Former President Donald Trump gave his first interview Monday evening since his game changing June 27th debate with President Biden which has upended the 2024 campaign for the presidency.
The venue was Sean Hannity’s prime time FOX News program Hannity that aired at 9 PM ET/11 PM PT. The 19-minute long commercial-free segment of the program, which was recorded in advance, featured Hannity’s questions to Trump who called in by landline phone.
Since the debate eleven days ago, Trump has been unusually restrained, appearing at only one rally and largely avoiding the media. He has continued to post and repost comments on his social media platform Truth Social. As AFP via Barron’s opined,
The answer [for Trump’s silence] may simply be that [he]. . . has understood that sometimes, less is more. ‘When your opponent is self-immolating, the wise thing to do is stay out of his way,’ said author, PR consultant and former White House correspondent Ron Fournier.
Hannity began the Q&A with Trump with a question about the debate with Biden.
TRUMP: He [Biden] looked extremely pale, to put it nicely. And I don't know. Maybe it was a good makeup job or maybe it wasn’t, but he was a very pale-looking man.
And when he started to speak, I don’t know. I thought his voice was weak. I didn’t know exactly what was happening. It was strange. I do have to say that the CNN, Jake and Dana, they were really they were pretty good. They were -- they really -- they were -- I thought they were fair.
I thought they were fair in the questions, I thought to him, to me. But it was a strange evening, I will tell you. It was a strange debate, because, within a couple of minutes, the answers given by him were -- they didn’t -- they didn't make a lot of sense.
Hannity pressed for a further response.
TRUMP: I was thinking about what I was saying. I wasn’t looking over at him almost at all, except when he went a little bit haywire. I didn’t look at him at all.
And I’m very disappointed in him. He’s the worst president in the history of our country. We have never had anything like it, what he’s done to our borders, what he’s done to our country, inflation, the people that he’s hurting. He’s destroying Social Security, destroying Social Security.
And people are -- I’m just so upset with him as president. And so I wasn’t really looking over. I purposely wasn’t. And I did take a couple of peeks when he was in the midst of giving some really bad answers. And they weren't even answers. They were just words put together that had no meaning or sense.
That was the extent of Trump’s critique of Biden’s debate performance. As AFP observed:
Trump offered a limited critique of Biden's debate performance in an interview Monday night with Fox News, eschewing any mention of a serious condition or any attacks on his mental fitness [emphasis added].
Image: Screenshot from Hannity during the host’s phone interview with Donald Trump July 8, 2024
When Hannity asked if he thinks Biden should end his campaign, Trump said: “Well, we prepared for him, but I don’t think it will matter.”
TRUMP: And it looks to me like he may very well stay in. He’s got an ego, and he doesn’t want to quit. He doesn’t want to do that. It just looks to me like that’s what he wants. I think [Dr.] Jill [Biden] would like to see him stay. She’s having a good time. I notice she really seems to be having a good time.
And I’m hearing that Hunter [Biden] is calling the shots. So this isn’t necessarily a very positive thing for our country, but I think he might very well stay in. And if he does, nobody wants to give that up that way. He’s going to feel badly about himself for a long time. It’s hard to give it up that way, the way where they’re trying to force him out.
HANNITY: Do you -- Mr. President, do you want Joe Biden to step aside? Do you care?
TRUMP: Well, we have prepared for him, but I don’t think it’s going to matter.
Several times, Trump mentioned his fear that Biden will be responsible for World War III.
TRUMP: And our country’s in very serious trouble. And I will tell you what. If we’re not careful, we’re going to be right in the middle of World War III. And that will be a war like nobody’s seen before because of the weaponry. The weaponry is a whole lot different than two army tanks going up against each other. This is a whole different world.
And we don’t have somebody that can properly represent us. There’s no question about that.
Returning to the campaign and the current MSM uncertainty about who will ultimately be the Democrat nominee in light of President Biden’s obvious frailty, Hannity persisted:
HANNITY: What do you make of all the talk that, if Biden steps aside or is pushed out, that it would be Vice President Harris? Do you expect that much would change?
TRUMP: Well, I think that it will be her. I think they are very concerned about the vote if it’s not her. They are very, very -- I mean, they’re gun-shy. They don’t want to do it any other way.
I have actually come to believe that’s what they're going to do. I think she’s an ineffective person. She was in charge of the border. She’s never been there. She didn’t do a good job, and she hasn’t done a job on a lot of things.
So -- but it would seem to me that, from a political standpoint, that’s who they're going with. They’re not even talking about alternatives. And it seems that if he gets out, for whatever reason -- and I don’t think he wants to get out. But, if he gets out, it will be her.
Interestingly, he’s got a lot of power because he’s got the delegates. When you have the delegates, unless he says ‘I’m getting out,’ they can't do anything to get him out, other than the 25th Amendment, if they want to do it in a different route. It would be the 25th Amendment. But let’s assume -- with not very much time left.
There’s not much time left, and then we can straighten out our country. We will make our -- we will make America great again, right? But there’s not a lot of time left.
HANNITY: No.
TRUMP: But I think, unless they use the 25th Amendment, which they’d use in a different sense, he has all the power. He has the delegates. He doesn’t have to get out. There’s nothing they can do to get him out.
So he will get the nomination. He got the nomination, and then they will have their meeting in Chicago, which, by the way, last week, 117 people were shot and 17 people were killed. That was last weekend in Chicago. And that’s like a war zone. But they have their convention in Chicago.
Trump hit on one of the leading issues of concern to voters, the influx of ten million +/- illegal immigrants due to Biden’s open border policies.
TRUMP: We’re going to have the largest deportation in our history, larger than the Eisenhower deportation. And we have no choice. I don’t want to do that. But this man has destroyed our country. And I say in rallies -- I’m doing a big one tomorrow [Tuesday, July 9] at Doral in Miami. I say at rallies that you could take the 10 worst presidents in the history of our country and put them together, they will not have done the destruction and damage as this man has done.
He’s been a horrible president, the worst president -- frankly, the worst president in history by far. And, by the way, Jimmy Carter is the happiest guy around, because Jimmy Carter now is saying -- I mean, he was like a genius compared to what Biden is. His administration was brilliant compared to the Biden administration.
So, it’s a very, very sad -- it’s a very sad time in our country.
Hannity concluded the interview with a question about Trump’s choice for a vice presidential running mate. Trump, however, was equivocal.
TRUMP: And I haven’t made a final decision.
This comment contradicts what Trump told NBC News on June 22:
Former President Donald Trump said Saturday that he knows who his vice presidential pick will be — and gave a clue about his or her likely debate night plans.
Asked by NBC News at a Philadelphia campaign stop whether he has decided on his vice presidential pick, Trump responded, ‘In my mind, yeah,’ adding that the person will ‘most likely’ be at Thursday’s debate against President Joe Biden.
‘They’ll be there,’ he continued.
Thanks to FOX News Media Relations for providing a transcript of the Hannity-Trump interview and a video link to the segment.
Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who has covered national politics and other topics for over five decades. His most recent interview on BBC Radio in the U.K. can be listened to here. His web page with links to his work and a bio is http://peter.media. Peter’s extensive American Thinker archive: http://tinyurl.com/pcathinker. His Twitter account is @pchowka.