President Donald Trump defended top ally Elon Musk’s efforts to return two stranded NASA astronauts during a Tuesday evening interview with Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle.
The astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, have been stranded on the International Space Station since June 2024 but returned to Earth on Tuesday.
“When I came into office, I said Elon, we got to get them out. You have a rocket ship, handy?” Trump said after questioning from Laura Ingraham, the host of the show. “How many people have a rocket and Biden left him up? He abandoned them.”
Musk, as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has faced growing criticisms from Democrats, vandalism against his Tesla stores, and wealth losses related to his efforts to slash the federal workforce and government spending.
Trump alluded to Musk’s unpopularity while defending his work to bring back the astronauts.
“They were supposed to be there for a few days. They were there for many months, and now they’re coming back,” Trump said. “But think of it. Elon is able to do that with his genius, and you have people that hate it. And I really believe these are people that hate our country. It’s a big problem.”
“Elon is a patriot,” Trump also said of the tech billionaire.
Trump also agreed with Ingraham’s questioning that the recent spats of vandalism against Musk’s Tesla facilities are acts of domestic terrorism.
“I think so,” he said. “I think that if and when they catch the people, and I hope they do, the good thing is they have a lot of cameras in those places, and they’ve caught some already having to do with that. I think that you will find out that they’re paid by people that are very highly political on the Left.”
In an earlier interview with the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, Trump touted an energy and infrastructure agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin that will lead to an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine.
Trump later told Ingraham he had a “great” call with Putin but they didn’t discuss the U.S. continuing aid for the beleaguered Ukraine.
“We didn’t talk about aid. Actually, we didn’t talk about aid at all. We talked about a lot of things, but aid was never discussed,” he said.
Trump again pushed back on claims that he was too favorable to Russia, saying, “There’s nobody been tougher on Russia than me.”
