ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Tonight former President Donald Trump is doing an interview on X, the platform once known as Twitter. The interviewer is the platform's owner, Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump. The Republican presidential candidate is still trying to find his footing against Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris three weeks after President Biden dropped out of the race. NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben is covering all this. Hi there.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Hey there.
SHAPIRO: Trump has been almost entirely off X since early 2021. His posting tends to be on Truth Social, which he owns. So why is he doing an interview with Musk on this platform now?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, first of all, Musk is a friendly party. Like you said, he endorsed Trump earlier this summer. He has also posted in favor of Trump and Vance and also just conservative causes in general. In addition, Trump might want to be doing this interview because he's trying to reach undecided voters. X recently claimed there are 35 million swing voters that use the platform.
Now, it's not clear what exactly that means. But Trump has just been doing a lot of online outreach. Think his interview last week with streamer Adin Ross. JD Vance did an interview with the "Full Send Podcast." Donald Trump has a TikTok account. Now, these are pretty unusual outlets for Republicans, but the Trump campaign is really trying to reach out to youngish voters and young men in particular.
SHAPIRO: Trump did start tweeting again today.
KURTZLEBEN: Right.
SHAPIRO: Is he back for real, for good?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, we don't know. As we all know, Trump is unpredictable, especially on Twitter. But, yeah, he started tweeting again today for the first time in nearly a year. Now, he had been banned from Twitter, now X, before Elon Musk took over. Elon Musk let him back on. But by then, Trump was pretty committed to posting on Truth Social. Now, thus far today, his tweets - they've mostly been tweets of his video campaign ads - so nothing very unusual. But it would not be a surprise if he got back into regular posting, so we'll see.
SHAPIRO: Let's talk about Elon Musk, who's doing this interview. The businessman is a lot of things, but he's not a journalist. What kind of...
KURTZLEBEN: Right.
SHAPIRO: ...Precedent is there for his involvement in presidential politics?
KURTZLEBEN: Not a lot except Florida governor Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign on X in May 2023. You might remember this. It was plagued with lots of technical problems. It was awkward. It was messy. It was hard to get any useful information out of it for long stretches. Here's a taste of what it sounded like.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ELON MUSK: All right, great. So let's see.
RON DESANTIS: It's going to keep crashing.
MUSK: Yeah, I think we've got just a massive number of people online, so its servers are straining somewhat.
SHAPIRO: Kind of foreshadowing...
KURTZLEBEN: Now...
SHAPIRO: ...Of how the campaign went.
KURTZLEBEN: Right. Yes. Well, yeah, and Musk this week, by the way, posted that they have been testing X to make sure it can handle the traffic tonight, so we'll see if that works.
SHAPIRO: What should we expect to hear from Trump?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, Musk has been highlighting in his tweets about this, that this is going to be live, unscripted and entertaining. So one basic thing I'm curious about is will Musk, who, again, has endorsed Trump, ask him anything actually difficult. Now, beyond that, Trump has a few main lines of attack he's been using in the last week, saying that Harris isn't doing enough interviews, for example. Here's what he said in that news conference he did last week.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: She's not doing any news conference. You know why she's not doing it? 'Cause she can't do a news conference.
KURTZLEBEN: So I can imagine that he would really stress that, hey; here I am, doing another interview. When is Kamala Harris going to do more interviews? He seems to be trying to goad her into more of these events. Now, beyond that, we know that he's been casting Harris and Walz as too liberal, calling them weird, throwing that insult back at them after Walz launched it. So those are his recent lines of attack.
SHAPIRO: All right. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben, thank you.
KURTZLEBEN: Thanks, Ari.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRAKE SONG, "STORIES ABOUT MY BROTHER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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