Donald Trump confronted a Fox News interviewer after the President was challenged by a false claim that Joe Biden wants to remove the police.
In a clip of Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday interview with Trump published on Friday, the president said his likely opponent in the November presidential election supported the move to dismantle police forces.
But in the interview conducted in the courtyard of the Oval Office, Wallace intervened to say that Biden did not support the funding.
Trump, hoping to prove his accusation, is seen asking for a copy of a policy letter that Biden agreed with Bernie Sanders that was published this week. The document did not prove his claim.
The interview, Sunday’s first interview with Trump in more than a year, will air in its entirety this weekend.
Wallace then told Fox News: “If it looked like it was hot in that yard right outside the Oval Office there, it was around 100F.”
Trump said, “He kept saying, ‘Whose idea was this?’ Well, of course, it was the president’s idea, but as he said, he wanted to make me sweat.
“We talk about everything. We talk about Covid[-19] and the explosion of cases in this country, mask questions, test questions. We also talk about politics, polls; We have a new Fox News poll that we discuss with the President, which shows that it follows.
“But he seemed completely confident that he will beat Joe Biden in November. We also talked about that revealing book from his niece, Mary Trump. “
In the published clip, Wallace observed recent increases in shootings in many cities and asked Trump why he thought such violence was on the rise.
The president replied: “I explain it very simply by saying that they are cities run by Democrats. They are liberally run. They are stupidly handled. “
Wallace noted that many cities have been run by Democratic mayors.
“They have been mishandled,” Trump insisted. “It was always bad, but now it’s totally out of control.”
Then he made his false claim about Biden, saying: “It really is because they want to underfund the police, and Biden wants to remove the police.”
“No sir, not him,” replied Wallace.
Trump upheld his claim, incorrectly saying that the Sanders-backed unity platform, the Vermont senator whom Biden beat in the Democratic primary, accepts calls to remove the police.
Biden has repeatedly said he does not support calls to remove the police and instead has called for police reform.
Wallace tried to explain, but the president responded by ordering an assistant to fetch the document.
“Let’s go! Get me the letter, please! Trump said.
The breakthrough ended there, but Wallace told Fox News presenter Bill Hemmer, “It led to a very interesting exchange … and he went through it and found many things that he opposed and that Biden accepted, but couldn’t find. no indication, because there is none, that Joe Biden has tried to eliminate and abolish the police. “
Trump made a similar claim during a blatantly political speech at the Rose Garden on Tuesday, stating: “The Biden-Sanders agenda is the most extreme platform for any major party candidate, by far in the history of the United States … Now they want to abolish our police. ” departments. They want to abolish our prisons, I suppose.
Politifact gave that claim a “Pants on Fire” rating.
Such attempts to portray Biden as an extreme liberal don’t seem to be working: Polls show voters see the challenger as more moderate than the president.
Wallace also said Trump had “shot Joe Biden that he had never heard before,” adding that the president said he expected “not nearly as many rallies as last time,” given the ongoing pandemic, next season.
“He seems a little concerned about that,” Wallace said.
Wallace and Trump have a controversial story, the President regularly mocks and despises the anchor compared to his father, famous CBS host Mike Wallace.
Chris Wallace is known as one of the most combative interviewers on American television. But in March, he told The Guardian that interviewers shouldn’t be looking for fights with their subjects, even if the subject turned out to be Trump.
“Look,” he said, “I think we are not meek, but I think the first thing I want to say is that he is the President of the United States, whether you like him or not, and I believe that there is a certain respect due to the office, even if you don’t feel sorry for a particular man.
Secondly, I think he falls into this trap of becoming a defender or an opponent rather than a reporter. We are not there to try to outdo the president or any politician.
“As you look to 2020, you want to make sure that you strive to be as effective and as far ahead as possible in identifying what is on the voters’ minds and what is resonating with the voters.”
On Friday, he said the interview with Trump had been “generally friendly, but I occasionally screwed him up.”
