Donald Trump Was All Over the Place While Tucker Carlson Did Not Challenge Him: Donald Trump has given his first interview since being arraigned – to Tucker Carlson in an hour-long sit-down on Fox News.
The liberal press was dismissive of the interview, which would have happened no matter what was discussed or what Donald Trump had said. But to be fair, the interview was a little…off.
“You’ll note that we’re using the term “interview” loosely,” Phillip Bump wrote about the Trump-Carlson exchange. “Typically one might expect a television host conducting an interview with a former president to press on critical issues, challenge obvious, established falsehoods and elicit some new thoughts or comments from the interview subject. But that’s not the tack Carlson took. While Carlson was once unusually willing to challenge Trump (for a Fox News host, anyway), in his most recent conversation, Trump was simply allowed to prattle on at will.”
And prattle Donald Trump did. Here are a few of the gems.
Memorable Moments from Trump’s Interview
In describing the scene during last week’s arraignment, Donald Trump said the courthouse was full of tears. “I’ll tell you; people were crying. People that work there….It’s a tough, tough place and they were crying. They were actually crying. They said, ‘I’m sorry…2024, sir, 2024.’…So in one sense, it was beautiful.”
Donald Trump had high praise for Chinese leader Xi Jinping. When Carlson asked Trump how smart he thinks Xi is, Trump answered: “top of the line.”
“President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find it. There’s nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing,” Trump said. The best part, however, was in reference to Xi’s interpreter. Trump warned that what he was about to say was “very impolite and very politically incorrect” but that Xi had “a beautiful female interpreter, she was very beautiful. She was very professional. She spoke every word for him.”
Carlson also asked the question on everyone’s mind: would Trump drop out of the 2024 race because of legal troubles? “No, I’d never drop out,” Donald Trump answered. “It’s not my thing. I wouldn’t do it.” And he wouldn’t have to either.
“It’s pretty widely accepted that the list of qualifications [to run for president] in the Constitution is exclusive – that is, Congress or states can’t add qualifications to those listed in the Constitution,” law professor Derek Muller told CBS. “It’s something that really doesn’t affect your ability to run as a candidate, to appear on the ballot, or even to win the election.”
Trump talked about a lot of things. Like the various “hoax” investigations he’s been subject to, the Afghanistan cease-fire, the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid.
The Donald Trump – Carlson Context
Carlson conducted the interview with a light-touch, saying of Trump that “for a man who is caricatured as an extremist, we think you’ll find what he has to say moderate, sensible, and wise.”
Of course, as we now know thanks to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, Carlson has used different terms to describe Trump when speaking off-air.
“Carlson actually “hate[s]” Trump. And he hates him “passionately.” He believes Trump is a “destroyer.” A “demonic force.” A president who was a “disaster.” A politician whose behavior after losing the 2020 election was “disgusting,” CNN reported, in reference to the texts Carlson sent after the 2020 election.
None of that came out in the interview, however – which may suggest Fox News is coming back around on Trump, who had previously been iced out in favor of Ron DeSantis.
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Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
