This interview with Elon Musk tonight on X, we're learning that Musk's role in the 2024 election has been bigger than he initially wanted the public to realize. Now, that is according to the Wall Street Journal, which has new reporting on his hands-on push to turn out 800,000 voters for Trump. Musk quietly funded a Super PAC back in the spring, but now, with less than 90 days until the election, Musk has overhauled the group's leadership after a series of early stumbles. Let's discuss with Dana Matioli, the lead reporter behind this Wall Street Journal story, and and so many others in the text space and in specific to Elon Musk. First, Dana, explain why you went scorched earth on the Super PAC leadership. There's still the expectations of that initial very big goal of turning out 800,000 voters. Yeah, they have a very ambitious goal. They want to get 800,000 low propensity voters in these swing states to show up for Donald Trump. But there's a big shakeup of PAC leadership. In July, some operatives from Governor Ron DeSantis's failed presidential bid came in to be involved with the PAC, and the vendors were changed out. That has had some resulting chaos.

They're having to start from scratch less than 90 days before the election. It's striking, one, because it sounds a lot like how he's operated in some of his business various adventures up to this point as well. On brand, on some level, your reporting made clear that that must get emphasized to the Super PAC and to its leadership, a desire for privacy. He'd been upset, I think, by a previous reporting from you and your team that revealed he'd told people he planned to commit about $35 million a month to the group. He was asked about that at one point and said this. At that point, could I say that I was throwing $45 million to Trump? That was a fiction made up by the Wolfsman. My question is less about that comment. You guys have done plenty of reporting around both before and after. But more, why did he want to keep the extent of his involvement quiet? He did not want to be the face of this pack. He actually went to length to hide his involvement. So For instance, when you look at the first federal filings from the PAC, he's not listed as a donor, and that was by design.

He didn't want to make his first donation to the PAC until after July first, so it wouldn't appear until the October filings. In the interim, he lined up friends and other Republican donors to fill the void of funding so that the PAC could pay its expenses in that first quarter. Today has been fascinating. One, obviously, we're all waiting for the conversation that he has with Elon Musk tonight. Actually, before I get to another question there, are they going to be able to pull this off? I'm old enough to remember the Ron DeSantis conversation campaign launch, which didn't go great by anyone's standards. Do they feel comfortable they'll be able to do this tonight? It's a really big haul. They had ambitions of hiring 6,000 people to go out and canvas in these battleground states. Then they fired the people doing that, so they have to hire and retrain those people. Their political ads have stopped since firing the other vendors. They've had glitches on their website, which hasn't been maintained since firing the other vendors. And they had 8,500 new voter registrations that were signed up through their website that they didn't mail out the forms because the vendor was fired.

So there are definitely things they have to patch up in the interim, and they have to get the new vendors up and running. And some of the Republican operatives we spoke to were a little bit worried about that because early voting starts as soon as in a month from now. So there's a really big time crunch element to this. Yeah, a tight turnaround time. The new team that he has, that he brought in, are pros by every stretch of the word, but it's going to be definitely a push for them. Trump was famously kicked off of X. Then it was called Twitter after his tweets during the January sixth Capitol attack. What's been fascinating today is he's back for the first time, I think in over a year, posting a video or two. I will show you some of it right now. I think this dynamic here, Trump has his own social media company. It's Truth Social. He benefits from it financially as well. Is the relationship here But is that part of why he's back on X? I think it speaks to this broader rallying cry from conservative groups around the Twitter takeover by Elon.

They viewed the prior company before Elon bought it as really suppressing conservative views. That community has really rallied around Elon and free speech, and they feel like it's a welcoming place now. I think that might be part of Trump's desire to reach those crowds and be part of this platform where it's been viewed as more Republican friendly. Yeah, it certainly tracks with the low propensity voters who maybe might be in the space that they're trying to reach. There's no question about that. Dana Mattioli, the articles in the Wall Street Journal, it's fascinating to read one of many that you've done over the course of the in a couple of months. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks for having me. About an hour and a half from now, billionaire Elon Musk will host Donald Trump on his social media platform X, the app once known as Twitter, and once a favorite outlet for Trump before he was banned in the aftermath of the January sixth insurrection. Cnn's Brian Todd has more for us. Brian, what can we expect from this conversation? Well, Wolf, media analysts expect this to be a friendly and free wheeling conversation, where Elon Musk is likely to let Donald Trump go in whatever direction he wants.

It comes as both men are trying to shape new narratives about themselves. Thank you very much. Donald Trump seemingly amped up tonight for his live conversation on X with Elon Musk, the former President posting several times on X today, the first time he's posted on the platform in nearly a year. Among his posts, a two and a half minute video highlighting coverage of the FBI's search of his Mar-a-Lago home in 2022. The FBI has executed an unprecedented search warrant at President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. I never thought anything like this could happen in America. Trump also reposted a message from his campaign's official X account, promoting during the conversation with Musk. It will be the interview of the century. For Trump, you want to generate the buzz right now because he's losing the narrative of the 2024 presidential election. He's trying to wrestle back some of the momentum, wrestle back some of the news cycle from Kamala Harris. What better way to do that than to put Trump, Musk, in the headlines on X? What can we expect from this enormously hyped conversation between the world's richest man and the former President? Because Elon Musk has come out and endorsed Donald Trump, I expect this to be like a bromance type of an interview where they're supporting each other.

I think that Elon Musk will let Donald Trump speak all the falsehoods and misinformation that he wants. Both men have heavily trafficked in misinformation and conspiracy theories in recent years. Trump, just yesterday, making the false claim on social media that there were fake crowd pictures of Kamala Harris's Michigan rally last week. Musk has similarly repeatedly embraced false conspiracies, spread misinformation, and one of his first acts since buying Twitter in 2022 was to reinstate Trump's account, which was banned after January sixth for the risk of further inciting violence. It was just a couple of years ago that Trump and Musk were on the outs. Musk tweeting, It's time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset. Trump saying this about Musk. Elon is not going to buy Twitter. No, he's got himself a mess. He said the other day, Oh, I've never voted for a Republican. I said, I didn't know that. He told me he voted for me. So he's another on this, but he's not going to be buying it. But just after the assassination attempt against Trump, Musk endorsed the former President, and Trump now has a different tune.

I respect Elon a lot. He respects me. And Musk is backing up his endorsement with cash, though the figures have been in dispute. Elon Musk has started a super pack for Donald Trump. The figures have been thrown out. He's refuted a figure of $45 million a month that he's thrown out. The future is going to be great. Donald Trump's interview with Elon Musk and the recent inroads that has made with the tech industry come at an important time. Kamala Harris has just returned to San Francisco for the first time since clenching the Democratic nomination, and she held a successful fundraiser there over the weekend, giving the Democrats real hope that Silicon Valley will support Harris more than it supported President Biden. Wolf. All right, Brian. Thank you very much, Brian Todd, reporting our political commentators. Actually, Allison and Scott Jennings are back with us for some more analysis. Scott, when Trump has been promoting a right-wing conspiracy theory about Harris's crowds, is it a good idea for him to do an interview with someone known to traffic in misinformation? Well, he's got to reach as many people as he can. At this point of the campaign, you can't leave any stone unturned.

I am, before this thing happens, cautiously going to say, This is a good idea, but I'll reserve judgment on the final analysis until I hear the content tonight. But Donald Trump obviously built a name for himself in politics on this platform. He's returning to the platform, and he's currying favor with someone with a ton of money. Elon Musk could financially change this campaign in a major way if he decided to do it. Maybe he already is to some degree. So I think he's got to reach folks, Wolf. And ultimately, he's got to prosecute the case that will work with voters. And he's going to reach more people tonight on Twitter than he would do at any individual rally out there. Ashley, Trump used his X account, formerly known as Twitter, today for the first time in almost a year. As we've been reporting, he was banned from the platform after the January sixth insurrection. What concerns do you have about this return? Yeah, so this interview, I wouldn't even call it an interview. It's a conversation with a strong ally of Donald Trump. So it's basically a campaign event hosted by the owner of X on X, the platform.

I'm I'm concerned every time Donald Trump is platformed, will he be fact-checked? Will lies that are absolutely untrue be stopped? Will Elon Musk, because he owns the platform, be able to promote Trump content over other content? Will it be a fair platform? To date, it doesn't seem like that is how Elon Musk is actually curating the content on his site. I think that we are in this new age of campaigning where every candidate is allowed to go and turn over every stone. But Elon Musk tries to present himself as an arbiter of the First Amendment, but that's not what this event tonight is going to be. And the final thing I'll just say on this is it's interesting Donald Trump is going back to X because Ron DeSantis launched his campaign on X in a chat with Elon Musk, and it was quite disastrous. The technology didn't work. And so it's funny that Donald Trump is doubling back on one of his opponents's strategies and using Elon Musk's platform to hopefully not perpetuate more lives, but mostly highly probable he will. Elon Musk seems to have just begun to start his livestream with the former President.

There's been a delay and must just took to his own network with an explanation, quoting from his post, There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X working on shutting it down. Ddos stands for Distributed Denial of Service. He went on to say, Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and pose the conversation later. Now, this is reminiscent of the glitches on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' own livestream with Musk to launch his failed presidential campaign. It's like you just keep crashing, huh? Yeah, I think we've got just a massive number of people online. So It's service restraining somewhat. All right. Sorry about that. We've got so many people here that I think we are melting the servers, which is a good sign. Join us now seeing this, Kristen Holmes, covering the former president. So what's the campaign saying about all this? This thing was supposed to start at the top of the hour, wasn't it? Yeah, it was over 40 minutes in here, and the campaign is saying that Trump broke the Internet. I'm going to show you a tweet here. This is obvious spin from Donald Trump's team.

We see a right wing activist posting, It's time to break the Internet. And then you see Chris Lossavita saying, Donald Trump did. I do want to point out, you noted what Elon Musk said there in the tweet, but then he went on to say that this was a giant server attack and that this shows how much opposition there is to even hearing Donald Trump speak. The reason why this is interesting is given the fact that Elon Musk is a supporter of Donald Trump. He has endorsed him, and now he has given him this massive platform to speak, essentially saying that people are against even having Donald Trump out there speaking, feeding into yet another conspiracy theory, which was one of the things that we were watching closely to see how this played out when it came to Donald Trump sitting down with Elon Musk. Obviously, you have seen the way we've all seen Donald Trump really play into these various conservative, far-right-wing conspiracy theories of late reposting pictures that he says that the crowds at Harris's event were AI generated, that there's really not those crowds. That was something we were watching closely to see, and it seems like even we're starting off here, Elon Musk saying that part of this attack is because there's so much opposition to even hearing Donald Trump speak.

How was the Trump team framing this conversation with Musk earlier today? Well, one of the questions I asked Donald Trump at our press conference last week when we were down at Mar-a-Lago and he took questions was why he wasn't out on the campaign trail. I posed that same question to his campaign senior advisors, and they said that they believe that this election was going to be decided by a small margin of voters. And of those voters, a lot of them were low propensity voters, meaning people who don't usually turn out or first-time voters who weren't going to get their news the traditional way, meaning they weren't going to necessarily sit and engage with politics in terms of watching a rally in a swing state. But those same voters might tune into a podcast, they might tune into an MMA event, and they might tune into an interview with Elon Musk. So that's part of the strategy here. Obviously, it's untraditional. We'll see if it works as we get closer to November. Kristen Holmes, thanks so much. Back with us is Scott Jennings, also joining us this 2020 Biden-Harris Senior Campaign Officially, Ashley Allison. Scott, Trump's co-campaign manager, tried to put a positive spin on the situation saying that Trump broke the Internet.

I mean, to Kristen Holmes' point, do you think this interview with Elon Musk is going for those people who may not normally vote, those low propensity voters, just like having Hulk Hogan rip his shirt off at the convention, which I know is a high point for you as well, was reaching a different audience and having Dana White intro the President, the former President. Of course. I think there are obviously going to be people who to follow Elon Musk that may not be as politically engaged as your average five out of five or four out of four voter. I was just listening to the space. There's over a million people in this thing, according to what's on the phone here. And Trump was recounting at the beginning of the space what it was like to be shot in the ear. And so maybe there are people who find it intimate to hear directly from Trump about this in a platform that they're most comfortable in. Ultimately, this is about reaching people where they are. I expect Kamala Harris, by the way, to do things that are nontraditional communications devices as well. I don't know what it will be, but you just can't rely on the same old stuff anymore.

You've got to do everything you can do. Obviously, he's not coasting anymore. He's in a dogfight now to try to win this election. He's now having a conversation with a massively influential and massively wealthy person who supports him in front of over a million people. I'm going to give it a provisional good idea. We'll see what the content produces. But provisionally, I think it's wise to try to talk to as many folks as you can. Actually, you Elon Musk is claiming there was some cyber attack on the site that caused the technical problems. We have no evidence of that at this point. We obviously saw similar problems, technical problems, with the launch from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign. Yeah. God bless Elon Musk. You could have figured out the issues that when your campaign or your site has a surge, that you need to expand capacity. If he was actually just paying attention, what it seems like Donald Trump has been doing to the Kamala Harris campaign, they would have realized that there are people who are engaging in this election in ways that they haven't engaged before. Kamala Harris broke the internet when they had over 100,000 white women join a Zoom.

The only person who was actually, I just have to say this out of respect for the culture, the only person who actually really broke the Internet is Beyoncé. So I know that Chris Lassavita is going to try and say that this is because of the overwhelming influx of folks. But the difference between what Donald Trump is doing on X and what Kamala Harris was able to do spontaneously is that Donald Trump is going to a platform that already has tens of hundreds of millions of people who already engage in saying, Come pay attention to me because I can't get you at my rally. The difference is since Joe Biden decided he wasn't going to run for the race, Kamala Harris had people who organized this organically and got some of the same numbers that Donald Trump is getting on a platform that is curated for them to show up. I don't think Donald is breaking the internet, but good try. Scott, do you think... I mean, is Elon Musk somebody that the former President wants to be... I mean, clearly, he feels there's value in associating with him despite the- Yeah, I mean, super rich guys.

Yeah, super wealthy, super influential, has an audience that they're trying to cultivate in this tech bro innovative space? Yeah, I mean, of course. I mean, look, when you're Donald Trump, you know what range you exist in with most voters. What you got to ultimately do is change the composition of the electorate to give yourself a little bit more of an advantage. That's Trump's superpower is that he may actually be able to reach people. Maybe they're followers of Elon Musk, maybe they aren't. But he ultimately may be able to reach people who aren't politically engaged, except but for someone like him So using the Musk platform and using him and getting the transference of his credibility to you with that voter, it's a total no-brainer. Now, what he says when he gets on there, we'll have to analyze after the fact. But just to reach people who may otherwise be unreachable Yeah, it's a worthwhile thing to do. Ashley Bufie, do you think this is a return to X for the former President? If he thinks it will help him win, yes. For so long, Donald Trump stayed on Truth Social because he wanted to build that platform.

You remember just a couple of months ago, we were talking about how much Truth Social was worth so that he could sell it, and that fell flat. But if Donald Trump thinks there's an audience for him on X, he will definitely be there. Same as the vice president. I think the reason why Donald Trump actually came back to X was because of the virility and the viral moments that the vice president had around Brat and the coconut memes. He's like, I want to be over there It's yours, too. So, yeah, I think he'll stay if he thinks it makes his campaign more viable. This was a big moment, not just for Donald Trump, but also for Elon Musk. For sure. Twitter, as I still call it. This is why I love good old fashioned television. It just works. Well, don't force us. Everything actually works. This actually does show that streaming can struggle, especially when someone like Musk fired most of the technical staffers at the company formerly known as Twitter. He had this coming. Musk says he had been tested testing the servers ahead of time, trying to make sure this would work. We'll find out later what actually went wrong here.

But it is embarrassing for Trump because every day, he's been attempting a reset lately to try to take on Harris. Yeah. This is truly what he made fun of Ron DeSantis for, which, as you would know well, it's perfectly timing that you're here. But I was looking at what Trump said when this happened to Ron DeSantis. He said, Wow, the DeSantis Twitter launch is a disaster. His whole campaign will be a disaster. Can you hear the laughs from the governor's mansion in Florida I don't remember any of that, Kaitlyn. Look, obviously, I'm sure everybody involved wish it went better tonight. But I think this is a symptom of a larger issue right now, which is for the first time in his adult political career, Donald Trump is struggling to get earned media attention. We have not seen that. There have been days, but since 2015, they've been days and hours, not weeks on end. I think that's what you're seeing him reach out doing press conferences, going to journalist panels, and now doing events like this because he is looking for ways to reach people and frankly, have us here tonight talking, even if it's a bad Twitter event or a delayed one, it's better than the night of Kamala Harris is on the rise and succeeding.

That's what he has to do. And her campaign is on True Social reposting Trump's truth about his interview. I mean, they're really trying to troll him with this moment here. They are trolling him. I mean, here's the thing, too. Trump is still running a playbook that is quite old and stale, frankly, in this political environment, trying to go after earned media as if it's the be all end all, as opposed to actually campaigning. Kamala Harris has been making waves through really critical swing states and actually on the ground, gathering crowds, talking to people, building up the base of the Democratic Party who's going to come out and vote for her. Donald Trump is sitting at Mar-a-Lago most of the time and sitting on X or Truth Social or wherever, spouting nasties, as opposed to going out and trying to reach people. And If he thinks that earned media is the only way to get votes, he's going to have a real reckoning because Kamala Harris is actually going to win through the culture and going directly to the people. I think when you look at what his strategy is, and I said, I'm curious what you're hearing from sources.

I mean, Trump was back on Twitter today. He has not been on Twitter since he was banned. Musk obviously bought the website, reinstated him. He posted his mugshot when he was indicted in Georgia last year. But until then, he had not been posting until today, really trying to hype this conversation and to take back the headlines. I think it's indicative of a campaign that continues to try to search these moments to flip the narrative. Donald Trump is returning to Twitter, not because that's the biggest audience in the world, but he knows media is there. He knows a lot of newsmakers and decision makers. It functions as a water-cooler of sorts. He wants to get his name back into the conversation. But to your point, the problem for Donald Trump is he's basically been chilling for a year or so. He hasn't been on the campaign trail in a big way. The legal problems hid some of that. Most importantly, he had an opponent who was not doing much of that campaigning itself. The second that changed. This campaign has been exposed for one that does not have the offensive ability that I think some people thought they did.

I think we looked at a race for last year and a half that was stale, and it presented Donald Trump as maybe a more imposing political figure than he was. But he continues to be at the same vote share he was a month ago, even before the RNC, even before the assassination attempts. That's indicative of a campaign that has reached a ceiling of voters and needs to try new things to win people over. And so far, it's not that they're not trying it, it's that it's not working. Elon Musk build it as the interview of the century. Donald Trump broke his long silence on X to promote it, but their conversation on Musk's platform was plagued with technical problems that are overshadowing the interview itself, at least parts of it. At the scheduled start time, many people could not connect to the feed where it was happening. Musk claims a denial of service attack, as it's known, overwhelmed the company's servers, but it's unclear if that was the issue or if too many people were trying to get into the room. The interview eventually got underway, nearly 45 minutes behind schedule. From there, Trump launched into his normal talking points and grievances and attacks on Kamala Harris.

They're doing it right now while this third-rate phony candidate. Don't forget, I beat Biden. He failed in the debate miserably. We cannot have a Democrat. We cannot have her. She's incompetent. She's as bad as by no tax on tips. All of a sudden, she's I'm not making a speech. She said, There will be no tax on tips. I said that months ago. All of a sudden, for politics, she comes out with what I said, which I think is terrible. I think it's also hitting them very hard. These people are fake. Kamala wouldn't have this conversation. She can't because she's not smart. She's not a smart person, by the way. The glitchy conversation was not just a misfire for Trump. He was hoping to use the opportunity to blunt Kamala Harris's momentum. It's also a big embarrassment for Elon Musk because this has happened before during the botched launch of Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign. It's unclear if this will impact Trump and Musk's relationship, which has gotten increasingly closer over the past few months since Musk took over what used to be known as Twitter. The billionaire has used the platform as his personal megaphone, expressing increasingly far-right views aligned with Trump.

Remember, Musk endorsed Donald Trump after the assassination attempt against him. And there's new reporting tonight that shows just how far Musk has ventured into politics. The Wall Street The Journal says his Super PAC wants to turn out 800,000 voters for Trump in battleground states. We will dig into that later on tonight. And if you want just a sense of just how much their bromance has grown, all you have to do is track Trump's evolving comments on electric cars. The cars go for like two hours. What are you going to do? Everyone's going to be sitting on the highway. We're all going to be looking for a little plug in. Why is it that these big, powerful car companies with guys that are making 35 million a year immediately quit? They say, You want electric vehicles? We'll give it to you when the damn things don't go far enough and they're too expensive. I'm for electric cars. I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly, Elon. So I have no choice. You have a good, and you do make a great product, I have to say. I have to be honest with you. That doesn't mean everybody should have an electric car, but these are minor details.

But your product is incredible. All right, now he's on board with electric cars. Okay, joining me now, CNN Media Analyst and Axio senior media reporter, Sarah Fischer, former Trump 2020 Director of Strategic Communications, Mark Lauter, and former Democratic congressman, and 2020 presidential candidate, Tim Ryan. Guys, thanks very much for being with us. Sarah, let me start with you first. This is a bit in your wheelhouse. Elon Musk is claiming that there was some technical problem at the beginning of this. What do we know? Now you have reports out from The Verge, a tech company, a tech media company, saying that sources said it's not actually a DDoS, a denial of a service attack. It was just that the systems were overwhelmed. It's hard. X has become a black box in terms of communication. What Elon Musk says oftentimes is what goes. But oftentimes, these things can look very similar, Jim. A DDoS attack is overwhelming a system to shut it down. It could have very well been that a lot of people wanted to listen to this interview, which overwhelmed the system and shut it down. Either way, as you mentioned at the top of your remarks, it's an embarrassment for Musk.

They're trying to make this the video platform of choice, but they can't get a livestream up and running. Yeah, he said it was going to be the greatest piece of entertainment or whatever before this thing got started. That is certainly not what it was. And Mark, the first 20 minutes of the interview was on the assassination attempt, and then we moved on into other areas. We're going to talk about some of those areas that he got into. Do you really want Donald Trump to be off-script, going off the cuff for two hours plus, as we're finding out he did earlier on this evening? What do you think? Well, I I think this was a great opportunity for him to reach. I saw it reach about 1.3 million at the max viewership just on Twitter, not some of the other streaming platforms that were also carrying it. So you're getting a nontraditional news audience that's consuming this conversation. I think the fact that it was a conversation was very entertaining. It's different from a politician, what they typically do. I think people were engaged with it that way. You literally heard Elon Musk and Donald Trump debating everything.

Obviously, the economy and the border and the things you would expect. But they were talking about tunnels, high-speed rail, SpaceX, a lot of just interesting things, and I found it to be quite entertaining. Well, and I guess opinions are going to vary on this. I mean, I wonder how much of this is going to come back to bite Trump when people piece through what was said. Tim, let me go to you. Let's listen to Donald Trump talk about Elon Musk and his approach to managing his workforce. Let's listen to that. You're the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, You want to quit? They go on strike. I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, That's okay. You're all gone. You're all gone. He calls Elon Musk the greatest cutter. I mean, you and I both know, Tim, that Donald Trump is going to have to win these blue-walled states, or at least Pennsylvania, for that matter, to win the presidency. He's been trying to appeal Union voters. This doesn't sound like something that's going to help very much at all.

You know, this sounded like when I first heard it is that these are the conversations that happen at the fancy country clubs with the really rich people, the really rich CEOs. Oh, you're a great cutter. No, you're a great cutter. How many did you lay off this month? How many did I lay off this month? The working class people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, that's what they think these folks talk about every a single day. It turns out when they're having a conversation, that's exactly what they talked about. When Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney, it was on a commercial in Ohio that basically talked about Romney putting a guy in a coffin. That's what he felt like when he lost his job because of what Mitt Romney did. You're going to be hearing a lot more of what was just said on that conversation, and you're going to be hearing it in three states in particular, not far from where I'm from right now in Columbus, Ohio. Yeah, Mark, you and I are both old enough to remember the Mitt Romney campaign when Mitt Romney said, I'd like to be able to fire people. That was a huge gaffe during that campaign.

That was a much more quaint time in our politics when that a gaffe could really cause trouble for a campaign. For Donald Trump, perhaps it's just a day that ends in Y. But I can't imagine, Mark, being somebody from the comms side of things, that you heard that and thought that was a good idea for Donald Trump to say that. Well, if I recall that they were talking about cutting government spending inefficiency, Elon Musk was really pressing Donald Trump on needing an efficiency commission to get rid of wasteful spending, wasteful programs with the government. I think that was what that interaction was entailing. I think a lot of people out there do think we need to cut the size of government, cut the amount of government spending we have. If the clip is played in context, then I think it will be easily understood. But if you hear him talking there, he says clearly to Elon Musk, If you go on strike, you're out of here, calling him the greatest cutter. Clearly, that's what he was talking about there. Well, if government workers want to go on strike in Trump administration 2.0, then they should be gone.

I think that's what they were talking about. We do need to get a hold of government spending. I think that was part of the free flow of this event. I'm sure both sides, and obviously, as you referenced, Jim, I'm sure the Harris campaign is going to try to take sound bites and use it for their advantage. If she ever does an interview, we will do the same thing on our side. I mean, that's how this game is played. But I do think the context matters. They were talking about bringing more efficiency to government. Elon was pressing to say, I would volunteer to help. And Trump was basically praising him saying, You know how to cut costs. Yeah. And Tim, I mean, Trump did say at one point, I need an Elon Musk. I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage and smart. I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the States. I mean, those kinds of comments, obviously, you're not going to sit well with a lot of voters. People hear that they don't want to see the Department of Education closed down. Well, first and foremost, they weren't talking about government workers.

They weren't talking about streamlining government. They were talking about Elon Musk firing people because they wanted to unionize or they wanted better wages and benefits. Take that campaign to Western Pennsylvania. Take that idea to Michigan and Wisconsin to Stone Cold loser, and there's no wiggling out of it. When it comes to Elon Musk, look, I like Elon Musk, some of the things he talks about. I like the fact that he's going into electric vehicles. I like some of the technologies that he's promoting. I listened to him tonight. And I thought to myself, what is he doing running around with Donald Trump? I look at the books that Elon Musk reads. He's trying to take the country technologically in a positive way. I completely disagree with his politics and the fact that he wants to use Trump as some vessel. I think he was trying to throw a lifeline to Donald Trump tonight, and it didn't work out. But this damaged Trump big time in the industrial states. He's already on his heels. He has no message, and he's trying to appeal to working class people. And he's talking about how much he loves how Elon Musk fires people.

That's terrible. You're going to hear that for 90 days in the swing states. And I think he tried to him a lifeline, and he threw him an anchor, is what happened tonight.