President Donald Trump launched into a foul-mouthed tirade over a question about Mitch McConnell.
TIME Magazine interviewed the president at the White House on Sept. 28. The topic of pardons came up before Senior Political Correspondent Eric Cortellessa and Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs moved on to questions about the Kentucky senator, who went AWOL for weeks before reemerging in a frail state.
The 80-year-old president was asked whether he’d seen footage of McConnell on Capitol Hill, and whether he thinks the longtime lawmaker should resign because of his health issues.
“It was a disappointment to a lot of Republicans,” Trump began to answer, before flipping back to the subject of pardons.
“So that’s just—well, Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody. He gave them to [Chief Medical Adviser to the President, 2021 to 2022, Anthony] Fauci. He gave them to this. But you mean I’m not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe’s allowed to give them?” he said, growing clearly irate.
Then his tantrum worsened, and he began to swear. According to a transcript of the interview, he said, “This ain’t gonna be much of a story. Here we are doing this. You haven’t asked me one f---ing positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative. Why are you devoting all this time to the White House?”
He then made a plea for more credit. “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. 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, c--p was falling off it all the time. Every time it rained, it was leaking, horrible. 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?”
“We did earlier,” one journalist responded.
Trump snapped back, “No, no, I brought it up, and then you said—”
“You beat us to it. But yeah,” the journalist responded, prompting another Trump rant.
“No, but I’m just thinking to myself, fake news. But I have a lot of respect. I like the owner, good guy,” he said. The outlet is owned by billionaires Marc and Lynne Benioff.
“But I don’t understand. I’m sitting here. I’ve done all this stuff. Look, this is nothing compared to what I’ve done, but I took the White House and made it beautiful again,” he continued, before turning to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the White House last week.
“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 [former president Barack...] Obama. Think Obama knows it? Obama would not. He doesn’t know if something’s dirty or clean.”
Xi was not in D.C. with Obama 25 years ago. Obama was an Illinois state senator in 2001.
The reporters changed the subject to Xi’s health, and Trump finally moved on.
However, not for long. When discussing what he’ll miss about the White House when his term ends, he returned to his chagrin about the press. He said he’d miss the Oval Office, then added, “Well, I hope I get a decent story. I don’t think—you know, it’s hard to get a good story. Every question’s a hit. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong.”
The easily rattled head of state has been on the warpath with the press and has lashed out at individual reporters lately, too.
He took his beef with the media to new heights last month when he declared that CNN, Politico, and MS NOW would be banned from the White House. However, a judge issued a temporary order allowing the publications to return.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that the outlets “constantly write or report fiction or lies” about his administration.
Just last week, Trump snapped at a reporter for asking him about his attacks on the press. In a tense exchange outside the White House Saturday morning, Trump loomed over MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner and lashed out in response to her question.
“Sir, do you only want outlets that support you to be a part of the press corps?” asked Gardner, who kept reporting from near the White House this week even after she was denied entry over Trump’s media ban.
“I want real news, not fake news like you,” Trump replied, jabbing his finger at her and at one point telling her, “Quiet!”
Trump has repeatedly lashed out at female reporters over questions he doesn’t like. He infamously said “quiet piggy” to Bloomberg News’ Catherine Lucey on Air Force One last year, and he has told others to be quiet and used his Truth Social platform to attack them by name.
CNN’s star reporter Kaitlan Collins is a frequent punching bag for Trump. In fact, he brought her up unprompted during the TIME interview.
He was asked about his White House ban on her employer, as well as Politico and MS NOW, and he moaned about being the target of their “fake news.”
“So at a certain point, you say, ‘What’s the purpose of like this crazy Kaitlan Collins?’ She’s a very average person. She’s the most unhappy young person I’ve ever seen. If I did something spectacular by any standard, and they would write about it, they will only write badly.”
