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The Trump Campaign’s ‘Please Shut Up’ Phase

The former president’s interview with Elon Musk was a reminder that overfamiliarity with a candidate can breed contempt.

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Logo Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.
By David Frum's

he X Spaces interview delivered Donald Trump without makeup or dress-up, talking unselfconsciously: manic, boastful, untruthful, aggrieved, abusive, obsessive, random, ignorant, tedious, bitchy—and ultimately, formless and endless. You might think a major-party presidential nominee would have other claims on his time, some sort of deadline, if only to get some sleep to ready himself for the next day’s campaigning. But no. At no point in the explosion of talk could one guess whether it would continue for another five minutes or another five hours.

he X Spaces interview delivered Donald Trump without makeup or dress-up, talking unselfconsciously: manic, boastful, untruthful, aggrieved, abusive, obsessive, random, ignorant, tedious, bitchy—and ultimately, formless and endless. You might think a major-party presidential nominee would have other claims on his time, some sort of deadline, if only to get some sleep to ready himself for the next day’s campaigning. But no. At no point in the explosion of talk could one guess whether it would continue for another five minutes or another five hours.

he X Spaces interview delivered Donald Trump without makeup or dress-up, talking unselfconsciously: manic, boastful, untruthful, aggrieved, abusive, obsessive, random, ignorant, tedious, bitchy—and ultimately, formless and endless. You might think a major-party presidential nominee would have other claims on his time, some sort of deadline, if only to get some sleep to ready himself for the next day’s campaigning. But no. At no point in the explosion of talk could one guess whether it would continue for another five minutes or another five hours.

he X Spaces interview delivered Donald Trump without makeup or dress-up, talking unselfconsciously: manic, boastful, untruthful, aggrieved, abusive, obsessive, random, ignorant, tedious, bitchy—and ultimately, formless and endless. You might think a major-party presidential nominee would have other claims on his time, some sort of deadline, if only to get some sleep to ready himself for the next day’s campaigning. But no. At no point in the explosion of talk could one guess whether it would continue for another five minutes or another five hours.