast difference in the reach of X and Truth Social won’t be lost on Trump, who pays a lot of attention to the size of the crowd for his election rallies and events.

Musk is a supporter of Trump and is likely to be a friendly interviewer, but the former president is known to be both a showman and unpredictable and the interview will be closely followed by allies and the Harris campaign.

Trump had the upper hand in the 2024 presidential election till President Joe Biden was in the fray. The race has changed since Biden dropped out and endorsed his deputy, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris has changed the race. She has energized the Democratic party, raised more funds and has taken the lead in polls, even in key battleground states.