Outside the Beltway

Source: the White House

“He sounded like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck.”

Trump on X.

Steven L. Taylor
25

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Source: the White House

After initially not really caring, I tuned into listen to part of Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk on X last night after hearing several quite bizarre clips. I remain of the view that I cannot believe his campaign allowed him to sound like that for two-ish hours. It is utter malpractice.

For example (h/t Matt Bernius via DM):

https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1823182083935940801

I listened for 20+ minutes and that is how he sounded. I mean, I don’t know why, but something linked ot denture does seem plausible. That no one spilled water on his device or something to stop the madness is shocking.

The title quote is from this USAT piece: Trump rambles, slurs his way through Elon Musk interview. It was an unmitigated disaster.

For a fascism-curious billionaire who loves cuddling up to right-wing loons, Elon Musk sure is good at making right-wing politicians look stupid.

Former President Donald Trump had loudly trumpeted a planned Monday night interview with Musk that would stream on X. But much like the disastrous X-platformed launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, the Musk/Trump interview failed to launch, leaving social media users laughing at the collective incompetence.

“Fascism-curious,” indeed. Further, his interview skills barely reach first-podcast-recorded-in-Mom’s-basement levels of polish.

Also: given that Musk had technical problems when he hosted DeSantis, I find the assertion that the problems getting started last night was DDOS attack a dubious one. And in regards to the DeSantis announcement:

In May 2023, when DeSantis’ presidential campaign premiered with a glitch-tastic interview with Musk on what was then called Twitter, Trump mocked the debacle, writing on social media: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”

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25 responses to ““He sounded like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck.””

  1. Not the IT Dept. Avatar
    Not the IT Dept.

    I’ll never stop finding it amusing that some people think Trump’s campaign team could stop him from doing whatever the hell he wants at any moment in time. Steve Bannon occasionally could do it in 2016 (see Chris Christie’s description about how SB manipulated Trump into approving funding for the transition office CC was supposed to be running) but if anyone else has been able to, they’ve been very quiet about it.

    I’m sure the current campaign gnomes just sat there in horror watching their professional reputations go up in even more smoke. I wonder if they’re paying now for something really horrendous they did in a previous life, like burn down an orphanage or something.

    10
  2. Jen Avatar
    Jen

    You would think, in a race where age has been mentioned as a factor repeatedly, that someone would have ensured he used the extra strength Super Poligrip.

    Unless the slurring was caused by medication, I guess.

    And Musk’s blaming a DDOS attack is laughable, nothing was wrong elsewhere on the platform.

    13
  3. MarkedMan Avatar
    MarkedMan

    I honestly didn’t think the excerpt sounded that unusual for him – a toxic thirteen year old boy (“Way!”) trying to puff himself up. One of the biggest blowhards I’ve ever come across in my life. In 40+ years I’ve never heard anything from that eternally aggrieved mouth that revealed more than the shallowest understanding of, well, literally anything.

    What has astounded me about the whole Trump thing is realizing that a very significant number of people will take it as gospel when an idiotic blowhard just repeats over and over, “I’m the smartest!”. That’s all it takes. A sad commentary on the human condition.

    13
  4. Beth Avatar
    Beth

    And he said, ‘No way,’ and I said, ‘Way.’”

    https://youtu.be/QOKociU8t_Q?si=-5Yd7USRyjA8-1fc

    2
  5. David S. Avatar
    David S.

    @Jen: It’s more likely that his engineers told him, “we got more traffic than we could handle,” and he interpreted that as a DDOS. Like, we used to call it “being Slashdotted”, back when Slashdot was the hotness. The issue is that Musk is too cheap* to provision more throughput in response to an expected and scheduled traffic spike. The reason it didn’t mess with other parts of the site simply means that the load was correctly quarantined so that partial system failure didn’t propagate into a complete system failure, which really doesn’t surprise me.

    * The other possible interpretation is that Musk didn’t expect this many viewers. Which … lol, no.

    15
  6. Lucysfootball Avatar
    Lucysfootball

    And after all this, the election is still basically a coin toss. If the parties were reversed I would have to vote for a qualified Republican over a Democratic version of Trump. Trump is probably less qualified than 98% of the people in Congress, and he still has a solid 45% of the vote. That isn’t sad, it’s disgusting.

    25
  7. Jay L Gischer Avatar
    Jay L Gischer

    @David S.: I posted this on another thread, but I’d like to hear your take. If I saw a high number of connection requests AND a high number of connections being dropped immediately after connecting, I would conclude there was a DDOS attack.

    I mean, I think the likelihood of there being throngs of excited listeners wanting to connect does not concord all that well with recent Trump rally attendance, does it?

    Although, it’s possible that they just don’t do this very much and it’s showing.

    2
  8. just nutha Avatar
    just nutha

    Based on what you’re saying, I have to conclude that The Hill is in the bag for the MAGAts. Their #2 takeaway was “Trump made no major missteps.” Hmmm…

    4
  9. Steven L. Taylor Avatar
    Steven L. Taylor

    @Not the IT Dept.:

    I’ll never stop finding it amusing that some people think Trump’s campaign team could stop him from doing whatever the hell he wants at any moment in time.

    I don’t actually think that, for the record. Still, it is quite amazing.

    2
  10. joe Avatar
    joe

    The continuous use of the Stalinist/Russian propaganda definition of “fascism” never ceases to amaze me.

  11. Matt Bernius Avatar
    Matt Bernius

    @joe:
    What definition of fascism do you prefer?

    11
  12. de stijl Avatar
    de stijl

    DDOS attacks are really easy to document. Just share the logs – it would be be undeniably true. Not sharing makes me think incompetence.

    Failing to scale properly is a you problem.

    Is there anything Musk can’t fuck up?

    5
  13. Matt Bernius Avatar
    Matt Bernius

    BTW the DDOS claim was laughable. Everything else on Twitter worked fine (which would not be the case in a DDOS attack).

    The issue was that there wasn’t significant enough load testing and balancing, which is what happens when you guy your engineering staff.

    9
  14. DK Avatar
    DK

    @Matt Bernius: The MAGA lunatic definition. This is where you pretend it’s normal to support a childish thug who incited a terror attack on Congress — because he couldn’t accept that being an incompetent failure and unlikeable, exhausting drama queen caused him to lose by 7+ million votes.

    11
  15. Steven L. Taylor Avatar
    Steven L. Taylor

    @joe: So what is the “Stalinist/Russian” definition. And when you say Russian do you mean Stalin era a Soviet Union or are you making some more expansive claim?

    How do you define the term?

    5
  16. Steven L. Taylor Avatar
    Steven L. Taylor

    @MarkedMan: I have heard him slur his speech on occasion. I have never heard him consistently slur for even a few sentences let alone for two hours (although I will admit I did not listen to it all)

    3
  17. Gavin Avatar
    Gavin

    I’m glad to learn that both Elon and Donald think Chernobyl, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are fine places today and therefore nuclear war is not such a big deal really.
    In some possible-worlds thought experiment, this conversation could have been interesting. But most of it was just wildly boring.

    3
  18. Gustopher Avatar
    Gustopher

    @Matt Bernius:

    BTW the DDOS claim was laughable. Everything else on Twitter worked fine (which would not be the case in a DDOS attack).

    That would depend on the larger scale service architecture. Twitter Live Stream is almost certainly not running on the same hardware as the web servers or the tweet services, or the identity services. If the routing layer holds up (and it usually is more robust than what is behind it) a DDOS can hit just one feature. It just depends on what service fails under the load first.

    I would be curious as to whether other live streams were disrupted, or whether they spun up a bunch of boxen just for Trump.

    All that said, I expect their DDoS was just users and a poorly implemented retry on the website of client app. At least that’s what two of my jobs messed up when they essentially DDoSed themselves.

    5
  19. al Ameda Avatar
    al Ameda

    Trump on what he said to Vladimir Putin regarding Ukraine:

    “I said to Vladimir Putin, ‘Don’t do it. You can’t do it, Vladimir. If you do it, it’s going to be a bad day. You cannot do it.’

    And I told him what I’d do.

    And he said, ‘No way,’ and I said, ‘Way.’”

    I’ll take THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED for $800, Alex

    12
  20. de stijl Avatar
    de stijl

    @al Ameda:

    I said “no way, dude” but dude said “way”.

    Bill and Ted spoke English better.

    Wayne and Garth spake better.

    “Station!”

    5
  21. al Ameda Avatar
    al Ameda

    @de stijl:
    lol … like, totally …
    I’m a bit surprised that he didn’t riff on Jeff Spicoli, in Fast Times at Ridgmont High.
    Something like: “All I need are some tasty waves and some stolen classified documents … “

    5
  22. Eusebio Avatar
    Eusebio

    Perturbed by the delayed start that he attributed to technical difficulties, he attacked the host, became uncooperative, and then resorted to ridiculous hyperbole…

    DT: …and then you were half an hour late. Just so we understand, I have too much respect for you to be late. They couldn’t get their equipment working or something.
    Interviewer: Mr. President-
    DT: I think it’s a very nasty question.
    Interviewer: … I would love if you can answer the question on your rhetoric and why-
    DT: I have answered the question.
    Interviewer: … you believe that Black voters can trust you with another four years.
    DT: I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln. That’s my answer.

    Oh wait… that was last week.

    5
  23. de stijl Avatar
    de stijl

    @al Ameda:

    I now sort of want to watch Dude, Where’s My Car. I don’t care what critics say, it’s a damn fine movie.

    Dude.

    Sweet.

    Think about it.

    (I actually do love that stupid movie unironically.)

    4
  24. Tony W Avatar
    Tony W

    @David S.: I used to work in a few very seasonal type of IT environments. We’d get spikes in traffic when certain events happened, but normally there was a steady stream of traffic.

    When Azure and AWS came out they were a godsend to businesses like this because you could provision your own equipment to handle the steady load, then let the cloud deal with the spikes and overload and only pay the transactional charges for the spiked traffic.

    That Musk is too stupid or cheap to do even this – and is willing to let the reputation of his platform suffer because of it, gives us more insight into his business acumen.

    2
  25. ~Chris Avatar
    ~Chris

    Everything written after the headline of this post is superfluous.

    1

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