President Trump must have known something was 'off' when an aide apparently accepted, and then he rejected, an invitation from 60 Minutes to participate in a candidate's interview with the CBS outlet.
The 60 Minutes interview with Harris alone went on anyway, and CBS harrumphed about Trump's supposedly unreasonable refusal to participate in their tradition of long interviews with presidential candidates.
But there was nothing unreasonable at all about Trump's refusal to enter the media outlet's little trap. Turns out 60 Minues has been caught in all kinds of tips and tricks from the Harris side of their production that's since been aired.
According to RedState's Sister Toldjah:
One of the clips that has gotten a lot of people talking was the teaser video released Sunday that showed the Democrat presidential nominee responding to a statement made by CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker on how "it seems" in his view "that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening" to the Biden-Harris administration.
Harris' answer was a word salad full of absolute nonsense.
For those who missed it, watch:
As it turns out, though, that was... not the answer we got when the "full" interview aired Monday night. Here's the version that aired, courtesy of the transcript and the video that came out Monday:
Bill Whitaker: But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.
Vice President Kamala Harris: We are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.
So it turns out 60 Minutes gave one audience in the earlier airing Kamala's original word salad, a non-answer to a pointed question if there ever was one, and after getting the audience response to that, aired another segment, apparently a sharply edited one from her answer, that at least said something moderately articulate. The idea, of course, was to make her look good.
But that's not what anyone would call journalism. That's public relations. That's Hollywood. Some have noted that it raises questions about whether they gave her multiple takes in order to improve her answer to the question even more.
Some noticed other problems with the segment, too:
Trump certainly did:
Naturally, a lot of people are disgusted. Here's a side-by-side of the differing answers to the same question.
With that the standard, and CBS thus far not apologizing for this obvious manipulation, can you imagine what they would have done to one of Trump's answers to the same question? They would have cut out every important point, or switched it around through splicing and dicing to the point of having him state the opposite of what he would have answered.
Step into my parlor, the spider said.
Trump stated that he wasn't going to do the 60 Minutes interview until 60 Minutes apologized for his last interview with them. That was the one where Lesley Stahl famously debunked his statement that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic and by extension proof of Joe Biden's corruption, which was perfectly factual.
CBS's response to Trump's refusal to participate in this imitation journalism as a response made it clear enough that they still aren't sorry for that politically motivated stunt, and this call for a new interview was just a newly laid trap for Trump. They couldn't even tell the story of that honestly. I can hear Scott Pelley's sanctimonious voice droning through this CBS passage:
The Trump campaign had said that the interview would be this past Thursday at Mar-A-Lago, Trump's Florida home. It also asked whether 60 Minutes would meet 78-year-old Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the Republican candidate for president was grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt. 60 Minutes agreed. On Sept. 9, Trump communications director Steven Cheung sent a text that read: "I'm working with our advance team to see logistically if Butler would work in addition to the sit down."
Days later, Cheung called to say "the president said yes."
Then, a week ago, Trump backed out. The campaign offered shifting explanations. First, it complained that 60 Minutes would fact check the interview.
"There were initial discussions, but nothing was ever scheduled or locked in," Cheung said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. "They also insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented."
60 Minutes fact checks every story it broadcasts.
Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020. Trump claims correspondent Lesley Stahl said, in that interview, that Hunter Biden's controversial laptop came from Russia. She never said that.
"Where's my apology? They should apologize," Trump said on Tuesday night at a Milwaukee press conference. "They were wrong on everything. So I'd like to get an apology. So I've asked them for an apology."
And Trump didn't claim that, either. There was a major problem with that Stahl interview and CBS has yet to address it, so Trump addressed it.
The network itself has a history of this kind of dishonesty at election-time:
Now they're whining because Trump saw through their game and decided not to say 'thank you, may I have another?' That's what's really unprecedented with this decision to say 'no' to 60 Minues because if they can't do honest journalism, Trump is not going to talk to them, and it doesn't matter if he loses the campaign publicity for not doing it, why would he step up for another dirty trick disguised as journalism? It's a new world out there with many other kinds of media outlets.
All in all, it was good presidential judgment and you can bet that guys like Putin, Xi, Kim and the Iranian mullahs are watching closely and taking note. If Trump won't allow himself to be kicked around by the media with its tired dirty tricks, what chance do they have in cutting deals with him? Better to give him what he wants and get him away from him -- that's going to be their logic.
Presidents don't let themselves be kicked around by two-bit satraps of any kind. In real time, Trump has demonstrated to all of us that he's the only one out there with the chops to be president. He spotted that trap from a mile away. He reads the lay of the land perfectly.
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