Politics

It’s been one month since former president Donald Trump was shot during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

At first, it seemed to those close to them as if QAnon adherents might finally be shaken from their long-held conspiratorial belief systems. In their universe, Trump was waging a secret war against the deep state, and no matter what happened in the real world—like Trump losing the 2020 election, or being found guilty in court—it was always explained away as being part of the plan. Trump was always in control. But the assassination attempt had people wondering.

Former president Donald Trump is back on X, and Elon Musk appears to be ecstatic.

In the hours after Musk and Trump’s meandering, disinformation-filled chat on X Spaces—which was, Musk claimed without evidence, delayed because of a cyberattack—the X owner stayed online well into early Tuesday morning, sharing dozens of fawning posts from supporters about the event. In a post that is now pinned at the top of his timeline, Musk claimed the conversation had generated almost 1 billion views, even though on the X Space itself, only 1.3 million people were listening at the peak. Additionally, X had only 251 million global daily active users in the second quarter of 2024, many of whom were fast asleep while the conversation took place.

On the same day that former president Donald Trump said vice president Kamala Harris “happened to turn Black,” Harris was at a Black sorority conference in Texas.

“As a proud member of the Divine 9, when I look out at everyone here, I see family,” said Harris, speaking on July 31 at Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority’s 60th Biennial Boule in Houston, Texas. Sound bites from Harris’ speech and high-pitched “EE-yips,” the call associated with Sigma Gamma Rho, echoed through countless videos that circulated on Instagram.

In a rambling, two-hour-plus conversation in an X Space, Elon Musk caved to former president Donald Trump on policy issues that directly affect the billionaire’s businesses, like energy policy and climate change.

Trump dominated the conversation, appearing to speak with a pronounced lisp and at times leaving little room for Musk to speak. After starting the call discussing the July assassination attempt against Trump, Musk and Trump bemoaned millions of criminals from all over the world flooding into the US, which is not happening. The former president voiced views and support for policies at odds with Musk’s business interests, like increasing US oil drilling and universal electric vehicle adoption.

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The election denial movement lives on, thanks in part to the efforts of well-funded and well-organized far-right activists. Today on the show, CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan joins WIRED Politics Lab to talk about his forthcoming documentary examining election deniers’ new tactics, and what happens after the November vote.

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Over the past few weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump have both made some huge plays to attract specific groups of men: young ones, in Trump’s case, and white ones, in Harris’.

Harris’ supporters have been hosting huge Zoom calls organizing “white dudes,” while Trump’s made appearances on a wide assortment of fratty podcasts and livestreams. The campaigns’ strategies with these voters are completely different, and they’re each creating their own vision for what masculinity could look like in their parties.

As asylum centers are boarding up ahead of another predicted day of violent protests across the UK on Wednesday, X owner Elon Musk has stoked tensions by labeling UK prime minister Keir Starmer “#TwoTierKier” and spreading a far-right conspiracy theory that claims white rioters are being dealt with more severely than minorities by police.

For days now, Musk has sought to use his huge influence to suggest that diversity was causing the riots: “If incompatible cultures are brought together without assimilation, conflict is inevitable,” Musk wrote. Responding to a video of riots in Liverpool on Monday, Musk warned: “Civil war is inevitable.”

Ahead of the US elections, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has used the platform as his own personal political bullhorn.

On July 26, Musk posted a video of vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in which a deepfake of her voice appears to make her say that she is the “ultimate DEI hire” and a “deep-state puppet.” The post now bears a community note indicating that it is a parody. But many alleged that, shared without appropriate context, the video could have violated X’s policies on synthetic, or AI-altered, media.

After President Joe Biden stepped down and Harris announced her candidacy, excitement quickly swelled around the new campaign. The KamalaHQ account on TikTok quintupled in followers within the first week, the campaign tells WIRED, and the new Harris-focused content received 232 million views and more than 33 million likes. This far surpassed Trump’s total like count: As of publication, Trump’s account has nearly 30 million total likes, compared to Harris’ 60 million.

Databases containing sensitive voter information from multiple counties in Illinois were openly accessible on the internet, revealing 4.6 million records that included driver’s license numbers as well as full and partial Social Security Numbers and documents like death certificates. Longtime security researcher Jeremiah Fowler stumbled upon one of the databases that appeared to contain information from DeKalb County, Illinois, and subsequently discovered another 12 exposed databases. None were password protected nor required any type of authentication to access.