Trump’s interview with George Stephanopoulos, explained

Donald Trump doesn’t normally talk to journalists willing to challenge him. His big ABC interview illustrated why.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos spent 30 hours with President Donald Trump over the course of two days last week, producing an hourlong televised interview that covered everything from 2020 polling to the president’s anger over Mick Mulvaney coughing in the Oval Office. And perhaps the best way to understand it is in juxtaposition with another interview Trump gave last week.

On Friday — after a damaging video excerpt of the Stephanopoulos interview had been released but before the whole thing aired — Trump called in to his favorite television show, Fox & Friends, for another lengthy interview. But the hosts refused to challenge Trump in any meaningful way, and the interview produced very little news. This is par for the course for Trump, who often only makes himself available to questioning from interviewers who range from friendly to fawning.

Stephanopoulos’s lengthy interview with the president — one that aired in its entirety on ABC on Sunday evening — sits in stark relief. On numerous occasions, Stephanopoulos challenged false claims and conspiracy theories that Trump usually gets away with, and as a result, the interview yielded a number of headlines — most of them damaging for Trump.

At one point, Trump, frustrated with Stephanopoulos’s dogged pushback to his false claims about the Mueller report, even referred to him as “a little wise guy.”

But beyond crude insults, the interview shed light on issues ranging from Trump’s reelection strategy to the flimsiness of conspiracy theories he’s been pushing about the FBI. Here are some of the key moments and takeaways.

Trump gives up the game about foreign interference

The first and perhaps most notable video excerpt of Stephanopoulos’s interview with Trump was released last Wednesday evening. In it, Trump indicated he’s willing to accept dirt on his Democratic opponents from a foreign entity — a willingness at odds with the position of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who testified to Congress that candidates should contact the FBI in such a scenario.

“The FBI director is wrong,” Trump proclaimed when Stephanopoulos brought up his hand-picked FBI director’s position. “It’s not interference, it’s information.”

Trump’s widely criticized comments provided perhaps the starkest illustration yet that he’s not serious about trying to prevent the sort of foreign interference his campaign benefitted from in 2016.

In the days following ABC’s release of that clip, Trump walked it back and said he would listen to offered information, then report that contact to the FBI. But he also tried to downplay his original remarks, attacking the media and drawing a false equivalency between the sorts of normal contacts with foreign governments that presidents routinely have and situations where a foreign adversary reaches out with dirt on a political opponent.

During his Friday morning interview on Fox & Friends, Trump went as far as to dismiss the very idea that a foreign government would reach out to him with dirt.

“I don’t think anybody would present me with anything bad because they know how much I love this country,” he said — ignoring the fact that his campaign was presented with an offer of foreign dirt in 2016 and took a meeting instead of contacting authorities.

The Fox & Friends hosts, however, didn’t challenge Trump on the point.

Trump won’t stop gaslighting about the Mueller report

In a portion of the interview released by ABC on Sunday morning, Trump repeatedly mischaracterized the conclusions reached by special counsel Robert Mueller in his final report about the aforementioned Russian interference campaign.

Riding in the cramped backseat of a car with Stephanopoulos, Trump brought up the “phony witch hunt” and said, “Mueller comes out. There’s no collusion.”

But as Stephanopoulos pointed out, that’s not what Mueller said. Here’s the transcript of the ensuing exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: I don’t think that’s what he found, but we don’t have time for that now. We’ll talk about it later.

TRUMP: That is what he found. Excuse me. He found no collusion. And they didn’t find anything having to do with obstruction because they made the ruling based on his findings and they said no obstruction.

STEPHANOPOULOS: He didn’t examine collusion, he laid out evidence of obstruction —

TRUMP: Oh, you trying to say now that there was collusion, even though he said there was no collusion?

STEPHANOPOULOS: He didn’t say there was no collusion.

TRUMP: He said no collusion.

STEPHANOPOULOS: He said he didn’t look at collusion—

TRUMP: George, the report said — no collusion.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Did you read the report?

TRUMP: Yes, I did. You should read it, too, George.

Suffice it to say that Stephanopoulos’s characterization of the Mueller report was largely accurate, while Trump’s was not. Mueller concluded federal prosecutors had “insufficient evidence” to bring conspiracy-related charges against Trump or members of his inner circle who hadn’t already been prosecuted, but stopped well short of saying “no collusion.” He detailed extensive evidence that Trump had at the very least tried to obstruct justice, but concluded that because of longstanding Office of Legal Counsel policy, prosecuting the sitting president wasn’t an option.

Trump, however, is not one to let facts get in the way of his preferred narrative. It wasn’t the only time during his interview with Stephanopoulos he made misleading statements.

Trump is in denial about his own poor polling

In another memorable exchange, Trump flatly denied the reality of polling — includes ones conducted by his own campaign pollster and subsequently leaked to the media — showing that he’s currently trailing the Democratic frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden, in a number of key battleground states. Here’s the transcript:

STEPHANOPOULOS: He’s still beating you according to the polls.

TRUMP: Well, I don’t believe those polls. There’s no way he beats me in Texas.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But even your own polls show you’re behind right now, don’t they?

TRUMP: No. My polls show that I’m winning everywhere.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I don’t know — we’ve all seen these reports that 15 out of 17 states, you spent $2 million on a poll and you’re behind in 15 out of 17 states.

TRUMP: Nobody showed you those polls because those polls don’t exist, George. Those polls don’t exist. But I just had a meeting with someone who’s a pollster, and I’m winning everywhere. So I don’t know what you’re talking about.

In this case, Trump’s words were belied by his actions. Over the weekend, news broke that in the wake of his bleak internal polling leaking, Trump purged three of his five pollsters.

Trump undercut his own “deep state” conspiracy theory

It took a single question for Stephanopoulos to debunk the conspiracy theory Trump has been pushing about the Obama-era FBI trying to throw the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton.

Alluding to the fact that the Trump campaign was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation that began in July 2016, but the FBI didn’t leak about it, Stephanopoulos asked Trump, “If they were determined to prevent you from becoming president, why wouldn’t they leak it beforehand?”

But instead of pushing back, Trump acknowledged that Stephanopoulos’s premise was correct.

“You know what, you’d have to ask them,” Trump said. “And you know what — had that gone out before the election, I don’t think I would have had enough time to defend myself.”

In other words, even Trump agrees that had top FBI officials leaked word about the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia being under investigation in the months leading up to the election, it likely would have been fatal to his presidential hopes.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, then-FBI Director James Comey repeatedly publicized the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, while Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani appeared to be the recipient of leaks about it. Two days before Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing that the Clinton email case had been reopened, Giuliani went on Fox News and said Comey had “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.” Giuliani later admitted to receiving a heads up about the “surprise.”

In short, the actual timeline of events in 2016 suggests that if anything, the FBI’s actions were a net positive for Trump’s campaign, not a negative. But that history is inconvenient for Trump, so he tried to rewrite it.

Trump makes transparently empty promises

In response to a question from Stephanopoulos about what he hopes to accomplish for voters between now and the 2020 elections, Trump talked about passing health care legislation. Here’s the transcript:

STEPHANOPOULOS: When you go to voters over this next year, what is the big unfinished piece of business you’re going to say, “This is what we’re going to get done?”

TRUMP: So we almost had health care done. Health care’s a disaster, Obamacare. But we’ve managed it much better than they managed it. So we’ve made it serviceable, but it’s not great. We almost had it done. We were one vote off, as you know. You know that whole story. And that was a very-- unfortunate situation. We would have had great health care. So we’re going to do that if we win the House. If we win back the House, we’re going to produce phenomenal health care. And we already have the concept of the plan, but it’ll be less expensive than Obamacare by a lot. And it’ll be much better health care--

STEPHANOPOULOS: Don’t you have to tell people what the plan is?

TRUMP: Yeah, well, we’ll be announcing that in about two months. Maybe less. So, yeah, sure you do. But — but, again, that’s — that’s subject to winning back the House, Senate and the presidency. You need the three. But we are —

Trump went on to promise that his new health care plan will be released “before the election, yes. We’ll be having a plan much before the election. Soon. Fairly soon.”

But going back to when he said he supported universal coverage during the 2016 campaign, Trump has repeatedly made promises about health care that haven’t come to fruition. In April, for instance, Trump tweeted that “Republicans are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare.” But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters the next day that he “made it clear to [Trump] we were not going to be doing that in the Senate,” and there’s been no progress toward health care legislation since then. Nonetheless, Trump told Stephanopoulos that a new health care plan will finally see the light of day “soon.”

Trump’s promise that a new health care bill will be revealed “in about two months” is reminiscent of when he promised a middle-class tax cut just before last year’s midterms, only to forget about it once the elections came and went. Then as now, the truth of the matter seems to be not that Trump is quietly working on plans that for whatever reason don’t see the light of day, but that he will say anything that he thinks will be beneficial politically.

And while Trump told Stephanopoulos that his mysterious new plan will protect people with preexisting conditions, every piece of health care legislation that he’s signaled support for since taking office would in fact strip coverage from millions of people. In short, when it comes to health care policy, what Trump does is much more important than what Trump says.

Trump is bizarrely cruel to his own staff

One especially weird moment came when Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, coughed while Trump was answering a question about his financial records, prompting Trump to ask Mulvaney to leave his office and for the footage to be reshot.

“Let’s do that over — he’s coughing in the middle of my answer,” Trump said, while Stephanopoulos looked on, seemingly in disbelief. “Let’s do that over. He’s coughing in the middle of my answer. I don’t like that, you know, I don’t like that.”

“If you’re going to cough, please leave the room,” Trump continued. “You just can’t — you just can’t cough.”

Trump has a long history of germaphobia, but since becoming president he’s reigned it in, at least publicly. Not only was the moment odd, but it said something about Trump’s interactions with his own White House staff.

The interview was a TV ratings flop

The famously ratings-obsessed president must have been disappointed to learn that his big ABC interview was not a big hit on TV, as Politico details:

The hourlong special with ABC chief anchor George Stephanopoulos came in third in its timeslot Sunday night, notching 3.91 million viewers according to ratings aggregator TV by the Numbers...

The interview’s ratings were a sharp drop from Celebrity Family Feud, which premiered in the time slot last week, and pulled in 6.1 million viewers. Trump’s interview also did not build much on the audience of its lead-in, a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos that brought in 3.5 million viewers.

Trump’s performance during the interview — the openness to foreign interference so long as it helps him, the pushing of easily debunkable conspiracy theories, praise for totalitarian dictators, and more — would have been unthinkable had Stephanopoulos been talking to any other president. But 30 months into Trump’s tenure, the lackluster TV ratings are another indication of how the Trump spectacle is becoming normalized.

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