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With 83 days to go until Americans decide whether to give Donald Trump another four years in the White House, the Republican nominee has been desperate to flip the script after president Joe Biden’s decision to exit the race caused an unprecedented shift in vibes and polls that has seen vice-president Kamala Harris take the lead in both national and swing-state polling.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, have seized the narrative and upended an election Trump and his allies had considered all but over when he accepted his party’s nomination in Milwaukee last month.
Looking for a miracle, Trump turned to a relatively new ally, X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk, for what both men billed as a game-changing “conversation” on X, the platform the world’s richest man bought with the express aim of using it as a political tool to fight what he calls the “woke mind virus.”
It didn’t go well from the start.
After a nearly hour-long delay caused by technical issues, which Musk blamed on an unspecified “denial of service” attack, the ex-president and the right-wing billionaire started talking.
It was a conversation, to be sure, but it certainly wasn’t “game-changing” in any way.
After spending the first half hour or so talking about the July assassination attempt that he escaped from with a flesh wound to his ear, Trump spent most of what became a more than 90-minute-long bull session delivering what amounted to a version of his stump speech, the teleprompter-borne shtick that he meanders in and out of during his signature political rallies.
With Musk as a dutiful hype man, Trump went through his greatest hits about immigration, the usual false claims about other countries emptying prisons and institutions that care for people with mental disorders to “send” people to the US, and his oft-told boasts about his “great relationships” with the world’s dictators.
He attacked the man he’s no longer running against — President Biden — and repeated lines he’s already used about Harris, the woman who is currently beating him.
But something was different about Trump this time.
For reasons that haven’t been explained, Trump spent most of the conversation talking with a noticeable lisp, even slurring his speech at times.
It was not the first time Trump had exhibited difficulties with his speech. There were numerous supercuts of verbal miscues and slurred words compiled by late-night comedians during his time in the White House, but this was no transitory episode.
He spent the entire conversation with Musk speaking in a voice that sounded like Sylvester, the lisping cartoon cat of Looney Tunes fame.
The Independent texted his campaign’s press secretary to ask if he had recently had dental work that would explain the lisp – no reply was received.
So when the morning shows kick off tomorrow, they won’t be talking about anything but Trump’s inability to pronounce his “s” sounds.
He wanted a reset, but didn’t get one.
