TRUMP
THREATENS TO HUMILIATE HIMSELF, RELEASE TRAIN WRECK INTERVIEW WITH LESLEY STAHL
EARLY
The president also apparently “brainstormed
ideas” Tuesday afternoon about how to go after the 60 Minutes reporter.
BY BESS
LEVIN
OCTOBER
21, 2020
As you’ve probably heard by now, on Tuesday, Donald
Trump abruptly walked out of an interview with 60 Minutes’ Lesley
Stahl and then failed to return for a previously scheduled appearance
he was supposed to tape for the show with Mike Pence. Later
he tweeted a surreptitiously
recorded video of Stahl not wearing a mask and shamed her for not adhering to
the protocols he’s ignored for the past seven months, seemingly trying to
damage the credibility of the widely respected journalist before their sit-down
aired.
Obviously, none of this is normal; according
to the Washington Post, the president was unhappy with Stahl’s tough
line of questioning regarding his disastrous handling of the coronavirus
pandemic, his feud with Dr. Anthony Fauci, and his attacks on
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, in addition to the fact
that she pointed out how his absurd claims about Hunter Biden, as
well as the Obama administration spying on his campaign, are bullshit. And
while the interview isn’t set to air on 60 Minutes until
Sunday, the president has apparently decided he might just preempt the network
and humiliate himself, releasing the train wreck early:
It’s not clear what “electoral intrusion” is,
but it would seem Trump believes that asking legitimate questions of someone
campaigning for another four years in office constitutes some kind of crime,
and it probably won’t be long before he demands that Attorney General Bill
Barr indict Stahl. Per the Post:
When
Trump first walked in, Stahl looked at him and said, “Are you ready for a tough
interview?” The president believes 60 Minutes will cut the interview
in an unflattering way and has been talking all afternoon about how to preempt
the footage, said the person familiar with the circumstances. After
45 minutes, Trump looked at staff members and said, “I think we’re done,
do you guys agree?” Stahl believed the walk with Pence was still going forward,
but Trump left the room and later complained to aides that [Joe] Biden would
have an easier interview and that 60 Minutes would “cut it up to make
him look bad,” according to an aide.
While three aides told the Post that the
president overreacted and someone with knowledge of the interview said it
contains no bombshell revelations, Trump reportedly “complained about it all
day.” And because he’s a sociopath, he “told aides he wanted to go after Stahl
and brainstormed ideas after the session with a group of aides in the Oval
Office,” as though he literally had nothing else to do with his time other than
plot his revenge on a journalist. As for why the White House has its own
recording of the interview, CBS was told it was for “archival purposes only,” and
not that it would be used by a vindictive president who’s worried that people
might find out he’s crazy and incompetent right before the election.
Anyway, here’s Trump’s chief of staff, Mark
Meadows, whining to Maria Bartiromo this morning
about how Stahl apparently didn’t open the interview by asking Trump, “When did
you realize you were the best president in U.S. history?”
Update: The
president is now trying to claim he schooled Stahl, or something, by tweeting a
photo of her looking at a bunch of blank papers he says show all the work he’d
done on healthcare:
For those of you keeping up at home, this is
at least the third time Trump has tweeted photographic “evidence” of something
that’s just been a bunch of blank paper, the other times being when he signed “documents” with nothing on them
from Walter Reed and when he held a press conference shortly before being
inaugurated and claimed a pile of folders
filled blank sheets of paper contained his “business plan.” In 2016, he made a
big show of signing stacks of papers that he said
were his tax returns, and while it's not clear if the pages were blank, they
were most definitely fake considering that was one of the years he paid
basically nothing in taxes.
