Below, the 13 wildest lines from what ABC has released of the interview.
1. “Well, I don’t believe those polls. There’s no way [Biden] beats me in Texas.”
2. “My polls show that I’m winning everywhere.”
Everywhere, eh? They must be really good polls!
3. “I just was given a meeting with my pollster who — I, frankly, don’t even believe in pollsters, if you want to know the truth. You just run a campaign and whatever it is, it is.”
4. “But I just had a meeting with somebody that’s a pollster, and I’m winning everywhere.”
OK. So, Point 1: Trump doesn’t believe in pollsters. Point 2: He just met with a pollster and he is “winning everywhere.” THIS ALL MAKES SENSE TO ME!!!!
5. “So on ‘Good Morning America’ today, they had that phony polling information. I explained to you last night that it was phony, but you didn’t do anything about it.”
6. “I like the truth. You know, I’m actually a very honest guy.”
7. “Not only — not only wasn’t he charged, if you read it, with all of the horrible fake news — I mean, I was reading that my son was going to go to jail — this is a good young man — that he was going to go to jail.”
8. “I’ve seen a lot of things over my life. I don’t think in my whole life I’ve ever called the FBI. In my whole life. I don’t — you don’t call the FBI. Life doesn’t work that way.”
Ahem.
9. “The FBI director is wrong because, frankly, it doesn’t happen like that in life.”
10. “I don’t — there’s nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, ‘We have information on your opponent,’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”
Truly stunning stuff here. What Trump, who is, reminder, the President of the United States, seems to fail to grasp is that a foreign county would almost certainly have a motive for passing along negative information about Trump’s opponent.
11. “It’s not an interference. They have information. I think I’d take it.”
12. “It’s a 747. But, you know, it’s a much bigger plane. Bigger wing span. It’s a much bigger wing span.”
13. “I could tell you, there is a couple of — there are a couple of secrets. You know what? There are a couple of secrets. I don’t think we’re supposed to be talking about that.”
14. “Yeah, uh, my life has always been a fight.”
15. “And I enjoy that I guess, I don’t know if I enjoy it or not, I guess — sometimes I have false fights, like the Russian witch hunt. That’s a false fight. “
So he likes fights. Or he doesn’t. But there have definitely been some false fights. Which he likes? Or doesn’t?
16. “We had nothing to do with Russia.”
17. “Paul Manafort, they have Paul Manafort on taxes and many other things. Nothing to do with our campaign.”
18. “What difference does polling information make? It doesn’t matter. He was maybe trying to do something for an account or something.”
Well, it is a bit odd that Trump’s campaign manager was sharing polling information with Kiliminik in hopes that it would wind up in front of two Ukrainian oligarchs, right? I mean, that doesn’t happen every day.
19. “I’ll tell you, you talk about collusion, take a look at the collusion with the Democrat party and Facebook and Google and Twitter. That’s called collusion, that’s called real collusion.”
20. “And [Vladimir] Putin, I will say this: if he had it, it was up to him. He would much rather have Hillary Clinton be president right now.”
21. “But two or three years ago, if somebody comes into your office with oppo research– they call it oppo research — with information that might be good or bad or something, but good for you, bad for your opponent, you don’t call the FBI.”
What is this “oppo research” of which you speak?
22. “I would guarantee you that 90%, could be 100%, of the congressmen or the senators over there, have had meetings — if they didn’t they probably wouldn’t be elected — on negative information about their opponent.”
Trump seems either incapable or unwilling to understand the difference between negative information a campaign unearths about another candidate and taking information from a foreign power. The first is business as usual in politics. The latter is a clear attempt to influence the outcome of another country’s sovereign elections.
23. “I don’t know, I stay uninvolved. I stay totally uninvolved.”
24. “The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it, but you go and talk honestly to congressmen, they all do it, they always have. And that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo research.”
I don’t think he knows what the meaning of those words actually are. This feels like a good place to end.
