Former President Donald Trump defied the Republican National Committee by not participating in the first presidential debate on Aug. 23 and instead opted for a wide-ranging pre-recorded interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
In the interview, which was broadcast at the same time as the GOP debate, President Trump spoke of the challenges that he had faced as president and now faces as a candidate, as well as what his priorities would be if he were elected again.
President Trump, who ran as an outsider in 2016, proved in his interview with Mr. Carlson that he remains a Washington outsider, questioning the powers of the federal bureaucracy and vowing to challenge orthodoxies when it comes to things such as environmental regulations, foreign policy, the economy, and election integrity.
Mr. Carlson asked, twice, whether President Trump thinks that he might be the target of an assassination attempt, considering that nothing else has succeeded in defeating him.
Attempts to impeach President Trump failed twice during his 2017–2021 presidency. In recent months, his popularity among Republican voters has only escalated in the wake of four criminal indictments as he seeks to become his party’s nominee for a third time in the 2024 election.
“They can indict you 20 times, and you’re not going to lose the Republican primary,” Mr. Carlson said.
President Trump replied: “It makes it look even more ridiculous, the four indictments. Maybe there’ll be more; I don’t know. These people are crazy.”
The former president sidestepped the assassination question but said that the people who are out to get him are “savage animals.”
The prospect of an assassination attempt is particularly raw now, considering that in Ecuador, libertarian candidate Fernando Villavicencio was killed on Aug. 9, less than two weeks before the country’s general election. In addition, the son of a slain U.S. politician, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is seeking to unseat Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, considering the deep political divides over various issues, including whether the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump and wrongfully awarded to President Biden, Mr. Carlson asked whether the nation might be headed toward “open conflict,” or a second Civil War.
“We seem to be moving toward something,” Mr. Carlson said.
President Trump didn’t directly answer the question, but conceded: “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. That’s probably a bad combination.”
President Trump decided to skip the debate in Milwaukee, saying that he saw no benefit to participating. He’s the runaway front-runner with a huge lead over his nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The Carlson–Trump program tallied almost 75 million views within an hour after it was posted, drawing some 22,500 comments and 256,000 likes.
2020 Election
In the interview, President Trump reiterated his view that the 2020 election was stolen, and when asked by Mr. Carlson whether he believed it would be stolen again in 2024, the former president said there would be attempts to do so.President Trump—who’s expected to surrender himself on Aug. 24 to authorities in Georgia, where he’s facing charges related to his questioning of the 2020 election results—said that his lead in the polls has softened the blows of the charges that he’s facing in four separate criminal cases.
“It’s I think it’s a lot easier because I’m so high in the polls, because it means that people get to see it’s a fraud,” President Trump said. He also questioned why Democrat politicians who questioned the results of the election didn’t face charges as he has.
President Trump also took aim at his former attorney general, Bill Barr, saying that he only “pretended” to investigate election fraud because he was “so petrified, so frightened of being impeached.”
Mike Pence
President Trump also reiterated his viewpoint that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the right to send back the electoral votes to state legislatures in states where there was suspected voter fraud.The question of whether Mr. Pence had the right to do so is central in charges brought against President Trump in Georgia, where he’s facing 13 charges including the allegation that his efforts to question the election results amounted to a criminal conspiracy under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
President Trump said he believed that Mr. Pence had received “very bad advice,” and that there had been lawyers who had argued on both sides of the issue.
Jan. 6
The events of Jan. 6, 2021—beginning with the massive protest in Washington by tens of thousands of President Trump’s supporters who believed that the 2020 election was stolen—have been misreported and mischaracterized, the former president said.A small group of people caused problems at the Capitol, while the vast majority were there to protest “peacefully and patriotically,” he said.
“People that were in that crowd that day ... said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced,” President Trump said. “There was love and unity.
“I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love. And I’ve also never seen—simultaneously and from the same people—such hatred of what they’ve done to our country.”
In the interview, President Trump expressed his wish to represent both Democrats and Republicans, saying that “most of the people in our country are fantastic.”
If elected again, President Trump said that his No. 1 priority as president would be to remove the hundreds of thousands of “criminals that have been allowed into our country ... getting them out.”
