Donald Trump dismisses the Fox News debate as a waste of time, citing his 50–70-point polling lead and accusing networks like MSNBC and CNN of "corrupt news," while blaming Fox’s decline on losing him as a host. He attacks Bill Barr for lying about Epstein’s death and failing to investigate election fraud, calling Democrats "savage animals" exploiting narratives like Russia collusion. Trump claims Biden is unfit, mocking his physical decline, and praises his foreign policy over Biden’s weakness in handling China’s Cuba/Venezuela expansion and Russia’s Ukraine influence—while falsely asserting China controls the Panama Canal. On domestic policy, he defends deregulation (e.g., appliance water restrictions) and tariffs but denies agency overreach, insisting Congress should lead. He admits surprise at post-presidency intelligence actions but credits his administration for eliminating Soleimani and al-Baghdadi, defending Comey’s firing as exposing Democratic "insurance policy" texts. Trump insists systemic election fraud occurred in Wisconsin while Democrats weaponize the DOJ against Republicans, ignoring their own challenges like Hillary Clinton’s losses. His 2024 focus: securing the border, deporting criminals from 149 countries, and countering open borders, EV mandates, and California’s grid failures—framing January 6th as a day of unity amid rising polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, you know, a lot of people have been asking me that, and many people said you shouldn't do them, but you see the polls have come out, and I'm leading by 50 and 60 points.
And, you know, some of them are at 1 and 0 and 2. And I'm saying, do I sit there for an hour or two hours, whatever it's going to be, and get harassed by people that shouldn't even be running for president?
Should I be doing that?
And a network that isn't particularly friendly to me, frankly.
You know, they were backing Ronda Sanctimonious like crazy, and now they've given up on him.
I mean, it's a lost cause.
It reminded me very much of 2016. You know, in 2016, I went through the same stuff.
And had to fight them all the way, and then they became very friendly after I won, or just about when I was winning.
But I just felt it would be more appropriate not to do the debate.
I don't think it's right to do it.
If you're leading by 50, 60, I have one problem leading by 70 points, and I'm saying, why am I doing it?
And I'm going to have 8 people, 10 people, whoever made the debate.
I don't know how many it is, but I'm going to have all these people screaming at me, shouting questions at me.
All of which I love answering, I love doing, but it doesn't make sense to do them.
Well, according to a poll that I guess we just saw, it just came out where it's down like 30-35%, but I think they were talking, referring to cable.
I think cable's down because it's lost credibility.
MSNBC, or as they say, MSDNC, is so bad.
It's so...
Wrong what they write and what they do and what they say.
It's fake news, as I said.
I think I came up with that term.
I hope I did because it's a good one.
It's not tough enough anymore.
It's corrupt news.
You know, really what you do is call corrupt news, but somehow that doesn't play as nicely.
But it is corrupt news.
So you have MSNBC and you have CNN, who's absolutely doing no ratings at all.
I mean, they're dead.
But they're doing none because they don't have credibility.
They really don't have credibility.
Fox is way down, as you know.
And the good old days are long ago.
I will say this.
It could come back, but they just don't have a lot of credibility, Tucker.
You know that perhaps better than anybody.
I think it was a terrible move getting rid of you.
You were number one on television, and all of a sudden we're doing this interview, but we'll get bigger ratings using this crazy forum that you're using than...
I think the closer you look, I'm not a conspiracy person at all.
I believe everything I hear.
But, yeah, the closer you look into it, I mean, the Attorney General of the United States, your Attorney General, clearly lied about the Epstein death.
Most of the people in our country are fantastic, and I'm representing everybody.
I'm not just Republicans or conservatives.
I represent everybody.
I'm the president of everybody.
But I've seen what they do.
I've seen the lengths that they go to.
When they make up the Russia, Russia, Russia, when that's exposed and they go down and Barr should have gone after them and other people should have gone after them.
And they did very late because the Durham report came out.
It was fairly good.
It could have been a lot tougher, I guess, but it was fairly good.
But it explained how corrupt it was.
I'll tell you who did a great job was the Inspector General Horowitz.
He did a phenomenal report.
You didn't have to go to Durham.
He did it on Comey and on...
I guess McCabe and some others.
And it was a vicious...
It was basically a true report, how bad they are.
But these people are sick people.
These are people that...
I think they hate our country.
You want to know the truth?
When you see open borders, when you see these policies that they have, and so many other things, it's so sad to see.
We have a country that's very fragile right now.
I've never seen...
I will say, look...
I ran in 16, which was 15, but I ran in 16, election in 16, and there was tremendous spirit.
In 20, there was even more spirit.
We got millions and millions more votes.
It wasn't even a contest.
People said, well, what did you think of 20?
I said, we did much better.
We did.
You've got to base it on the number of votes.
We got many more votes in 20 than we did in 16. But the election was rigged.
It was a rigged election.
And with COVID, they use COVID to cheat in a lot of different things.
And we have so much on it.
It's like so easy.
But we had judges that didn't want to look.
We had people didn't want to get involved.
He's a conspiracy theorist if you say anything about the election.
But I have never seen spirit like there is right now.
Even coming down here, just the people on the road that are just absolutely going crazy.
And the reason is...
I think they like me, and I know they love my policies.
I hope they like me, too.
You know, a lot of people say they don't like me, but they like my policies.
I think they like me.
But I have never seen spirit like it is right now.
And the reason is because crooked Joe Biden is so bad.
He's the worst president in the history of our country.
I don't think he's going to make it to the gate, but, you know, you never know.
So do you have a preference, assuming you're the Republican nominee and all goes as you plan it to go, do you have a preference in who you run against?
And I'm not sure I would have said this 10 years ago, but they get it, you know?
They really get it.
When somebody gets indicted, your poll numbers go down.
When somebody gets indicted, you announce, ladies and gentlemen, I'll be leaving to spend time with my family and to fight for the rest of my life on this stuff.
But you're out of politics.
I got indicted four times.
All trivia, nonsense, bullshit.
It's all bullshit.
It's horrible when you look and you look at what they're doing.
The boxes hoax.
I'm covered by the Presidential Records Act.
I'm allowed to do exactly that.
He's not covered and he's got 25 times the number of boxes.
He's got them stored in a flimsy garage underneath his Corvette at Penn.
And by the way, at Penn he gets millions of dollars.
China pays this guy millions of dollars.
See, I think he's the most corrupt president we've ever had.
And he also has the distinction of being the most incompetent.
And I believe both.
I mean, he's both incompetent and corrupt.
I actually believe he's compromised because China knows so much about him.
They know where the money comes from.
They know where it is, who paid it, and they probably paid it.
Well, they do pay Penn.
And he gets a million dollars.
I think he takes $999,000 because, you know, keeps it a little bit under a million, like by a dollar.
He, in many ways, is a Manchurian candidate.
We have a Manchurian candidate and he's afraid to tell Russia to get out of Cuba.
He's afraid to tell China to get out of Cuba.
He's afraid...
China now is building...
Think of this.
China's building military installations in Cuba.
The Cuban population of Miami is not too happy because they're never going to be able to go back.
And you don't even hear about it.
And the worst culprit is the press, the media, because...
Normally, you know, when I first heard that, that China's building installations in Cuba, and installations means military installations.
Okay, you know, they said just some communication.
They did that on the islands with Japan.
They took the island, they started this massive construction, and they told everybody, including the Japanese, the Japanese have to be very careful, they told everybody that this is a housing development.
They're going to build a housing development.
And I said, how come the runway is 20,000 feet long?
You know, private jets need...
4,000 feet.
They don't need 20,000 feet.
The big ones need 20,000 feet.
They don't even need 20. And I looked at the runway.
I said, that's the largest runway ever built, both in width and length, for housing development.
There's nobody that has a plane that big that you would have a runway that's protesting.
We have done the stupidest things in this country.
And now we have a president that can't put two sentences together.
Can't speak, can't walk, can't talk.
I don't think he gets to the starting gate, but these people do miracles.
I mean, he ran out of his basement, and you got away with that one because of COVID, so he sort of got away with it.
They cheated on the election.
But you have people that are very smart, but they're fascists, and they're radical left lunatics, and they're destroying our country with the all-electric cars and the windmills all over the place, which, by the way, don't work, and they're all, most of them, made in China.
For the most part, they're made in China.
Germany, a little bit, but China.
But you look at what's happening to our country, even no voter ID. I mean, why don't they want voter ID? There's only one reason they don't want voter ID, because they want to cheat.
Who doesn't want...
You know, the Democrat convention, the last one, they had voter ID that was this big, it looked like a prison card, this big on their chest.
You walked in, they had your picture, your this, your fingerprint, they had everything.
The most incredible voter ID I've ever seen.
That was to get into the Democrat National Convention.
But to get in to vote...
If you buy groceries, if you buy practically anything now, you have ID on a card, credit cards or otherwise.
Well, you can, but now they make it so you can't do that so easily.
They have a restrictor.
It's called a restrictor.
And it restricts the water from coming out.
So I ended all of that.
And you have to see these.
They let the water come out.
You know what people do?
They wash their hands like five times longer.
Or in the washing machine, they'll press for their, let's say, the dishwasher.
They'll press it.
Then they'll press it about seven or eight times.
They'll end up using more water, and it still won't be very good.
I met with the head of Whirlpool.
They were practically going out of business during my administration, and they said to me, from Ohio, incredible, great state, I love Ohio, that they were really doing badly because people were dumping washing machines all over, mostly from South Korea, but also from China.
And he was explaining it's just a terrible situation.
I said, let me ask you, how's the quality?
He says, we're better, but they are good enough quality.
But, you know, of course he's going to say that.
But, you know, they are better.
He said, but they don't allow us.
They're dumping these machines.
They're cutting us in half.
They're killing us.
And on top of it, the government won't let us use water in our machines.
I mean, he shows me like a quarter of a bottle of water.
That's supposed to be washing clothing.
And I freed it all up, and I put tariffs on these countries that were selling, and the machines coming into the country.
And that company went from a big, all the washing machine companies, they make washing machines, they make dryers, they make all of the different machines that do this kind of work, including dishwashers.
And they went from a disaster area to being just thriving.
And Soleimani was us that did that, not so much CIA. But we did some very good work with the CIA. You know, when I looked at the 51 intelligence agents saying that the laptop from hell was Russia disinformation, when I took a look at that, I said, that's a horrible thing.
They knew it wasn't.
They knew it was not.
And by the way, you're talking about cheating on the election?
McLaughlin and Fabrizio, great pollsters, they said a thing like that plus other things meant anywhere from 10 to 17 percent.
You've got to understand, in my opinion, Mike Pence had the absolute right to send the votes back to the legislatures.
The Democrats and everybody said, you don't have the right.
In other words, I said, is he a human conveyor belt?
You mean if he finds fraud in Pennsylvania?
In Georgia, in any of these states, Arizona, he has to send them to Mitch McConnell, right?
That's right, sir.
Well, if he finds fraud, he has to?
Yes, sir.
I said, so he's just, so he's a conveyor belt.
Boom, put him in.
I said, I don't agree with that.
And we had some lawyers, not all, we had some lawyers that said, no, you do have the right to send them back to the legislatures to be rechecked.
Because if you looked at what went on in Wisconsin, who, by the way, now agree with me, Wisconsin has been virtually, other than the fact they're not allowed to do anything statutorily, but Wisconsin has been, I mean, what they found is incredible.
I mean, we won Wisconsin.
But Mike Pence had the right, in my opinion, To send him back.
I think it's a lot easier because I'm so high in the polls because it means the people get it.
The people see it's a fraud.
The people see it like this horrible district attorney.
From just a little while ago, from essentially Atlanta, that's Fulton County.
She said, basically, I don't have any right to challenge an election.
Well, what about Stacey Abrams?
What about Hillary Clinton?
What about all of these Democrats that are still challenging my election?
The same people that are saying he's challenging an election, challenge my election.
And they did it with slates.
They did it with all sorts of things.
They were very bad, very bad about it.
But basically, they're suing me and they're saying, you don't have any right to challenge you.
And if you challenge an election, we're going to indict you and put you in jail.
So what they're doing is they're really, they've weaponized, and don't kid yourself, the DOJ and Biden and the whole group, they're watching all of this stuff.
They love the local stuff.
You know, the DA in Manhattan.
Not only that, they put one of the DOJ top people into the Manhattan DA's office.
To run things.
They don't even have a case against me.
It's not even a case.
Everyone says, even the Democrats say, you can't bring these cases.
You have no case.
The Attorney General or the District Attorney, Fannie, Fannie Willis, in Atlanta, she's getting killed.
Basically, she's saying Trump doesn't have the right to criticize an election.
But you've been around long enough now.
You've seen many elections criticized.
I mean, Hillary Clinton goes crazy.
Every time she talks, she says, he's not the president, Jimmy Carter.
He's not the president.
Well, I am the president.
Hillary Clinton called me, by the way, 3.02 in the morning to congratulate me the night of the election.
Don't forget, they were all celebrating at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
And I came home and I said, you know, I think we won.
I felt we won because the rallies are so big.
You know, we'd go to Wisconsin and we'd go to Georgia.
We'd go to different states.
And Michigan, we'd have rallies.
In Pennsylvania, we had 58,000 people in Butler.
And I said, you know, how are we losing this?
How do you have a rally where you have...
From 50 to 100,000 people, many of them.
You know, I did seven a day for a couple of days.
That's a lot.
That's a lot.
These are big rallies, too.
And I didn't hold back.
I didn't say, let's make them little, let's do abbreviations, right?
But they challenged this stuff.
Hillary called me up and conceded.
Now, the word is that Obama said you have to do that.
But she called up and totally conceded.
But now, you know, every time you see her on television, she's saying, like...
Well, she's challenging the election.
So that would mean that she should be indicted, but that would mean also that Stacey Abrams in Georgia should be indicted because she still thinks she won the election for governor.
And taking hundreds of thousands of criminals that have been allowed into our country and getting them out and bringing them back to their country, Guatemala.
By the way, not only the four countries that we think of as neighbors, all over the world.
Last month, we had 149 countries represented.
Think of it.
We had 149 countries represented, Tucker, from places that many people never even heard of.
Coming into our country.
And they're coming in from mental institutions and they're coming in from prisons.
They're emptying out their prisons all over South America.
They're emptying out their mental institutions.
Terrorists are pouring into our country.
We have no idea.
I had the strongest border in the history of our country.
And I built almost 500 miles of wall.
You know, they like to say, oh, was it less?
No.
I built 500 miles.
In fact, if you check with the...
Authorities on the border.
We built almost 500 miles of wall.
And I had another 200 that I was going to build.
You know, it's like water.
It seeks.
And we're going to build another 200. We built it.
It was all set to go.
All they had to do was install it.
It would have taken three weeks.
And that's when I found out.
I said, I think these people actually want open borders.
The first thing I would do would be I would seal up the border good and tight, except for people that want to come in legally.
There's tremendous passion and there's tremendous love.
You know, January 6th was a very interesting day because they don't report it properly.
I believe it was the largest crowd I've ever spoken before.
And you know some of the crowds I've spoken before.
And like July 4th on the mall, I think they had a million people there.
But I think that the biggest crowd I've ever spoken before was on January 6th.
And people that were in that crowd...
A very, very small group of people, and we said, patriotically and peacefully, peacefully and patriotically, right?
Nobody ever says that.
Go peacefully and patriotically.
But people that were in that crowd that day, a very small group of people went down there, and then there are a lot of scenarios that we can talk about.
But people in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they've ever experienced.