Trump says he will shut down US education department

After former US President Donald Trump said on Monday that illegal immigration "saved" his life, he remarked that he wants to shut down the federal department of education.

Trump spoke about the assassination attempt on him at an election rally in a highly anticipated interview with Elon Musk on the latter’s social media platform X, which was delayed because of a cyberattack.

In an audio interview heard by more than a million people on X, Trump and Musk discussed a wide range of issues from immigration to the economy, education, climate change, Russia and Ukraine, relationships with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China Xi Jinping in the context of the 2024 presidential election in which the X owner has endorsed the former President against his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The broadcast of the interview was delayed by a distributed denial of service, according to a post on X by Musk. But once it went on, the two had a freewheeling conversation that lasted about two hours.

They began by talking about the assassination attempt on Trump at an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania and Musk acknowledged that Trump won his support and endorsement when he called out “fight, fight” as he was being led out of the arena by Secret Service personnel.

Trump recalled that he had turned his head towards a chart on illegal immigration and that that might have saved his life, agreeing with Musk. “Illegal immigration saved my life. You're right."

“The incredible thing though, when you talk about the odds, you had to be exactly at that angle, but, the incredible thing is that the chart, I used it less than 20 per cent of the time. It was just a moment, yeah, it's always on my left, never my right, and it's always at the end of the speech. So we have it, it's on the right, not the left. It's at the beginning, not the end. And even the people that put it up, they were unprepared, and they did a great job. They got it up immediately, fortunately. But I looked to the right and the bullet came whizzing by, hitting my ear, so it was too busy. But when you think of the odds of that, and you know that normally, you wouldn't use it, normally, I wouldn't have the thing, and then, you know, would have been a very different story. It's, very much, I say, an act of God. It's a miracle that it happened, and I'm honoured by it.”

Trump has made undocumented immigration a centerpiece of his critique of the Biden-Harris administration saying that it threw open the southern border with Mexico. But he forced Republican lawmakers to kill a bipartisan legislation to end it because he did not want to be denied the chance to run on the issue.

The former President also vowed to shut down the federal department of education that was created in 1980, according to its website, to lay down policies on federal financial aid for education, and distributing as well as monitoring those funds; collecting data on America's schools and disseminating research; focusing national attention on key educational issues; and prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education.

Trump said: “We’re ranked at the bottom of every list of the top 40. We're ranked number 40, number 38 Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, different countries are ranked good. Actually, China is pretty close to the top. There are top six or seven, but we're ranked at the bottom, almost at the bottom, 38 3940 In other words, horrible. And yet we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world. And what I'm going to do is one of the first acts, and this is where I need an Elon Musk. I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage in sports. I want to close up the Department of Education.”

The highly anticipated interview of former US President Donald Trump by Elon Musk on X was way behind schedule because of technical issues.

“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X,” Musk posted on X 18 minutes after the scheduled start time of 8 p.m. US Eastern “Working on shutting it down.”

“Worst case,” he added, “We will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyberattack in which an attacker overwhelms a website, server, or network resource with malicious traffic, according to one explanation.

Six minutes later, Musk posted again: “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.” Three minutes later, he wrote on X: “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter.”

The former President was permanently suspended from X in January 2021, when the social media platform was known as Twitter. The ban was lifted by Musk after he bought the platform. Trump returned in August 2023 and has posted just one message since. He remains active, however, on Truth Social, the look-alike social media platform that he launched after being banned from X/Twitter.

Trump returned to X with a flurry of posts and picked up over 300,000 new followers taking up his total to 88.3 million followers, which is 80.8 million more than the 7.5 million he has on Truth Social.

X gives Trump a much bigger platform, which, according to Musk, has 600 million monthly active users (other estimates put it at 540 million). Truth Social is much smaller — it had only 5 million monthly active users according to papers it filed during its IPO in March 2024 as reported by Axios.

The vast difference in the reach of X and Truth Social won’t be lost on Trump, who pays a lot of attention to the size of crowd for his election rallies and events.

Musk is a supporter of Trump and is likely to be a friendly interviewer, but the former President is known to be both a showman and unpredictable and the interview will be closely followed by allies and the Harris campaign.

The Trump campaign needs a bump. Trump had the upper hand in the 2024 presidential election till President Joe Biden was in the fray. The race has changed since Biden dropped out and endorsed his deputy, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris has changed the race. She has energised the Democratic party, raised more funds and has taken the lead in polls, even in key battleground states.