Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Did you hear the clips of Donald Trump lisping or slurring his words during his Monday night interview with Elon Musk? For more than 24 hours after the glitchy, audio-only chat aired on X Spaces, the explanation from the Trump campaign was “No, you didn’t.”
Many people pointed out that Trump didn’t sound like himself. The terms “slurring” and “dentures” were trending on X during the event. News outlets noted it seemed like he had “suddenly gotten a lisp we hadn’t heard before.” Late-night comedian Seth Meyers joked that Trump sounded “like a sugared-up kid on Halloween who won’t take out his plastic vampire teeth.”
Multiple journalists asked the campaign about his voice on Monday. The Trump team initially insisted that he sounded totally fine, with spokesperson Steven Cheung telling CNN and the BBC, “Must be your hearing.” A HuffPost reporter got a ruder version of the same response: “Must be your shitty hearing. Get your ears checked out.”
Unsurprisingly, denying reality did not stop the chatter about Trump’s slurred speech. So late on Tuesday night, Trump tried a new tactic: admitting on Truth Social that his voice was “somewhat different and strange” in the original broadcast and blaming “the complexity of modern day equipment, and cellphone technology”:
This explanation is actually very plausible. As New York’s John Herrman pointed out, Trump’s “mouth full of yogurt” sound was “probably due to a long-standing flaw in how X encodes users’ voices.” And indeed, Trump sounds much crisper in a new version of the interview he posted on X:
The Trump team probably could have avoided a new round of questions about the 78-year-old candidate’s age and health (which already took Joe Biden out of the race) if they’d started out by acknowledging the issues with the audio rather than mocking journalists who asked for comment. It’s too bad tech issues can’t explain the real problem with the interview: Trump’s 20-plus false claims and weird comments, like that Kamala Harris’s “beautiful” Time cover makes her look like Melania.
