Trump’s MAGA loyalists are reflexively praising his recent interview performance. Eric Daugherty, chief content creator for the right-wing Florida’s Voice News, tweeted, “BREAKING: The White House just released the FULL uncut version of President Trump’s 60 Minutes interview which CBS SPLICED into just 27 minutes. The original is 73 minutes long. 47 held up VERY well through the entire thing. The fake news doesn’t stand a chance!”
However, reactions on X were far from unanimous. Many users were highly critical of Trump’s responses to Anderson Cooper O’Donnell’s questions. Tim Miller of The Bulwark, a Never Trump conservative, former GOP strategist, and frequent MSNBC guest, tweeted sarcastically, “60 Minutes did not air the part where Trump discusses his success in extorting the network and calls them Fake News. This edit is harmful to me and I’m considering suing.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) also weighed in with a sarcastic jab: “Maybe I should file a complaint with the FCC against the Trump White House for editing his unhinged 60 Minutes interview. It will use the exact same language Trump lodged against Vice President Harris.”
Meanwhile, Max Flugrath, communications director for Fair Fight Action, highlighted an inconsistency in Trump’s knowledge, posting, “So, Trump knows who Bari Weiss is, but not Changpeng Zhao, whose company helped the Trump family make $550 million and he just pardoned less than 2 weeks ago?”
Liberal Gen-Z influencer Harry Sisson described the interview as “a total disaster.” He added, “He can’t answer questions on his blatant corruption, he sounds clueless on foreign policy, and he continues to defend his tariffs which are hurting Americans. Trump is a complete failure.” In a separate tweet, Sisson remarked, “This is Trump on 60 Minutes right now. He looks absolutely awful. He’s incoherent, rambling, and looks like he’s dripping in sweat. This man is not well!”
Journalist Lemire commented on the controversy around Changpeng Zhao, saying, “Let’s remember, this guy admitted to it, he confessed to this money laundering scheme, and yet President Trump claims that he doesn’t know who he is. Now, whether that’s true, it’s disturbing either way. The autopen strikes again, I guess.”
Lemire added, “No, it’s either he doesn’t know, which is preposterous, or, of course, he does know, and he simply thinks that denying it on national television is a better look for him trying to create some distance from a pardon that’s obviously controversial.”
Republicans have remained largely silent regarding Zhao’s pardon and have not expressed significant criticism of the Jan. 6 pardons issued shortly after Trump’s return to the White House. Scarborough noted that they also have not challenged Trump’s use of the Justice Department to target his political enemies.
Scarborough further criticized the hypocrisy he perceives within the GOP: “These are the people that were melting down and freaking out for years over Hunter Biden, right, [non-fungible tokens] and Hunter Biden paintings selling for how much, $50,000, $75,000? I don’t know how much they were selling for, it wasn’t $2 billion. I mean, the cryptocurrency alone is just absolutely crazy, and, you know, send people all over the earth to investigate, like Hunter Biden and a $3 million deal, the amount of which we don’t know how much Hunter Biden got.”
He continued, “But, again, here we have the same people that melted down for years over that—all about Qatari jets, $2 billion in cryptocurrency here, Trump meme coins. You just go down the list of things and the things that they freaked out and melted down and investigated before are 1/1000th of what they’re melting down about Hunter Biden NFTs.”
Scarborough added, “It’s like ‘South Park’ wouldn’t even touch this because it would be such a stupid, stupid parody of what actually the Republican Party has become, what these MAGA followers have become and what they will do, they’ll justify absolutely anything.”
He also recounted a personal anecdote about a longtime MAGA reporter: “I had one guy, one reporter in the MAGA bubble for years, for years, hectoring me, going, ‘What was Hunter Biden doing on Air Force Two? Oh my God, what was Hunter Biden doing on Air Force Two?’ That MAGA reporter hectored me about Hunter Biden for years.”
Scarborough said he recently called this reporter to ask about the Trump family’s business dealings. “I call him up and I go, all right, so that’s fine, so tell me about the Trump meme coin. How much, a billion? How much money did Donald Trump make? ‘Oh, that’s the most corrupt thing I’ve ever heard in my life,’ he says to me one day and then never brings it up again.”
“But if you talk to him, he would still be talking about that Hunter Biden flew on Air Force Two with Joe Biden when Joe Biden was president, and there’s absolutely no awareness whatsoever,” Scarborough observed. “There’s this false equivalency, false flattening of the earth, and really, they look like total fools. At some point, they’ll figure it out, but that point is not now.”
[YouTube link: youtu.be]
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*Note: This article summarizes varying viewpoints on President Trump’s 60 Minutes interview and related controversies, reflecting a spectrum of political perspectives.*
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