Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: X
The last time a presidential candidate agreed to join Elon Musk for a live interview on his own platform, the service crashed and the interview was a meandering mess. It wasn’t just a chat, either, but the official launch of Ron DeSantis’s candidacy. This awkward event and the strategically inept campaign that followed both raised the question: Are the Republicans too online?
This week, more than a year later, Musk was joined by Donald Trump for another interview on X. The service crashed and the interview was a meandering mess. Musk, once again, was a nervous and fawning interviewer, unable to coax Trump out of circular monologues. Trump, for his part, sounded like he had a mouth full of yogurt, possibly due to a long-standing flaw in how X encodes users’ voices. The conversation itself didn’t amount to much: Trump told the story of the assassination attempt from various angles for the first 30 minutes; the two of them talked past each other about immigration for while, in full agreement but somehow unable to link one statement to the next; they almost managed to engage about energy, an area in which they might see things differently; Trump praised Musk for (allegedly!) firing workers who criticize him or threaten to unionize at his companies, handing the Harris campaign a useful clip and earning a formal complaint from the UAW.
As an interview, it wasn’t especially illuminating. As a spectacle, however, it answered one question definitively: The Republicans are too online, and it appears there’s no going back — this wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Musk has steered the platform in their direction, and they’ve returned the favor. X is for them, and they’re all in on X.
Elon Musk buying Twitter, documenting his own radicalization on the platform, swapping out the platform’s previous power users with paid blue-check fans, and promoting far-right voices sounds, at first, like basically good news for Republicans. In some ways it is: The media’s favorite platform is now run by someone who hates them. Musk isn’t as broadly popular as he once was, but he has lots of fans, and his endorsement — and money — still matters. But these same facts hint at a different story as well. Musk has delegitimized X in the eyes of many of the users whose presence made it valuable in the first place and whose horror at (and attentiveness to) Trump’s performance on the platform helped make it so valuable to the former president. At the same time, Musk’s public hyperpoliticization has had consequences for his image and maybe his businesses. In terms of public opinion, he used to float above the fray; now he’s falling below the party line.
Twitter had — and X still has — a general radicalizing tendency. It’s a platform for intervention and pressure, not maintenance. This tendency has made it powerful for activists and other people who want to change the status quo or at least sway or shame elites; it’s also made trouble for politicians who start to confuse it with real life. What was a Democratic problem during the Trump administration became a Republican problem during the Biden administration. Twitter has always been an ideological ratchet, and now it’s placing tension on the Republicans in both substantive and aesthetic terms.
Trump’s Twitter account was so powerful in part because it felt so out of place, his all-caps proclamations standing in stark blaring contrast to the cautious communications favored by other public figures, inviting followers to gleefully trash the place, and inspiring lesser MAGA politicians to ape his style. After the Trump presidency, and until now in his absence, the tone of the online right on X has shifted toward dark acidity and knowing contempt. J.D. Vance, an incredibly online senator, has been criticized as a wooden speaker and an awkward interviewee, easily folding into the Harris campaign’s messaging about the Republican Party becoming “weird.” When I see clips like this, though, I recognize something slightly different and very familiar. J.D. Vance is a man who can only think in posts:
It’s a terrible disease! And contagious. Trump’s interview with Musk can be understood as the new style of the party encountering the old one. A man who thinks in tweets trying to communicate with a man who thinks in TV sound bites and rally applause lines. A man who panders to reply guys trying to talk to a man who lives for a crowd. Musk and Trump have plenty in common. They’re wealthy, isolated, paranoid, and politically conservative; they’re both bosses fashioning themselves as populists. Trump loves making up absurd crowd-size numbers, and Musk loves inflating view counts. (The closest the two men got to connecting with each other was when Trump preemptively congratulated Musk on “breaking” every “record” with the stream, which Musk ran with, in his way, after the event was over.) Somehow, though, they talk like they’re from different planets. Musk’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has a European flavor, as he engages extensively with various international far-right figures on his platform, while Trump’s is more recognizably American; Musk issues apocalyptic warnings about Western birthrates while Trump rants about “illegals.” There’s little ideological sunlight between the two on the subject, and yet they couldn’t seem to connect at all. The new style, exemplified by Musk, probably reads as more extreme, in part because it’s drawn from a platform now dominated by the types of people who used to lurk on 4chan and in part because in some ways it actually is.
The newly X-brained Republican Party is lined up behind Trump, whom it sees as a popular figure and a potential path to power (or at least an inevitability). But Trump’s return to his favorite platform was an awkward homecoming. While he was offline, the rest of the Republican Party was logging on and posting. Trump and Musk might have trouble holding a conversation, but their projects are now inextricably joined. That’s the thing about X, as its lingering users can attest: Once you log on, it’s hard to log off.
