by President answers questions with words, mostly in expected order
In what CBS News is calling “surprisingly watchable television,” President Trump sat down for a 60 Minutes interview that featured actual questions, attempted answers, and only moderate chaos.
Veteran correspondent Scott Pelley conducted the interview, which aired Sunday evening to an audience of millions who tuned in expecting a trainwreck and were rewarded with something closer to a minor derailmentdramatic, but everyone survived.
“We went in with low expectations, and he somehow met them,” Pelley told colleagues after the taping. “He answered maybe 40% of the questions I asked, which is 40% higher than I anticipated. At one point, he used the word ‘infrastructure’ correctly. I almost cried.”
The Trump 60 Minutes interview covered topics ranging from the economy to foreign policy, with Trump responding to inquiries using his signature communication style: starting on one topic, veering into unrelated territory, making several questionable claims, and eventually landing somewhere in the vicinity of a point.
When asked about inflation, Trump spent four minutes discussing his electoral college victory in 2024, the size of his rally crowds, and how “nobody understands inflation like I understand inflation, believe me.” Pelley attempted to redirect the conversation six times before eventually giving up and moving to the next question.
The interview’s most memorable moment came when Pelley asked about Trump’s relationship with foreign leaders. “I get along great with everyone,” Trump insisted. “Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Unthey all love me. They call me all the time. They say, ‘Donald, you’re the greatest president America’s ever had.’ That’s a direct quote. From all of them. They said it at the same time, actually. Conference call.”
Fact-checkers at CBS News worked overtime during the broadcast, with on-screen corrections appearing so frequently that viewers compared it to watching a movie with overly enthusiastic subtitles. At one point, Trump made seven factually incorrect statements in under two minutes, prompting the network to display a single message reading “Multiple claims require context” because individual corrections would have obscured the entire screen.
Trump addressed questions about his administration’s policies with characteristic confidence, describing initiatives as “the best ever” and “much better than Obama’s,” regardless of whether Obama had implemented similar policies or whether the policies actually existed.
“We’re doing things nobody’s ever done before,” Trump explained when asked about his legislative agenda. “Big things. Beautiful things. Things that people said couldn’t be done, and frankly, they were right, we haven’t done them, but we’re thinking about doing them very strongly.”
Pelley pressed the president on controversial statements he’d made on Truth Social, including one where he appeared to threaten journalists with imprisonment. Trump dismissed this as “just locker room social media” and insisted he has “tremendous respect for the press, except when they’re nasty to me, which is always, so actually I don’t respect them at all.”
The interview concluded with Trump standing up mid-question, declaring “this has been a great interview, one of the best,” and walking off set while Pelley was still speaking. Producers scrambled to fill the remaining eight minutes with extended commercials and B-roll footage of the White House.
Reaction to the interview divided along predictable lines. Supporters praised Trump for “telling it like it is” and “not backing down from the liberal media,” while critics noted he “didn’t actually answer any questions” and “may have committed several impeachable offenses during the interview itself, we’re still reviewing the tape.”
CBS announced it would air additional footage from the interview online, including 40 minutes of Trump discussing his golf game, demanding the cameras be turned off (they weren’t), and asking Pelley if he wanted to buy a Trump Tower condo at a “very special price, just for you, because you’re great.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/trumps-60-minutes-interview/
SOURCE: Trump’s 60 Minutes Interview Reaches New Levels of Coherence (Aisha Muharrar)
