Trump blows up in blockbuster interview: ‘You haven’t asked me one f---ing positive question’
President Donald Trump unleashed against Time magazine reporters during an interview released Thursday, complaining they hadn't asked him "one f---ing positive question."
The instance came after he was asked about the health status of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and whether he would consider pardoning members of his administration before his time in the presidency was up.
"...You mean I'm not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe's allowed to give them?" Trump said of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden . "This ain't gonna be much of a story. Here we are doing this."
"What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative," he continued. "Why are you devoting all this time to the White House?"
Trump went on to defend his major White House renovations — a point discussed earlier in the conversation that the president framed as important because it serves as a "symbol of America."
"You know how I do, I do that out of my back pocket. I pay for a lot of it, but I fix it because the White House should look like that," Trump said. "It shouldn't look like — if you would have stood in that balcony and looked at that wall, half the wall was falling. It's actually dangerous. People are walking under, crap was falling off it all the time. Every time it rained, it was leaking, horrible."
He added: "Now it's perfect, and I would say that I should be given credit for fixing the White House because I'm also doing very well with the war. I'm doing very well with another war that we already won, Venezuela. Do you notice you haven't asked me a question about Venezuela?"
The outlet noted that it had asked Trump earlier about Venezuela, to which he replied, "No, no, I brought it up, and then you said—."
"You beat us to it," reporters for the magazine responded. "But yeah."
Earlier in the interview, Time had asked the president about his recent meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly with interim President Delcy Rodriguez and if he told her that the country needs to have elections.
Trump added that he was thinking "fake news" to himself.
"But I don't understand. I'm sitting here. I've done all this stuff," he said. "Look, this is nothing compared to what I've done, but I took the White House and made it beautiful again. OK, and people look at it. People came up. President Xi looked at it two days ago. He said, 'This is beautiful. Much better than I…' He was here 25 years ago with Obama."
It wasn't the only time that Trump took sharp aim at the media during the interview.
He also fielded questions about his ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds, which was temporarily halted last week by a federal judge who he appointed during his first term.
"If I do the finest thing, if I found the cure to cancer, they would say, 'Why didn't he move quicker?'" Trump said. "They are just horrible people, and they're so bad. So I believe in a free press. I believe in an honest press, but I don't believe in fake news."
He later singled out The New York Times as a news organization that could also be barred.
"They have no money," the president said. "They have no value of money. They have nothing going, and just fake news, fake news and maybe they'll be next."
Trump sat down for the wide-ranging interview on Sept. 28, during which he also discussed the Iran war, the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court and his outlook on the midterms.
Stories by Rachel Cohen
Read the original article on MassLive . Add MassLive as a Preferred Source by clicking here .
