Take him literally & seriously, but I wouldn’t expect many people coming out to support him. The most fervid Trump supporters seldom get off their couches. https://t.co/WLlqpvwwQT
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 30, 2024
There’s been a certain amount of hair-on-fire commentary on social media about this interview. It’s not the kind of reading I usually share before most of you have had breakfast, but before y’all get nervous: Yes, it’s pretty bad. Time found someone shameless enough to go back to the 2017 ‘intriguing dude talks tuff’ media smarmfest, because hateclicks spend just like honest labor:
Donald Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: He was too nice.
We’ve been talking for more than an hour on April 12 at his fever-dream palace in Palm Beach. Aides lurk around the perimeter of a gilded dining room overlooking the manicured lawn. When one nudges me to wrap up the interview, I bring up the many former Cabinet officials who refuse to endorse Trump this time. Some have publicly warned that he poses a danger to the Republic. Why should voters trust you, I ask, when some of the people who observed you most closely do not?
As always, Trump punches back, denigrating his former top advisers. But beneath the typical torrent of invective, there is a larger lesson he has taken away. “I let them quit because I have a heart. I don’t want to embarrass anybody,” Trump says. “I don’t think I’ll do that again. From now on, I’ll fire.”
Six months from the 2024 presidential election, Trump is better positioned to win the White House than at any point in either of his previous campaigns. He leads Joe Biden by slim margins in most polls, including in several of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome. But I had not come to ask about the election, the disgrace that followed the last one, or how he has become the first former—and perhaps future—American President to face a criminal trial. I wanted to know what Trump would do if he wins a second term, to hear his vision for the nation, in his own words…
The most important thing about this whole document: Yes, it’s full of objectively terrifying ideas from someone who was given a uniquely awful chance to destroy our country. But there’s not one thing in it we haven’t already heard about. Stripped of the interviewer’s fanboi message-massaging, you’ve got an angry old man letting himself be shipped from one friendly venue to another, like an over-the-hill country musician playing his greatest hits (not as well as he once did, but the audience just wants to say they saw their god-emperor live in person, while he’s still around). If you know an undecided voter who’s been in a coma or an alien spaceship for the last several years, this would be an introduction to The Very Worst of Donald Trump. For the rest of us, IMO, it’s gonna be useful mostly as a source of political ads for his opponents. Especially for President Biden’s team!