Lara Trump blames glitches during Musk interview on ‘deep state’

RNC co-chair claims there’s a ‘massive effort’ to keep former president ‘out of the White House’

Without offering a shred of evidence, Lara Trump has blamed the tech glitches during Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk on X on the “deep state.”

The daughter-in-law of the former president made the comments during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program on Monday night, and she went on to claim that Trump’s adversaries have been given a “free pass” while President Biden is in the White House.

Trump’s interview with Musk on Monday began 40 minutes late and suffered from glitches, in a situation that was reminscient of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign announcement on the platform last year.

“I think it’s pretty obvious at this point, there are a lot of people out there and there’s a massive effort, of course, to keep Donald Trump out of the White House,” Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump and the Republican National Committee co-chair, claimed on Monday. “These people are terrified. This is the deep state. This is the swamp in Washington, DC.”

Musk and Trump were supposed to begin speaking live on X at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, but after users reported not being able to tune in, the broadcast didn’t begin until 8:40 p.m.

Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump speaks on stage on the second day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 16 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Getty Images)

In May last year, DeSantis launched his campaign on X in an announcement beset by glitches, as the app crashed multiple times for users. During the first 30 minutes, all that the listeners could hear was garbled speech and feedback as the connection dropped on several occasions. The audience dropped from 600,000 to 40,000 listeners before going back up to 100,000.

At the time, Musk blamed the problems on the site’s servers. On Monday, Musk blamed the issues on what he said appeared to be “a massive DDoS attack” on the platform.

Lara Trump said on Monday, “These are the people who are our adversaries in many cases, they know that the jig is up, the game is over when Donald J. Trump returns to the White House and they are petrified of it.”

She added: “They’ve had a free pass for three and a half years that the people who want to do nefarious activities to us here in America, to our allies around the world, they’ve gotten a free pass and a free ride and they would like another four years of that with Kamala Harris at the helm.”

But Jake Moore, a global cyber security adviser at the cyber security company ESET, told The Independent that Musk’s explanation wasn’t trustworthy. He said it’s more likely that the servers couldn’t handle the number of people trying to listen in.

“I don’t think it was a DDoS in its true form. It’s usually committed by malicious threat actors — so cyber attackers. It’s not officially a cyber attack, it doesn’t actually steal any data, but it does knock a website offline. It’s very orchestrated by a group or individual,” he said.

“I think Musk may have been a bit too quick to react, a bit too theatrical in his terminology to create a storm on the platform.”

Moore added that the strongest indication of a DDoS attack is when an entire platform goes down, but users were still able to access X on Monday night. Many were simply unable to get onto the Spaces feed with Musk and Trump.

“We would’ve seen X dropped off entirely as a platform,” Moore told The Independent.

“We have seen this before. Usually on Meta with WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, sometimes all three go at the same time. To find a subset of X knocked offline for 40 minutes and nowhere else, that is why it’s unlikely and, quite frankly, unbelievable.”