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I Interviewed Trump For 5 Hours. Here’s What He Told Me About ‘Stupid F—er’ McConnell, McCarthy’s Bromance With Luntz, And The Fake News That Bothered Him The Most
In multiple interviews, Former President Donald Trump unloads on the rigged 2020 election, Republicans who screwed him, and why he regrets elevating Anthony Fauci during the pandemic.
Mollie Hemingway
What follows is adapted from three interviews of President Donald Trump for Mollie Hemingway’s latest book “Rigged: How The Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” out October 12.
“I don’t like her … and I don’t like me.”
Former President Donald Trump was looking at a photo of the two of us that his assistant had just taken on my phone. It wasn’t up to his specifications. We’d just completed the second of three interviews I’d have with him for my new book, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.”
As we walked outside one of the buildings at Mar-a-Lago, his palatial home on 20 acres of Palm Beach Island, Florida, he bragged that he had the only property on the island that faced both the ocean and the lake, thus the name. “That’s what Mar-a-Lago means – ocean to lake,” he translated, more or less.
Given the setting on the beautiful late March date, I asked if I could take a picture of him. I’d interviewed him a few times in the Oval Office and once already in Florida, but had never taken his picture. He suggested we take one together.
He didn’t like the first photo. “I don’t like her … and I don’t like me,” he said, suggesting we move to a different location out of the sun. His capable aide Margo Martin took another photo and turned it around to show him. “I like me, but I still don’t like her,” he said.
Trump dropped everything and decided to teach me how to take a picture. Somehow I’d reached my 40s without knowing how.
He walked us to an impeccably manicured, grassy area in front of the historic main building, explaining that you should always think about the background of a photo and not just the people in it. A massive flag flying at half-mast, in remembrance of victims of a shooting in Colorado, was behind us. The flag had also been lowered when I was there a month prior, in honor of Palm Beach’s Rush Limbaugh, who had then recently died. Trump had bestowed a Presidential Medal of Freedom on the conservative icon the year prior.
He told me to angle my body, put my hand on my hip, and a few other tricks. “You can trust me: my wife is a supermodel,” he said, as if I were unaware. Margo showed him the resulting picture.
He looked at it, paused briefly, and said, “Well there you go,” clearly pleased with the result. He was right, it looked much better.
The interview had been all over the place. Trump is a bizarre combination of an open book and difficult to nail down. When my husband listened to tapes of the interviews, he seemed almost shell-shocked at how much Trump hopped around from one topic to the next.
While I like to think I’m an excellent listener, I’m not a fan of the interview style that requires badgering a source for a preferred outcome. As in the other interviews I had with him, I was just as curious about what he wanted to focus on as what I needed to find out from him.
At one point, he noticed a large bandage on my forearm, which covered a burn I received while cooking dinner for my children. “Did you have a tattoo put on?” he asked, in the midst of listing off detailed election irregularities in Pennsylvania and Michigan. “Mollie’s going into the tattoo stuff? Whoa, that’s a big step.”
As we sat down in his second-floor office, the former president was watching Fox News, where I’m a contributor. He asked me what I thought of various Fox personalities. When he got to Bret Baier, who hosts “Special Report,” I complimented him.
Trump went on a riff about what a good golfer Bret is. “He’s a bull. He’s strong as hell.” Trump had recently played with Bryson DeChambeau, and talked about how he drove the 18th green at his Palm Beach course, which is about a 370-yard carry — even longer than Bret could, he said.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/08/i-interviewed-trump-for-5-hours-heres-what-he-told-me-about-stupid-f-er-mcconnell-mccarthys-bromance-with-luntz-and-the-fake-news-that-bothered-him-the-most/