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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

Donald Trump told Elon Musk that internal “enemies” were “more dangerous” than foreign adversaries such as Russia and China in a rambling, two-hour conversation on X that was delayed by glitches on the social media platform.

The discussion on Monday, billed by Trump as the “greatest interview ever”, was heard at times by more than 1mn people, according to X, though Musk had prepared for 8mn people to join the talk with the former president, which began 42 minutes later than planned.

Trump has been trying to adjust to a newly competitive race for the White House after vice-president Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic party candidate last month.

The discussion underscored Trump’s appeal to Musk, a self-declared “free-speech absolutist” who has moved sharply to the right in recent years and used his social media platform X to promote his ideas on immigration and regulation.

The former president opened the conversation with a lengthy recounting of his attempted assassination in July in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump said he would return to the town in October, not long before the November election.

He then accused Democrats of engineering a “coup” to replace Biden on the presidential ticket. Musk suggested that the party “took [Biden] out back behind the shed and basically shot him”.

Trump also accused Harris of shifting towards the middle on issues such as immigration, saying she was a “radical left, San Francisco liberal . . . and now she wants to be more Trump than Trump”.

The former president has been struggling to find a coherent line of attack on Harris in recent weeks — including questioning her race — as she has gained ground in the polls. His criticism remained scattered on Monday, and he rarely mentioned Harris by name.

He also raged against his political opponents, declaring that he had “enemies on the outside and enemies on the inside” and that “bad people in our government” were “more dangerous” than foreign adversaries.

The former president praised the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea as “at the top of their game”.

“They are tough, they are smart and they are vicious,” he said.

Musk lavished praise on the former president while repeatedly trying to turn the conversation towards more centrist themes such as immigration, where he praised Trump as a moderate and distinguished between legal and illegal immigration, as well as curbing government spending, and controlling the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Trump falsely claimed that it was “impossible” to sell US cars in Europe and that it was “very difficult” for American farmers to sell agricultural products overseas. He also greatly overestimated how much aid the US gave to Ukraine in its war against Russia and underestimated aid from Europe.

“We have a deficit with [the EU] of $250bn, which people don’t know,” said Trump. “It sounds so nice — ‘the European Union’. But let me tell you: they’re not as tough as China, but they’re bad. And I let them know it, and that’s probably why they notified you. No, they don’t treat our country well.”

EU commissioner Thierry Breton warned Musk in a letter ahead of the interview against disseminating hate speech or disinformation in violation of the bloc’s Digital Services Act.

Towards the end of the interview, the 78-year-old Trump bashed Biden, who is 81, for being “close to a vegetable state”. Musk responded: “We just don’t have a president right now.”

The Harris campaign noted that Musk had said in 2022 that Trump would be 82 at the end of another presidential term, “which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America”.

A spokesperson for the Harris campaign said that Trump’s “extremism” was on “full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight” after the interview.

“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class.”

Former President Donald J. Trump claimed without evidence on Sunday that his rival in the 2024 presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris, had used artificial intelligence to doctor or create an image of a rally that showed a large crowd in Detroit last week.

“She ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Mr. Trump wrote on his social networking site, Truth Social.

Three reporters from The New York Times who attended the Michigan rally confirmed that the crowd numbered in the thousands, contrary to Mr. Trump’s assertion that “there was nobody there.” A Times analysis of photos and videos of the event also showed that Mr. Trump’s claims about the size of the crowd were unfounded. Other images and videos from multiple vantage points showed a large audience.

Crowd size is often a point of comparison between candidates, but Mr. Trump has now given it more intense focus.

A Harris campaign official told The Times by email that the original photo in question was taken by a campaign staff member and was not modified by artificial intelligence.

The crowd was packed tightly inside the airplane hangar. Some attendees waited for Ms. Harris’s arrival on elevated platforms that gave them a higher vantage point, but a majority stood on the floor. From some angles at the back of the hangar where reporters were positioned, it was difficult to gauge how far the crowd extended.

But by moving over to a nearby riser that faced the open door of the hangar, Times reporters could see the size of the crowd more clearly. It stretched beyond the hangar, spilling out onto the tarmac beyond — not far from where Air Force Two came to a stop.

Ms. Harris’s X account streamed the rally, with the first few minutes panning over the crowd as Air Force Two arrived. The Harris campaign later posted on X that the image reflected what the campaign said was 15,000 attendees, and it also responded to Trump’s post with a video of the crowds as Air Force Two arrived at the Detroit Metro Airport.

Posts calling into question the authenticity of the crowd photo, and of the size of Ms. Harris’s audience, had already begun to bubble up among far-right Trump supporters before Mr. Trump seized on it. Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post included a screenshot of an X post by Chuck Callesto, calling the crowd image “FAKE.”

Mr. Callesto is a conservative social media strategist who has frequently posted falsehoods and “Stop the Steal” content about the 2020 election. Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist whom Mr. Trump wanted to hire for a role on his campaign, posted multiple times about the photo, and Joe Hoft, a far-right blogger, wrote a post about it.

Before Ms. Harris’s rally, Mr. Trump had already been focused on comparing crowd sizes at her rallies with those at his own. He said during one of his campaign speeches that Ms. Harris had drawn crowds because she had entertainment and that he did not need to do the same to attract attendees.