Trump Issues New Unhinged Demand on Harris’s 60 Minutes Interview
After refusing to even do an interview with 60 Minutes, Donald Trump’s campaign is demanding that the CBS show release a full transcript of its interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Trump campaign has taken issue with a truncated package that aired on Face the Nation Sunday ahead of the full interview, which showed Harris answering a question one way. But according to Fox News, when the full interview aired the next day, her answer was entirely different.
When host Bill Whitaker asked Harris about the U.S.’s relationship with international war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Face the Nation clip showed that Harris responded, “Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
The 60 Minutes interview showed Harris responding quite differently. “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” Harris said simply.
The Trump campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, released a statement Tuesday accusing 60 Minutes of “deceptively” editing Harris’s full interview.
“Why did 60 Minutes choose not to air Kamala’s full word salad, and what else did they choose not to air? The American people deserve the full, unedited transcript from Kamala’s sit-down interview. We call upon 60 Minutes and CBS to release it. What do they, and Kamala, have to hide?” Leavitt said.
It’s worth noting that Trump didn’t even attempt to do the interview, and gave some exceedingly flimsy reasons as to why. 60 Minutes brutally roasted Trump over his baseless excuses for breaking more than 50 years of tradition by not appearing for an interview. It seems that the former president couldn’t handle being fact-checked, nor did he want to face any “tough questions” like the ones that caused him to storm off set in 2020.
Still, his campaign seems more than willing to nitpick Harris’s performance: Trump went ballistic Wednesday in a post on Truth Social, claiming 60 Minutes had “sliced and diced” Harris’s interview and baselessly insisting she had been hyper-edited into coherency.
“Lyin’ Kamala’s answers to questions, which were virtually incoherent, over and over again, some by as many as four times in a single sentence or thought, all in an effort, possibly illegal as part of the ‘News Division,’ which must be licensed, to make her look ‘more Presidential,’ or a least, better,” Trump wrote.
Trump also claimed that the interview violated campaign finance laws and that he had never heard of an interview being edited. However, Trump appeared in an interview that appeared heavily edited on Fox & Friends just three months ago.
“This is a stain on the reputation of 60 Minutes that is not recoverable—It will always remain with this once storied brand. I have never heard of such a thing being done in ‘News,’” he wrote.