The 58 wildest lines from the Elon Musk-Donald Trump interview

Whoa boy.

In a much-touted interview, Donald Trump and Elon Musk talked for more than two hours on Monday night on the latter’s social media platform X.

It was an odd “interview.”

Musk played fanboy to Trump — reminding me of this great Chris Farley-Paul McCartney bit:

And Trump just played all of his greatest hits — ignoring most of Musk’s questions and prompts and just riffing on his hobbyhorses: Joe Biden, the media, immigration and his assassination attempt.

Thanks to the amazing team at Listening Post (you need to check them out!), I got my hands on the full transcript of the conversation.

I went through it line-by-line and pulled out the, uh, best lines. They’re below.

I put these “lines” posts behind the paywall because a) they are very labor intensive and b) I am the only person — I think — who is doing the work of going through what Trump and other prominent politicians are actually saying.

It’s important work — what they say is the best indicator of what they’ll do — and I hope you will decide to become a paid subscriber to this newsletter to read the lines in full.

It’s $6 a month or $60 for the year. And, thank you.

To the lines!

1. “And congratulations, because I see you broke every record in the book with so many millions of people. And that's an honor.”

What record, exactly, is Trump talking about? Also, this is how I am going to start every conversation I have from now on. And away we go!

2. “And then you do want silencing of certain voices. Usually those are voices that have something to say that are constructive, oftentimes constructive.”

Musk said that the interview was delayed by 40 minutes because of a cyber attack against X, which he attributed to an attempt to silence Trump. Also, are the voices that are silenced usually the ones that have something “constructive” to say?

3. “But congratulations on breaking every record in the book tonight.”

What record? What book?

4. “The doctors later told me that the ear is a place that is a very bloody place if you're going to get hit.”

“The human head weighs 8 pounds.”

5. “It was very I guess you would say surreal, but it wasn't surreal.”

Donald Trump on being shot in the ear. Both surreal and utterly not surreal.

6. “And I also heard people, shout bullets, bullets, you know, get down, get down because I, you know, I moved down pretty nicely, pretty quickly.”

“I moved down pretty nicely.”

7. “So that was the miracle that was for those people that don't believe in God. I think we got to all start thinking about that.”

Uh, ok.

8. “You know, I'm a believer, now I'm more of a believer, I think, and a lot of people have said that to me. A lot of great people have said that to me, actually.”

Trump appears to say here that the assassination attempt turned him into a believer in God before catching himself and saying it made him “more of a believer.”

9. “They saw a lot of blood and they saw that I went down and it's almost like they wanted to be with me.”

In which Trump says that no one fled the scene of the shooting because they wanted to be with him.

10. “If, if somebody knew, cause people were hearing that, you know, there was just a bad feeling that there was somebody was around, you know, that story now it's been.”