Trump wanted Elon Musk to give him a reset — he didn’t get one

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 have up-ended 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 owner Elon Musk, for what both men billed as a game-changing “conversation” on X (formerly Twitter), 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 schtick 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