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Politics Explained

Trump’s been more open with the media than any US president in history

Robbed of his rallies, the former reality star is increasingly turning to the mainstream media for exposure, writes Sean O'Grady

Tuesday 04 August 2020 22:14 BST
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The American leader has appeared in set-piece interviews 80 times
The American leader has appeared in set-piece interviews 80 times

Donald Trump is famously fond of big, you might say “beautiful” boasts demonstrating his superiority to most, if not all of his predecessors. It started with the claim that more people watched and/or attended his inauguration in January 2017 than had seen Barack Obama’s in 2009 (this has been argued over), and most recently he has said he had done more for African-Americans than anyone since Abraham Lincoln. Again, that would be a contestable point.

But there is one thing where Donald Trump is the undisputed champion: his willingness to be interviewed on TV. According to a calculation earlier this year by the CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller, Trump has appeared in set-piece interviews 80 times on Fox News (usually well-regarded by Trump), with ABC and CBS getting five apiece. That is probably more than all his predecessors put together, albeit they didn’t have telly in George Washington’s time. The most recent Trump appearances, on Fox News Sunday, with Chris Wallace, and Jonathan Swan’s interview for Axios/NBC, make for rather compelling viewing. They have their bizarre moments, and Trump is his usual combative self; yet, unlike some of his tetchy press conferences, he doesn’t walk out and goes along with the flow. It’s not fashionable to say it, but on occasion he actually has cogent answers to some of the questions. Nothing seems to be off-limits – meddling with the election date and contesting the result, Russian “bounties” to the Taliban for killing allied forces, Covid death rates, John Lewis, Black Lives Matter, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell... at least Trump turns up. In the Axios interview, Trump (to be fair) was right to say that if you get Covid you’re less likely to die, presumably because care is excellent in the US; but he was obviously wrong to dismiss the death rate. The exchanges on that didn’t quite clear up the distinctions.

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