Donald Trump’s Interview With Elon Musk Sparks Controversy Over Speech Clarity

Multiple people on social media believe they heard Donald Trump speaking with a lisp during his interview with Elon Musk. The former president spoke to the CEO of X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, in a livestream which has now seen tens of millions of views. At certain points during the interview, a number of social media users said Trump's words sounded a bit odd, with some questioning whether it was due to technical issues, a lisp, or if the former president was slurring.

At the start of what Musk stressed was a "conversation" and not an "adversarial interview," Trump said: "Congratulations because I see you broke every record on the book with so many millions of people and it's an honor, we view that as an honor." And you do want silencing of certain voices, usually those are voices that have something to say that are constructive and so, we have to consider it an honor.

In multiple recordings on X, including the ones uploaded by Musk and Trump, Trump appears to sound different while saying the words "millions" and "silencing." The same thing seems to happen at several other points of the interview. The BBC, which was live-blogging the chat at the time, recorded more than 20,000 posts with the term "slurring." Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung told the British network: "Must be your hearing."

Newsweek has contacted the Trump campaign for further comment. The Harris campaign’s profile, Harris HQ, also posted about it, quoting a section of the conversation about climate change. It wrote: "Trump, slurring, says he's okay with climate change and rising sea levels because he thinks he'll 'have more oceanfront property.'

Several podcasters and streamers attributed the sound to the strange audio effect from compression, a process where data that is deemed unnecessary is often removed to reduce the size of the audio file. Sometimes, this process ends up removing or altering important parts of the audio, resulting in distortions.

Twitch streamer and political commentator HasanAbi posted: "It's probably due to audio compression issues but Trump sounds like he has a lisp." Digital and TV streaming reporter Spencer Allan Brooks said: "The Trump audio is no good. Sounds like he has a lisp. Bad mic? Terrible audio compression?"

Multiple people cited a separate video clip of Trump speaking on the phone to Musk, where the word "millions" sounds normal, suggesting the supposed lisp can only be heard on uploaded audio files, which many said shows it was a compression issue. It came after the conversation was delayed more than 40 minutes behind its scheduled start time of 8:00 p.m. ET, because of technical problems, which Musk attributed to a DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attack.

This is an attack that typically sends vast amounts of traffic to a platform's servers in the hope of temporarily knocking it offline. When Musk finally began speaking in the Space at 8:42 p.m., he said the "massive attack illustrates" that "there's a lot of opposition to just hearing what President Trump has to say." This is what Trump was referring to in the snipped clip, when he said: "And you do want silencing of certain voices, usually those are voices that have something to say that are constructive and so, we have to consider it an honor."