US will go out of business if Kamala Harris wins

Washington: Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is a ‘third-rate phoney candidate’ and ‘more incompetent’ than her boss President Joe Biden, her Republican rival in the November election Donald Trump has said.

"We don't have a president right now - and Kamala is even worse. She's a San Francisco liberal who destroyed that city, destroyed California, and will destroy our country if she's elected," Trump has said. In a much-anticipated audio-only interview with billionaire tech magnateElon MuskElon Muskon his social media platform X which was delayed by more than 40 minutes due to technical difficulties, the 78-year-old former president said, “She is a radical left lunatic," as he alleged that “she wants to be more Trump than Trump”. The interview on X went on for about two hours.

The event, which was scheduled to begin at 5:30 am IST on Tuesday, was delayed by more than 40 minutes due to a DDOS attack, a type of cyberattack.

During the chat, the two spoke in length about the assassination attempt on Trump last month. Their conversation also saw the Republican nominee attacking his Democratic rival Kamala Harris for the 2024 US presidential elections.

The interview, which was joined by more than 1.3 million users, was an opportunity for Trump to seize the limelight at a time when Kamala Harris has erased his lead in opinion polls, just weeks after she replaced Joe Biden in the race to the White House. Launching a scathing attack on the 59-year-old US Vice President, Trump reiterated his allegation that Biden being replaced by Harris as a presidential candidate of the Democratic party was a coup. Musk agreed with the former president and said, "Her behaviour is far left.” "She (Harris) had three and a half years, and by the way, they have another five months that they can do something. But they won't do anything. It's all talk," Trump said. Trump would face Harris in the general elections on November 5.

He accused Harris of having failed miserably on border security as hundreds and thousands of people entered the country illegally. Asserting that he is in favour of legal immigration, Trump said it is illegal immigration that he is against. “She is such a liar,” Trump alleged on X.

“There appears to be a massive DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack on X. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” Musk said in a post on X.

During the interview, both Musk and Trump agreed that the crime rate has increased in the US because of the open border policy of the Biden-Harris Administration. “We’re gonna have the largest deportation in the history of this country. And we have no choice,” said the former president.

Responding to a question from Musk, Trump also slammed Biden’s foreign policy and applauded Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “I got along well with them,” he said, claiming there would have been no war if he was the president of the United States.

Meanwhile, Musk stressed that people respond to strength and not weakness and said, “We have some really bad people… we have some really bad people, and I say they are more dangerous than Russia and China.” The biggest threat, he said, is not climate change but nuclear warming.

The conversation between Trump and Musk started with the failed assassination attempt on the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. “It’s very much, I say, an act of God. It’s a miracle that it happened,” Trump said.

Commenting on the country’s economy, he said the US is having the worst inflation in 100 years. Trump accused the Biden-Harris administration of the worsening of the US economy. “We need to reduce our government spending. … We need, like a government efficiency commission,” Musk said.

Trump also told Musk, the 53-year-old CEO of Tesla, that he was an “interesting character”. During the conversation, Trump described China as a primary competitor in Artificial Intelligence and announced that he would close down the Department of Education and move them to the states.

In this, he said he would need Musk’s help. Trump, who has 88.8 million followers on X, had 10 posts on the social media platform, each of which has been viewed millions of times. Some of his posts had 34 million impressions.

His first post, “Are you better off now than you were when I was president? Our economy is shattered. Our border has been erased. We’re a nation in decline. Make the American Dream AFFORDABLE again. Make America SAFE again. Make America GREAT Again!” had 25 million impressions.