Donald Trump has had enough of the free press. He has spent his second term trying to shut down White House news outlets and railing on social media about unfair media coverage, and he is growing increasingly hostile as his poll numbers plummet in the run-up to the midterm elections. The president lost it on a Time reporter this week during an interview in the Oval Office.
“You didn’t ask me a damn positive question,” he said. “All of this. And this? And this? And this? And this? It’s all negative.”
The president was asked whether Mitch McConnell should resign from the Senate due to his health issues. Trump responded by saying the videos of McConnell in trouble were a “disappointment to a lot of Republicans,” before noting that “Sleepy Joe pardoned everyone.” He then exploded at the reporter, wondering why they were asking him so many questions about the White House renovations and complaining that they didn’t ask him about Venezuela. The journalist pointed out that they had spoken at length about Venezuela earlier in the interview.
“I don’t understand. I’m sitting here. I did all this,” Trump said. “I took the White House and made it beautiful.”
The rest of the interview depicts a frustrated president retreating into an alternate reality as the nation turns against him.
When asked to explain to people struggling to pay their bills why it is so important to him to spend so much time and energy renovating the White House, Trump explained that the White House is “a symbol of our greatness” and claimed, falsely, that the renovations would cost the American taxpayer nothing. “For me, it’s relaxing,” he said of the renovation process. Trump did not address the cost of living crisis in his response. An Associated Press-NORC poll released Thursday found that only 17 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the issue.
Trump also criticized the conservative-dominated Supreme Court despite a series of favorable rulings after being able to appoint three justices during his first term. The Supreme Court has certainly been lenient towards Trump, but it has not allowed him to bend the Constitution at will, much to his dismay. “Yeah. Yeah,” he said when asked if he regretted the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. “What can I do? I registered them. They voted against me too many times. I was very… I gave them the job of their lives, and they vote against me a lot. They vote for me too. The Democrats stick like glue – those three, they hardly ever vary.”
The interview came as Trump and his administration have emphasized their commitment to artificial intelligence and as the president has repeatedly promoted data centers. Asked if the 71 percent of Americans who oppose data centers are wrong, Trump said the press hasn’t reported on it fairly. He also essentially agreed with Americans who opposed their presence in their communities. “But if I were talking to the American people and getting fair press, which I would never do, I would like to have data centers,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I want them right next to my house, but I certainly like them in my county. They show a data center, and I go up right next to a man’s house, and I wouldn’t necessarily like that. Even though his house is probably a lot more valuable.”
Trump proposed a new approach to world peace when discussing foreign policy: “Because by destroying Iran, we created world peace,” he said, once again threatening to wipe out the nation of 90 million. He also claimed that Israel and Saudi Arabia would both be “wiped off the face of the planet” if he were not president. Asked about his initial position that the war in Iran would be over in a few weeks, Trump blamed the press for that timeline and said the war in Iran was not that bad compared to the decades when the United States was entangled in Vietnam.
Of course, Trump said the war would end quickly after he started it. “We had planned for four to five weeks,” he said earlier this year. “But we have the capacity to go much further than that.”
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