By Reena Bhardwaj
Washington, DC [US], August 13 : US Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump said that he hopes to get on well with Russian President Vladimir Putin again if he wins the upcoming presidential elections, reported local media TASS.
Trump returned to the social media platform X by sitting down for a chat on Spaces with platform owner Elon Musk and emphasised that he gets along with Putin very well.
"I got along with Putin very well, and he respected me," Trump said, adding that he hoped that they would get on well again.
The politician also claimed that conflicts in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip would not have occurred if he were still president, as reported by TASS.
After having a choppy start, the discussion got underway about 40 minutes late after what Musk claimed was a "massive" cyberattack on the platform, previously known as Twitter. Musk said a distributed denial of services (DDoS) attack "saturated all of our data lines".
After almost a two-hour-long discussion, the two men also talked about the recent assassination attempt on Trump, his views on immigration and the economy, and the future of energy production. At its peak, Monday's Spaces had more than 1.3 million listeners.
The former president attacked Vice President Kamala Harris as a "San Francisco liberal" who had changed her tune on issues like fracking and defunding the police. He argued Harris would revert to more liberal stances if she is elected in November.
Eating to the high-profile interview, Kamala Harris' campaign described Trump and Musk as "self-obsessed rich guys" in a statement.
"Trump's entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024," Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello said.
The former US President also accused the Biden administration of wasting their four years in office and not doing anything for the people.
The lengthy conversation, which Musk said was aimed at "open-minded independent voters", near the end of the conversation, doubled down on his endorsement of Trump and called on moderate voters to back the Republican's campaign.
The former president Trump was a prolific poster on the platform when it was known as Twitter until his account was suspended shortly after the January 6 riots at the Capitol, when officials said his posts posed "the risk of further incitement of violence."
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