In an interview that aired Sunday, Donald Trump defended his recent falsehoods about immigrants and the Capitol riot by claiming, implausibly, that he did not know or had “not heard” the truth.
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Former President Donald J. Trump in Philadelphia on Sunday.
Donald Trump has largely avoided interviews where he will be fact-checked in real time. But on Sunday, he sat for an interview on Fox News, where he was challenged directly on some of his most glaring falsehoods of the campaign.
The exchanges that resulted provided a case study in the tactics the former president uses when confronted with facts that contradict his statements.
Mr. Trump repeatedly denied knowledge of information that has long been publicly available, questioned the sources and then pivoted away to an unrelated topic.
On one point, though, he stuck by his words with no deflection or equivocation: He absolutely believed, he said, that his political opponents were an “enemy from within” who posed a greater threat than foreign adversaries.
Here’s a look at notable moments in Mr. Trump’s interview with Fox News’s Howard Kurtz:
‘I have not heard that at all’
Mr. Kurtz questioned Mr. Trump’s recent description of Jan. 6 — when his supporters stormed the Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election — as a “day of love,” and asked whether the former president understood why Americans saw it as a dark day.
Mr. Trump didn’t back down from the description, and when Mr. Kurtz pushed back — noting that hundreds of people had pleaded guilty or been convicted, and that many were charged with assaulting police officers — Mr. Trump immediately deflected to another topic. He then claimed that nobody was killed on Jan. 6 and that “nobody had guns here either.”
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Source: nytimes.com
