The ridiculous hysteria over Musk’s Trump interview

After listening to the full one hour and 39 minutes of last night’s Elon Musk-Donald Trump conversation, livestreamed on X, I can report that neither of them gleefully plotted to end democracy, institute white supremacy or remove the right to vote from women, as their more hysterical critics probably thought they might.

In a wide-ranging discussion, they touched on everything from how much a human ear bleeds when shot to the fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. Trump discussed foreign policy and lamented the cost of groceries for wage-earning American families. Most of it was focussed on meat-and-potato issues that affect ordinary people not just in the US, but all over the world.

X owner Musk told Trump that he had voted for Barack Obama and had always been ‘moderate, if not slightly left, politically’, and that he wants to work on alternatives to fossil fuels. Trump repeatedly said that he did not want to start wars, and called Vladimir Putin ‘vicious’ and Volodymyr Zelensky ‘honourable’. So we can all calm down now – right, liberals?

Right, liberals?

Alas, no. That’s because Musk is perhaps the only man who generates almost as much deranged, authoritarian chattering-class loathing as The Donald himself. This is especially so in the European Union and the UK at the moment, where Musk has become something of a bogeyman.

Indeed, Britain’s cultural and political elites seem particularly annoyed by the fact that Musk has the temerity to exercise his free speech on his X platform. They hate the idea that users might read a dissenting tweet from Musk – such as his claim that Britain is heading towards ‘civil war’ – when they would rather we only listen to them. His decision to interview Trump predictably prompted a nuclear-level meltdown.

Yesterday, before the interview was streamed, Bruce Daisley, a British former Twitter executive, wrote an extraordinary piece in the Guardian calling for Musk to be arrested if he ‘keeps stirring unrest’. As the subheading put it: ‘Perhaps fear of unexpected detention will concentrate his mind.’ Are the editors at the Guardian auditioning for roles as mob henchmen?

The piece didn’t just call for Musk’s arrest. It actually suggested that Musk is snorting illicit drugs through the night, while egging on British fascists with his posts. ‘Glancing at Musk’s X feed shows him regularly staying up long into the night posting and replying’, Daisley wrote: ‘He’s been open about his use of ketamine, apparently a medical prescription. While 4am tweets can be deleted… real-world consequences hang around long after the buzz has gone.’

Even worse was the letter sent to Musk ahead of the Trump interview by high-ranking EU apparatchik Thierry Breton. Breton implied that livestreaming a convo with Trump could have ‘detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security’, and threatened Musk with sanctions under the EU’s online censorship law, the Digital Services Act.

The political class’s desire to suppress figures like Musk and Trump stems from their fear that people might actually want to hear what they have to say. To be fair to his detractors, Trump’s turns of phrase can be disconcertingly crass and inelegant. He doesn’t sound like a statesman. In his conversation with Musk, he called his Democratic rivals ‘dopey suckers’ and characterised Biden’s empty words on Ukraine as ‘stupid threats coming from [his] stupid face’. He also recounted a famous back and forth he had with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un: ‘He said “I’ve got a red button on my desk”, I said, “I’ve got a red button on my desk too, but my red button is much bigger and it works. And then I called him Little Rocket Man.”’

I get that for the professional-managerial class, this all sounds unforgivably gauche. But are such comments really worth destroying free speech and representative democracy over?

Anyone is entitled to disagree with Trump’s policies and Americans are free to vote against them. But instead of fighting Trump’s policies in open and robust debate, his establishment foes across the West misrepresent, emote and obfuscate. They make it very difficult to have a sensible discussion about anything, much less government policy.

Musk put it best when he said during the interview: ‘We want safe and clean cities, we want secure borders, we want sensible government spending, we want to restore both the perception and reality of respect in our judicial system… stop the lawfare.’ He then added: ‘How are those even right-wing positions?’

Quite. Right now, the chattering-class hysteria over Trump and Musk is a far greater threat to public discourse and debate than anything either has actually said. We need to let them speak.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.