Former President Donald Trump addressed the disputed 2020 election, his mounting legal problems, and the potential for “civil war” during a wide-ranging interview with former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, released Wednesday night.
Former President Donald Trump addressed the disputed 2020 election, his mounting legal problems, and the potential for “civil war” during a wide-ranging interview with former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, released Wednesday night.
Trump, the nation’s 45th president and current front-runner for his party’s nomination, opted against participating in the first Republican primary debate with eight other candidates the same night in Milwaukee.
Trump instead pretaped the 46-minute interview with Carlson for streaming as counterprogramming during the GOP presidential debate, which was aired by Fox. (In a surprise move, Fox had fired Carlson in late April.)
Carlson’s interview with Trump, which took place in the former president’s home in Bedminster, New Jersey, touched on Democrats’ multiple indictments of Trump, the jailhouse death of financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the likelihood of civil war, and Trump’s thoughts on Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and others in the GOP.
The Trump-Tucker interview streamed on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and was prerecorded several days ago. The interview became available just after 8:55 p.m. EDT Wednesday, to get a short jump on the 9 p.m. EDT debate on Fox.
The interview also arrived the evening before Trump was set to be arraigned for the fourth time this year—this time in Atlanta, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis secured a grand jury indictment with racketeering charges against Trump and over 15 allies for challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Here are six takeaways from Carlson’s interview of Trump.1. ‘Why Wouldn’t They Try to Kill You?’
Carlson, noting that after everything the Left has thrown at Trump since 2015 hasn’t stopped him, asked whether the former president worried that he would be targeted for assassination.
“It started with protests against you. And then it moved to impeachment twice. And now indictment. Are you worried that they wouldn’t try and kill you? Why wouldn’t they try to kill you, honestly?” Carlson asked.
Trump responded: “They are savage animals.”
“They are people that are sick,” he said. “You have great people in the Democrat Party. You have great people that are Democrats. Most of the people in our country are fantastic. And I’m representing everybody.”
“But I’ve seen what they do, I’ve seen the lengths that they go to, when they make up the ‘Russia, Russia.’”
After talking about other issues, Carlson returned to his question that Trump hadn’t fully answered.
“The protest didn’t work. You got elected anyway. Impeachment didn’t work, twice. Indictment is not working. Your poll numbers go up when they raided Mar-a-Lago in August of last year, your numbers went up,” Carlson said.
“They can indict you 20 times and you are not going to lose the Republican primary because of that. … They are counterproductive,” he said. “So what’s next after trying to put you in prison for the rest of your life? That’s not working. That’s not working. So, don’t they have to kill you now?”
Trump didn’t specifically address whether his political enemies wanted to or might try to take his life.
