4 interesting things Trump said in interview with Fox
In a wide-ranging interview with "Fox News Sunday," President Donald Trump faced some tough questions from anchor Chris Wallace. Here are four interesting things the president said.
1. If Biden wins, “religion will be gone.”
“If Joe Biden got in, first of all, he won’t call the shots,” Trump said in the interview aired Sunday. The people — the radical left people that’s around him — will call. Religion will be gone, OK?”
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When Wallace asked Trump to elaborate, the president said, "Look at what they’re doing to the churches. They won’t let the churches even open if they want to stand in a field six feet apart. We’ve had churches that wanted to stand in fields six feet apart."
He also said, “Life, you could forget about that, the whole question of life,” referring to abortion. He also mentioned “Supreme Court...”
Biden, Trump added, “will destroy this country, but it won’t be him.”
“It will be the radical left. The same type ideology that took over Venezuela, one of the richest countries in the world. They now have no water, they have no food, and they have no medicine.”
Trump said he won’t lose “because the country in the end, they’re not going to have a man who’s shot. He’s shot, he’s mentally shot.”
2. U.S. has “one of the lowest mortality rates in the world” when it comes to COVID-19
Wallace told Trump, “We have the seventh highest mortality rate in the world. Our mortality rate is higher than Brazil, it’s higher than Russia and the European Union has us on a travel ban.”
Trump responded, “Yeah. I think what we’ll do – well, we have them under travel ban, too, Chris. I closed them off. If you remember, I was the one that did the European Union very early.
“But when you talk about mortality rates, I think it’s the opposite. I think we have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world.”
Wallace said, “It's not true, sir. We had 900 deaths on a single day.”
Trump then asked his staff for the numbers on the mortality rate. He was given papers that showed the U.S. as having one of the lowest mortality rates for COVID-19.
Wallace clarified that he was going by numbers from Johns Hopkins University, where the U.S. ranked seventh (ranked 10th as of Monday at 3.7%) out of 20 countries. The White House, meanwhile, cited numbers from the European CDC, which shows the U.S. as having the second lowest mortality rate at 3.7% among eight countries.
Trump said, “I hope you show the scenario because it shows what fake news is all about … Now we have somewhat of a surge in certain areas. And other areas we’re doing great … But you don’t hear people complaining about ventilators. We’ve got all the ventilators we can use. We’re supplying them to other countries.
“We go out into parking lots and everything, everybody gets a test… I’m glad we did what we’re doing. But we have more tests by far than any country in the world.”
3. Police kill many whites too
Wallace told Trump, “Nationwide, blacks are twice as likely, fewer in absolute numbers, but in terms of per capita, blacks are twice as likely to be shot and killed by police as whites are. In Minneapolis, over the last five years, police used force against blacks at a rate seven times that against whites. Can you understand why blacks would be angry at that?”
“Of course I do,” Trump responded. “Many whites are killed also. You have to say that.
“I mean, many, many whites are killed … This is going on for decades. This is going on for a long time, long before I got here. You know, if you look at what’s gone on in Portland, those are anarchists and we’ve taken a very tough stand … You know, we’ve arrested many of these leaders. If we didn’t take that stand, right now, you would have a problem like … they were going to lose Portland.
When asked if he felt the Confederate flag was offensive, Trump said, "It depends on who you’re talking about, when you’re talking about. When people proudly had their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism, they love their flag, it represents the South, they like the South.
"I say it’s freedom of many things, but it’s freedom of speech.
"I’m not offended either by black lives matter, that’s freedom of speech."
On the call to rename military bases named after Confederate leaders, he said, "You know the whole thing of cancel culture, we can’t cancel our whole history, we can’t forget that the North and the South fought. We have to remember that. Otherwise we’ll end up fighting again.
"Fort Bragg is a big deal, we won two world wars, nobody even knows General Bragg. Go to that community … say how do you like the idea of renaming Fort Bragg? What are we going to name it? You’re going to name it after the Rev. Al Sharpton?
"We won two world wars … out of Fort Bragg, won them out of all these forts and now, they want to throw those names away. No, I’m against that. Most other people are."
“We can’t cancel our whole history. We can’t forget that the north and the south fought. We have to remember that, otherwise we’ll end up fighting again. You can’t just cancel all...”
4. “I’ve been very unfairly treated.”
“I think I was very unfairly treated,” Trump told Wallace, after he asked, “Whether it’s in 2021 or 2025, how will you regard your years as president of the United States?”
Trump said he was under investigation “by a bunch of thieves, crooks” and “from before I even won.”
The president called the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016 “illegal.”
“I have done more than any president in history in the first three and a half years, and I’ve done it suffering through investigations where people have been — General Flynn, where people have been so unfairly treated.
The Russia hoax, it was all a hoax. The Mueller scam, it was all scam. It was all false. I made a bad decision on — one bad decision; Jeff Sessions, and now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama.”
The bottom line is “I’ve been very unfairly treated, and I don’t say that as paranoid. … Everybody says it.”
He then claimed, “President Obama and Biden spied on my campaign. It’s never happened in history. If it were the other way around, the people would be in jail for 50 years right now.”
