Interviewer Reminds Trump 'The Question Is About Google' After Off-Topic Ramble

Bloomberg News’ editor in chief abruptly stopped Donald Trump from changing the subject during a Tuesday interview in Illinois after the former president took an irrelevant detour.

John Micklethwait spoke with Trump at the Economic Club of Chicago amid his run to retake the White House, asking at one point for Trump’s view on Google and its parent company, Alphabet.

“The U.S. Justice Department is thinking about breaking up Alphabet, as Google likes to be known now,” Micklethwait said. “Should Google be broken up?”

Sighing, Trump replied, “I just haven’t gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes, and the Justice Department sued them” — a reference to the agency last week accusing the state of illegally removing people from its rolls too close to the Nov. 5 election.

After Trump ranted on that topic for 10 additional seconds, Micklethwait noted, “The question is about Google, President Trump.”

“Google’s got a lot of power. They’re very bad to me,” Trump replied, proceeding to accuse the search engine company of amplifying “bad stories” about him and neglecting to highlight “good stories.”

“I called the head of Google the other day, and I said, ‘I’m getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find them in Google,’” he said. “I think it’s a whole rigged deal. I think Google is rigged just like our government is rigged all over the place.”

“So, you would break them up, in other words?” Micklethwait interpreted.

“I’d do something,” Trump replied, without explaining what that would entail.

With weeks to go before the general election, the former president has backed out of two major interviews and declined to face his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, for another debate.

Trump has set off alarm bells with speeches that have appeared increasingly erratic, marked by stream-of-consciousness comments, irrelevant tangents and incoherent rambling. On Monday, he gave up on taking questions at a Pennsylvania town hall event after multiple disruptions in the audience and instead spent nearly 40 minutes swaying onstage as various songs played.