I came in with a handful of blue cards and still couldn’t understand half the questions, but Donald Trump made a lot of news in his Mar-a-Lago interview.
What is clear is how he chooses to answer or deflect the most sensitive questions, and how various media outlets choose to frame them. .
Some newspapers, including The New York Times, ABC, and The Hill, reported it straight. Other maneuvers, many of them left-leaning, were cherry-picking quotes to make Trump look as bad as possible while ignoring plausible-sounding statements from Trump.
A classic example was when he asked the former president about the killing of Alexei Navalny in a prisoner of war camp in Siberia. I thought he might lay low because of his friendly relationship with Vladimir Putin.
But I told him directly: Is the Russian dictator responsible for the death of the opposition leader?
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Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump takes to the stage to announce his new signature shoe line at Sneaker Con at the Philadelphia Convention Center on February 17 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. . (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“Probably,” Trump said. “I mean, I would say maybe, just maybe. I don’t know. He’s a young man, so statistically he’s going to live longer…Certainly, it looks like something very bad has happened. .”
Note that Trump never even mentioned Putin in the same paragraph as Navalny, now saying he is “probably” responsible. Of course, Mr. Trump can’t prove that, and neither can I.
Here are some of the headings:
“President Trump couldn’t bring himself to blame Putin for the death of Alexei Navalny.”
“President Trump has given a mind-bogglingly awkward answer to a new question about President Putin.”
Trump: ‘I don’t know’ whether Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.
I understand.
This is where President Trump’s rhetoric comes into play. I asked him why he uses words like “vermin” and “blood poison” to describe illegal immigrants. Especially since the press states that such words were used by Hitler and Mussolini.
President Trump said he didn’t know that, then repeated that “our country is being poisoned,” prompting a flurry of headlines that doubled down on those harmful words.
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You could say that, and I don’t mean to ignore him, but the more important part of his answer came next.
I asked the 45th president whether he uses “excessive” and “inflammatory” language to promote media discussion. This means that by focusing on the president’s words, news organizations will spend days debating the president’s rights and wrongs, focusing on his turf and his preferences. I went too far. And President Trump did not deny it, saying he would not limit it to “politically correct” language.
“It also makes people think about very important issues,” he says. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric, unless you use certain words that are probably not very good words, nothing happens.” The theory was correct.
Then he started talking about immigrants coming from mental hospitals and how crime is doubling. Neither has been proven to be true on a large scale.
Migrants line up at a remote U.S. Border Patrol processing center after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in Lukeville, Arizona, Dec. 7, 2023. (John Moore/Getty Images)
The same goes for NATO, where President Trump caused a global uproar by saying he would encourage the Russians to “do whatever they want” to NATO countries that don’t pay their fair share of defense costs.
I said that sounds like someone taking a pro-Putin position.
Trump “looks like someone who is trying to make people pay,” he said. In other words, it was a negotiation tactic.
Half an hour before airtime, the media was awash with headlines about President Trump saying there would be “bloodshed” if he lost the election. So I watched that part of his speech the night before at a rally in Ohio.
President Trump has used heavy language to hint at the possibility of political violence. This wasn’t one of them.
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President Trump was talking about Chinese cars and their impact on the world. American automobile industry. And he said if he wasn’t elected, there would be a disaster in terms of the impact on jobs. He then quickly returned to talking about electric vehicles and competition in the industry.
Some experts now say the mere use of the word bloodshed is like a bat signal telling supporters to prepare for violence. After all, he was so Machiavellian that he added, “It’s going to be the bare minimum.” But, like I said, too many news outlets got hooked on this bloodbath story and took it out of context.
President Trump also said at the rally that some immigrants are “animals” and “not human beings.” In my opinion, this is unacceptable language, but remember what he said about inflammatory language that fuels debate in the media. I wanted to decipher his approach for the audience.
President Trump also made news about abortion. I asked him about the Times article about him discussing a national ban after 16 weeks of pregnancy with his advisers, unaware that his campaign had dismissed it as fake news. I thought he would reject it.
Migrants who crossed the Rio Grande River into the United States from Mexico line up for processing at U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Eagle Pass, Texas, on September 23, 2023. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
no. He essentially acknowledged the 16-week report, which had previously been attributed to an anonymous source, and said he would make a decision “soon,” but said it was clearly within that range. Ta. Despite my skepticism, he said he wanted to “make both parties happy.”
As Republicans tackle abortion in a post-Roe world, Trump said, “We have to do it in our hearts. But beyond that, we have to get elected.” He said his opposition to three exceptions – rape, incest and maternal life – led to Pennsylvania Republican Doug Mastriano’s landslide loss in the gubernatorial race.
Trump then slammed Democrats and late-term abortion. As I said in one of my several fact checks, abortions are extremely rare.
He has also made news on subjects ranging from Israel to TikTok.
I first met Donald Trump in New York in 1987, when he was promoting his first book, The Art of the Deal.
And then, without saying anything, he said to me:
“When you go to New Hampshire — and by the way, I’m not running for president — you get the best audiences, and the reception is the best all around. When politicians show up, you get a reasonable audience. I will attend.”
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To be honest, at the time, I never imagined that Trump, who was still mostly a local real estate agent, would be in the White House, but now he will be the top Republican candidate for the third time in a row.
