By Reuters

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Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump expressed anger that Vice President Kamala Harris had been swapped in for Biden on the Democratic ticket during his Monday (August 12) interview with Elon Musk.

 
"She hasn't done an interview since this whole scam started," Trump said, claiming falsely that Biden dropping off the ticket was a "coup." Trump had been leading Biden in many polls of battleground states likely to be critical to the outcome of the Nov. 5 election but is now trailing Harris in some of the same states.

Trump insulted Harris several times, referring to her as "third rate," "incompetent" and "a radical left lunatic."   

 
Trump had a friendly two-hour interview with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Musk's social media platform X, after technical problems delayed the start of the event for more than 40 minutes.

Musk, who has endorsed Trump, blamed the difficulties on a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which a server or network is flooded with traffic in an attempt to shut it down, though his claim could not be verified.
Trump sought to turn the problems into a positive, congratulating Musk on the number of people trying to tune in.

A counter on X showed as many as 1.3 million people were listening at times during the lengthy conversation.