Politics
Trump chats with Musk in lengthy, overarching interview as Harris continues snubbing media
Trump to be interviewed by Elon Musk tonight
Fox News national correspondent Bryan Llenas reports on the anticipation surrounding former President Trump’s no-holds barred interview with Elon Musk on X on ‘Special Report.’
Former President Donald Trump spoke with tech billionaire Elon Musk in an overarching, lengthy interview Monday evening on X as Vice President Kamala Harris continues avoiding the media since landing on the top of the Democratic ticket for the White House.
“It’s pretty sad when you think that somebody that does this for a living can’t answer a question or is afraid to do an interview, and in her case, with a very friendly interview. She’s got all friendly interviewers,” Trump said of Harris Monday evening during his roughly two-hour interview with Musk on X Space.
Trump’s comments come as Harris has avoided the media for 22 days. She has snubbed formal press conferences or sit-down interviews, including for a Time magazine cover story, since she emerged as the DNC’s nominee for the White House after President Biden dropped out of the race last month.
“She is considered more liberal, by far, than Bernie Sanders. She’s a radical-left lunatic. And if she’s going to be our president, very quickly you’re not going to have a country anymore. And she’ll go back to all the things that she believes in. She believes in defunding the police. She believes in no fracking, zero,” Trump added of Harris.
KAMALA HARRIS DECLINES TIME MAGAZINE INTERVIEW AS SHE CONTINUES TO AVOID THE PRESS
Donald Trump Elon Musk (Getty Images)
Trump’s interview with Musk kicked off after 8:30 p.m. Monday, following a “massive” distributed denial-of-service attack on the platform that caused delays, Musk explained on X. More than 1 million people ultimately listened to the interview according to the live tracker throughout the discussion.
X MELTS DOWN AFTER TRUMP-MUSK’S INTERVIEW ‘SPACE’ IMMEDIATELY CRASHES
The two held a laid back interview, where Musk prompted Trump with topics before the 45th president was offered ample time to elaborate on policy issues such as immigration, the assassination attempt on his life last month, spiraling inflation and closing the Department of Education in favor of states taking the mantle on school systems.
Vice President Kamala Harris says her cursing habit has gotten worse since she entered office. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
“I want to close up Department of Education, move education back to the states. … Of the 50 [states], I would bet that 35 would do great. And 15 of them, or, you know, 20 of them, will be as good as Norway. You know, Norway is considered great,” Trump said, while noting left-wing states such as California could struggle if he does eliminate the DOE.
The 45th president also spoke at length with Musk about the current state of immigration in the U.S.
“I believe it’s over 20 million people came into our country. Many coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger version of that is insane asylums. And many are terrorists. And I’ll tell you what, they’re coming not just from South America. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Asia. They’re coming from the Middle East,” Trump told Musk, who endorsed Trump earlier this year.
Trump said that despite Harris’ recent rhetoric to address the spiraling migrant crisis at the border, she and Biden have had years to address migration but “won’t do anything.”
“She 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. She’s incompetent and he’s incompetent. And frankly, I think that she’s more incompetent than he is, and that’s saying something, because he’s not too good,” he said.
On the topic of immigration, Trump also credited a slide his campaign made showing immigration stats for saving his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month during a rally, when shooter Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate him. The 45th president looked over to the slide on immigration data when Crooks opened fire, which narrowly saved his life as the position of his head had abruptly changed.
“That slide — illegal immigration saved my life,” he told Musk. “The incredible thing is that the chart, I used it less than 20% of the time. It was just a moment.”
“It’s always to my left, never my right, and it’s always at the end of the speech,” Trump added of the position of the slide.
“I’m going to sleep with that chart always,” he joked.
FBI INVESTIGATING IRAN’S HACK OF TRUMP CAMPAIGN DOCUMENTS
The interview, billed as “a conversation” between X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk and former US President Donald Trump, originally due to start at 1am on Tuesday, finally got underway just after 1.40am. Picture date: Tuesday August 13, 2024. (Photo by PA Wire/PA Images via Getty Images) (Getty Images)
Trump went on to rattle off a list of wars and world events the U.S. could have avoided if Biden were not in the Oval Office, while noting he was tough on nations such as Russia, China and North Korea and knows the countries’ respective leaders “well.”
“First of all, the Israeli attack would have never happened. Russia would never have attacked Ukraine, and we’d have no inflation, and we wouldn’t have had the Afghanistan mess, if you think of it well … if you take a few of those events away, and we have a different world.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for a photo prior to their talks on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023. President Putin will make a two-day state visit to China this week, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (Sergei Guneyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)
HARRIS CAMPAIGN POSTS DEBUNKED CLAIM THAT TRUMP CALLED CHARLOTTESVILLE NEO-NAZIS ‘VERY FINE PEOPLE’
He pointed to his tweets back in 2017 when he slammed North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as “little rocket man” as tensions heightened between the two nations amid a series of North Korea missile and nuclear tests.
In this photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends at a meeting of the Workers’ Party of Korea in Pyongyang, North Korea on Feb. 28, 2022. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: “KCNA” which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP)
“I had that problem worked out very quickly,” Trump said of North Korea. “It was nasty at the beginning with Rocket Man … [Jong-Un] said he has a red button on his desk. I said, ‘I have a red button on my desk too, but my red button is much bigger, and my red button works.’ And then I called him ‘Little Rocket Man.’”
“Anyway, here’s the bottom line. All of a sudden, I got a call from him, and they said they want to meet, they wanted to meet me. And we met … and I got along with him great. We were in no danger, but President Obama thought we were gonna end up in a war, a nuclear war, with him,” he said.
BURGLARY AT TRUMP CAMPAIGN VIRGINIA HEADQUARTERS CAUGHT ON SURVEILLANCE CAMERA UNDER INVESTIGATION
The Biden administration would support the elimination of taxes on tipped wages, an idea first proposed by former President Trump, the White House said. (Left: (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images), Right: (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images))
Trump also addressed Biden’s exit from the 2024 race, saying it was a Democratic “coup” that pressured Biden to drop out. Biden dropped out of the running last month as concerns mounted surrounding his mental acuity and 81 years of age and Democrats and traditional allies of the party called on him to exit the race.
“This was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way, or we can do it the hard way,’” Trump said.
“They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him,” Musk added before Trump slammed Biden as “the worst president in history.”
TRUMP CAMP THANKS WH FOR CONFIRMING THERE’S ‘NO DAYLIGHT’ BETWEEN HARRIS, BIDEN: ‘KAMALA CREATED THIS MESS’
Trump made a return to X, formerly Twitter, earlier on Monday after nearly a year of not posting on his once-favored social media platform. Before X sold to Musk in 2022, Trump was suspended from his Twitter account following the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He seldom posted on the platform after Musk reinstated his account, only sharing his mugshot in August of last year.
Former President Donald Trump told Columbia Journalism Review he had to fight off “unbelievably fake stories” during his presidency. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
“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!” Trump posted earlier Monday amid a flurry of campaign ads.
Ahead of his interview with Trump, Musk hyped the interview as one that “should be highly entertaining!” as it “is unscripted with no limits on subject matter.”
“This country is going down, and these people are bad people that we’re running against. And they’re liars. They make statements. They do things that are so bad. They say they’re going to make a strong border. They say they’ve been great on the border, and they’ve been the worst in history. They say they stop crime,” Trump said towards the end of the interview.
“It’s so incredible.”
Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.
Politics
Trump signs order to protect Venezuela oil revenue held in US accounts
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President Donald Trump has signed an executive order blocking U.S. courts from seizing Venezuelan oil revenues held in American Treasury accounts.
The order states that court action against the funds would undermine U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.
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President Donald Trump is pictured signing two executive orders on Sept. 19, 2025, establishing the “Trump Gold Card” and introducing a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas. He signed another executive order recently protecting oil revenue. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Trump signed the order on Friday, the same day that he met with nearly two dozen top oil and gas executives at the White House.
The president said American energy companies will invest $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s “rotting” oil infrastructure and push production to record levels following the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
The U.S. has moved aggressively to take control of Venezuela’s oil future following the collapse of the Maduro regime.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Politics
Column: Some leaders will do anything to cling to positions of power
One of the most important political stories in American history — one that is particularly germane to our current, tumultuous time — unfolded in Los Angeles some 65 years ago.
Sen. John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, had just received his party’s nomination for president and in turn he shunned the desires of his most liberal supporters by choosing a conservative out of Texas as his running mate. He did so in large part to address concerns that his faith would somehow usurp his oath to uphold the Constitution. The last time the Democrats nominated a Catholic — New York Gov. Al Smith in 1928 — he lost in a landslide, so folks were more than a little jittery about Kennedy’s chances.
“I am fully aware of the fact that the Democratic Party, by nominating someone of my faith, has taken on what many regard as a new and hazardous risk,” Kennedy told the crowd at the Memorial Coliseum. “But I look at it this way: The Democratic Party has once again placed its confidence in the American people, and in their ability to render a free, fair judgment.”
The most important part of the story is what happened before Kennedy gave that acceptance speech.
While his faith made party leaders nervous, they were downright afraid of the impact a civil rights protest during the Democratic National Convention could have on November’s election. This was 1960. The year began with Black college students challenging segregation with lunch counter sit-ins across the Deep South, and by spring the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had formed. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not the organizer of the protest at the convention, but he planned to be there, guaranteeing media attention. To try to prevent this whole scene, the most powerful Black man in Congress was sent to stop him.
The Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was also a warrior for civil rights, but the House representative preferred the legislative approach, where backroom deals were quietly made and his power most concentrated. He and King wanted the same things for Black people. But Powell — who was first elected to Congress in 1944, the same year King enrolled at Morehouse College at the age of 15 — was threatened by the younger man’s growing influence. He was also concerned that his inability to stop the protest at the convention would harm his chance to become chairman of a House committee.
And so Powell — the son of a preacher, and himself a Baptist preacher in Harlem — told King that if he didn’t cancel, Powell would tell journalists a lie that King was having a homosexual affair with his mentor, Bayard Rustin. King stuck to his plan and led a protest — even though such a rumor would not only have harmed King, but also would have undermined the credibility of the entire civil rights movement. Remember, this was 1960. Before the March on Washington, before passage of the Voting Rights Act, before the dismantling of the very Jim Crow laws Powell had vowed to dismantle when first running for office.
That threat, my friends, is the most important part of the story.
It’s not that Powell didn’t want the best for the country. It’s just that he wanted to be seen as the one doing it and was willing to derail the good stemming from the civil rights movement to secure his own place in power. There have always been people willing to make such trade-offs. Sometimes they dress up their intentions with scriptures to make it more palatable; other times they play on our darkest fears. They do not care how many people get hurt in the process, even if it’s the same people they profess to care for.
That was true in Los Angeles in 1960.
That was true in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
That is true in the streets of America today.
Whether we are talking about an older pastor who is threatened by the growing influence of a younger voice or a president clinging to office after losing an election: To remain king, some men are willing to burn the entire kingdom down.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
Politics
Federal judge blocks Trump from cutting childcare funds to Democratic states over fraud concerns
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A federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stopping subsidies on childcare programs in five states, including Minnesota, amid allegations of fraud.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, a Biden appointee, didn’t rule on the legality of the funding freeze, but said the states had met the legal threshold to maintain the “status quo” on funding for at least two weeks while arguments continue.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns.
The programs include the Child Care and Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and the Social Services Block Grant, all of which help needy families.
USDA IMMEDIATELY SUSPENDS ALL FEDERAL FUNDING TO MINNESOTA AMID FRAUD INVESTIGATION
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
“Families who rely on childcare and family assistance programs deserve confidence that these resources are used lawfully and for their intended purpose,” HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said in a statement on Tuesday.
The states, which include California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, argued in court filings that the federal government didn’t have the legal right to end the funds and that the new policy is creating “operational chaos” in the states.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian at his nomination hearing in 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In total, the states said they receive more than $10 billion in federal funding for the programs.
HHS said it had “reason to believe” that the programs were offering funds to people in the country illegally.
‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’: SENATE REPUBLICANS PRESS GOV WALZ OVER MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
The table above shows the five states and their social safety net funding for various programs which are being withheld by the Trump administration over allegations of fraud. (AP Digital Embed)
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.” (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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Fox News Digital has reached out to HHS for comment.
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