After spending days calling for CBS to release a full transcript of Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes , Donald Trump woke up bright and early Thursday with a new idea: leverage the public appearance as a reason to call for the Democratic presidential nominee’s concession in the race.
“A giant Fake News Scam by CBS & 60 Minutes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social . “Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better.”
“A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal,” he continued, baselessly claiming that a network choosing to make its own edits is akin to a crime. “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!”
Attached to the post was a clip of Harris’s interview on the show compared to a teaser clip distributed by the network. The teaser clip spliced a section of another answer the vice president gave to a question related to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Between the edited and unedited version of Harris’s response to the original question, the two answers are starkly different.
But ultimately, that choice was not Harris’s.
“We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS,” an unidentified aide for the Harris campaign said in a statement to Variety .
And, at minimum, at least the vice president actually engaged in the sit-down interview with the legacy network. During its Monday night broadcast, CBS News’s Scott Pelley said that Trump backed out of his own scheduled interview with 60 Minutes at the last minute—the first time a presidential candidate had rebuffed the long-standing October tradition since 1968—revealing that the Trump campaign had “complained that we would fact-check the interview.”
“We fact-check every story,” Pelley said.
Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to pull the broadcast licenses of major networks when he disagrees with their coverage of himself or his campaign. But that doesn’t mean his perspective on editing and censorship is buttoned up: Trump has enjoyed more than his share of selectively edited interviews on Fox, some of which have gone so far as to swap out his answers when discussing heavy topics such as serial sex offender and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
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