In a friendly interview with Fox News broadcast Sunday morning, former President Donald Trump repeated a litany of grievances about the trial that resulted in his conviction on 34 crimes last week, while portraying himself as a martyr and insisting the fact that he was taking the situation well.
He also suggested that if he was sentenced to prison or house arrest, “at a certain point there is a breaking point” for the public – the latest in a series of comments that suggest the possibility of political violence.
Mr. Trump’s comments on the guilty verdicts – in which a New York City jury agreed with prosecutors that he falsified financial documents to conceal a hush money payment to a pornographic actress during the campaign presidential election of 2016 – largely echoed those he made on Friday, the day after his conviction.
He said the verdict was biased because New York City, where the trial took place, is majority Democratic.
Mr. Trump maintained that the payments he made to Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and the key witness against him, were legal fees, although the jury found they were not.
He denounced witnesses like Mr. Cohen, without naming them, and asserted, while discussing the trial in this nationally televised interview, that the judge’s silence order in the case prevented him from doing so.
Democrats, “sick” people
During the interview, a 90-minute session recorded in advance and spread over the four hours of the show Fox & Friends, Mr. Trump has also repeatedly called his political opponents – and even some of his former supporters, notably former Justice Minister Jeff Sessions, whom he considered insufficiently loyal – as “bad”, “sick” , of “deranged” and “bad people”. He also suggested, as he had before, that Democrats were an “enemy within” who posed a greater threat to the United States than foreign adversaries like Russia or China.
“These people are sick. They are sick. They are disturbed,” he said.
You know, I’m talking about the enemy without and the enemy within. So you have Russia, you have China… If you have a smart president, you still manage them pretty easily, actually. We have a lot of advantages. But the internal enemy is causing damage in this country.
Donald Trump, in an interview with Fox News
The interview, Mr. Trump’s first since the verdict, did not feature many tough questions. At times, Fox News hosts appeared to try to steer him toward certain answers, suggesting at one point that it would be understandable if he wanted to weaponize the Justice Department against President Joe Biden and others Democrats.
PHOTO STEPHANI SPINDEL, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Fox News screens in New York announce that Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 counts last Thursday.
“We were just talking about the militarization of the justice system against political opponents,” said Rachel Campos-Duffy, one of the presenters. “Some of your followers said the only way to stop this was through mutual assured destruction, right? If you do this to us, we will do the same to you. You said no, my revenge will be America’s success. You just got this verdict. Are you still in the same state of mind? »
Mr. Trump, who has explicitly said he wanted to use the Justice Department to target his political opponents, including appointing a special prosecutor to “prosecute” Joe Biden, insisted he had no idea.
“It’s a very difficult question in one sense, because these are bad people,” he said, before pivoting: “A lot of people have said we have no choice but to ‘elect Trump, the Republicans, because he is the only one who can resist this. Remember, if it wasn’t me, they’d be going after someone else, and I know a lot of competitors. They wouldn’t fare as well. They wouldn’t be doing so well right now. They would say, ‘Mom, take me home, I want to go home.’ »
Success in bringing the country together
He then claimed, falsely, that he never said “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, that only her supporters said it. And he welcomed what he suggested was his restraint in not doing so once elected.
They all said ‘lock her up,’ and I felt… and I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing, he said. And then this happened to me, and I might feel different about it. I can not tell you. I’m not sure I can answer the question.
Donald Trump, in an interview with Fox News
When he added: “Think about it, you’re locking up the wife of a president of the United States,” Mr.me Campos-Duffy prompted him to respond differently: “They want to lock you up over a $130,000 accounting issue!” »
“And a perfectly orderly accounting affair,” added Mr. Trump. “People also say: ‘Can you bring the country together?’ And the answer is yes. Success will bring the country together, because I brought it together. »
While the portions of the interview that were broadcast focused primarily on the trial and its aftermath, Mr. Trump was also asked about his policies. He gave largely the same answers as before, including that he would carry out a mass expulsion larger than President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback and that he would reauthorize oil drilling in the Wildlife Refuge Arctic National Park in Alaska, as part of a package of pro-fossil fuel policies.
This article was first published in the New York Times.
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