Greg Gutfeld inadvertently damned Elon Musk and Donald Trump with faint praise on Tuesday when he attempted to defend their glitchy, widely-regarded-as-boring conversation on X the night before.
“Successful people fail every day,” the Fox News personality said. “The only people who don’t understand that are actual failures. People who aren’t successful don’t understand how failure is necessary to succeed.”
To illustrate his point, Gutfeld compared the Musk-Trump X conversation to Vice President Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign in an attempt to imply she has no real successes of her own.
“She failed horribly and still got a VP slot. Then in 2024, they want her off the ticket and she ended up on the ticket,” he said. “So that doesn’t happen in the private sector. You own your failures. In the public sector, they just boost you on up.”
Co-host Jeanine Pirro agreed. “I mean, these are guys who’ve reached the pinnacle in the business world, and they’re, just two of them, having a free-flowing conversation,” she said, “that Kamala is trying to convince us, or the Democrats are trying to convince us, is really a threat to democracy.”
“It’s a threat to democracy because they can’t control the narrative,” Pirro insisted. “And the amazing part of it is that Musk said, ‘Look if Kamala Harris wants to come on X and have this conversation, I’d be happy to have her on as well.’”
Pirro also praised Musk and Trump for offering “substantive things” for listeners on X. “I really admire the two of them for what they were willing to say and what they were unafraid of,” she explained. “And people are on Donald Trump all the time about the leaders of North Korea and Russia and China. He just talks about them being at the top of their game. He isn’t praising them. He’s speaking about reality. And when Biden is there, Putin invades Ukraine. Iran launches, you know, Hamas goes against Israel. And he really is just recognizing the reality of the world.”
Putin’s tenure at “the top of” his game has included changes to the Russian constitution that will allow him to run for two more terms beginning this year, the poisoning and subsequent death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the signing of a bill that granted lifetime immunity to former presidents of the country, as well as the invasion of Ukraine and allegations of war crimes lodged by the International Criminal Court.
Meanwhile, Gutfeld is omitting decades of history in order to inaccurately characterize Harris as some kind of failure. She entered politics in 2003 when she successfully ousted the incumbent San Francisco District Attorney. Harris was reelected in 2007 and ran for Attorney General of California in 2010, winning first a tough Democratic primary race and then a tougher general election against a Republican opponent. She was reelected in 2014 and then elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.
It is true that Harris’ 2019 Democratic primary campaign did, in fact fail, but she would hardly be the first primary also-ran to end up becoming Vice President and then a presidential candidate in their own right. Other recent examples include George H.W. Bush (1980 GOP primary) and Joe Biden himself (2008 Democratic primary).
And to Gutfeld’s point, Biden was effectively pushed out of the 2016 primary by Democratic Party elites in order to clear the way for Hillary Clinton. She lost; he won in 2020.
You can watch the conversation from The Five in the video above.
