President Donald Trump lashed out at Time magazine reporters in an interview published Thursday, complaining that they didn’t ask him “a single damn positive question.”
The instance came after he was asked about the health of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and whether he would consider pardoning members of his administration before the end of his term as president.
“…You mean I’m not allowed to give them away, but Sleepy Joe is allowed to give them away?” Trump said of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. “It won’t be much of a story. Here we do that.”
“What about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? It’s all negative,” he continued. “Why are you spending all this time at the White House?
Trump then defended his major renovations to the White House — a point made earlier in the conversation that the president called important because it serves as a “symbol of America.”
“You know how I do it, I do this out of my back pocket. I pay for a lot of it, but I fix it because the White House should look like this,” Trump said. “It shouldn’t look like…if you had been on that balcony and looked at that wall, half of the wall was falling. It’s actually dangerous. People walk under it, shit was falling all the time. Every time it rained there was a leak, it was horrible.”
He added: “Now it’s perfect, and I would say 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’ve already won, Venezuela. Did you notice you didn’t ask me about Venezuela?”
The outlet noted that it had asked Trump earlier about Venezuela, to which he responded: “No, no, I talked about it, and then you said…”.
“You beat us to it,” replied the magazine’s journalists. “But yes.”
Earlier in the interview, Time asked the president about his recent meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly with interim President Delcy Rodriguez and whether he told her the country needed an election.
Trump added that he was thinking “fake news” to himself.
“But I don’t understand. I’m sitting here. I’ve done all this,” he said. “Look, it’s nothing compared to what I did, but I took the White House and made it beautiful again. OK, and people are looking at it. People have been coming. President Xi looked at it two days ago. He said, ‘It’s beautiful. Much better than me… “He was here 25 years ago with Obama.”
This isn’t the only time Trump lashed out at the media during the interview.
He also answered questions about his ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds, which was temporarily suspended last week by a federal judge he appointed during his first term.
“If I did the next best thing, if I found the cure for cancer, they would say, ‘Why didn’t he act faster?'” Trump said. “They’re just horrible people, and they’re so bad. So I believe in a free press. I believe in an honest press, but I don’t believe in fake news.”
He then named the New York Times as a news outlet that could also be banned.
“They have no money,” the president said. “They have no monetary value. They have nothing, just fake news, fake news and maybe they’ll be next.”
Trump sat down for a lengthy interview on September 28, during which he also discussed the war in Iran, the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court and his prospects for the midterm elections.
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