Amid talking about Arnold Palmer’s junk and frying fries at McDonald’s this past weekend, Donald Trump took time to sit down for an interview with Fox News’ media reporter Howard Kurtz at Trump Tower.
I got the transcript. And went through it line by line.
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To the lines!
“She gave a horrible, incompetent answer on a news program. It's not an entertainment program. They call it news. They say it's the number one news program. And so she gives an answer that was -- shows that she's dumb or incompetent or something wrong with her.”
He’s talking about the Kamala Harris interview on “60 Minutes.” And away we go!
“It's so bad that the people at CBS say, we're not going to do a little editing like the word the, make it there, something. You understand? They take the whole ridiculous answer out, and it was a long answer, and replace it with a much shorter answer that she did having to do with a totally different subject, which also didn't make sense, but it wasn't as incompetent”
The issue here is that “60 Minutes” gave “Face the Nation” — another CBS show — a longer clip of a Harris answer and then, in its own version of the interview, played a shorter clip of the same answer. Trump and his GOP allies have insisted CBS edited the original video to make Harris look better. Which seems very unlikely to me. That said, “60 Minutes” is refusing to release the transcript of the interview. Which is dumb.
“They took the answer out in its entirety, and they put a completely different answer in that looks -- that makes her look like she's normal, OK, which is about the best you're going to do.”
Again, that is not what happened, according to CBS. They said they simply cut Harris’ longer answer to make it shorter to fit into the 21-minute window they had to run the Harris interview on “60 Minutes.”
“Now, what we're doing is we're going to subpoena their records, because we want to see how much else did she do? And I can tell you, I have done ‘60 Minutes’ many times, and they do with me different”
Trump agreed to and then backed out of a “60 Minutes” interview in this campaign. Also: “They do with me different.”
“But I will have a paragraph that is a great paragraph, and they will make it less good by just taking things out.”
Ah yes, a great paragraph. The best. Big guys, with tears in their eyes, came up to Trump and said “Sir, that paragraph changed our lives.”
“That, you can sort of say they want to make the program shorter. They always say, well, we want the shorter now.”
“We want the shorter now.”
“And ‘60 Minutes" -- no, I think ‘60 Minutes',’ I think it should be taken off the air, frankly.”
If this doesn’t scare you, you aren’t paying attention.
“They should investigate her. Look, on ‘60 Minutes,’ they say it was her campaign that forced them to do that. So, certainly, that should be investigated.”
If the “they” here is CBS, they absolutely have not said the Harris campaign told them to edit her answer. He’s just making stuff up.
“I mean, if you take a look at the polls now, I mean, I can't tell you exactly, but it looks like I'm winning, and winning pretty easily.”
It looks like nothing of the sort. The race is effectively tied.
“They took away the presidency of the United States. I don't even like using the word coup, because a lot of people don't exactly understand what a coup is.”
I understand what a coup is. And what happened with Joe Biden was not a coup.
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